Posts made in January 9th, 2008

Pictogram and Jing

Posted on Jan 9, 2008 in SMARTboards, Software | 0 comments

This was my first attempt at using a piece of software called Jing to record a mini-tutorial. The software worked pretty well and was quite painless. There’s not many features, it records an area you choose and you can have a microphone on or off. That’s it. But it’s simple enough for me. it gives you a free video hosting account with Screencast to host the video on, or you can choose to save it and host it yourself.

It also takes screenshots, and the pics in the Art Attack post below were taken and automatically uploaded to Flickr using Jing.

Anyway, the best way of getting a feel for a piece of software is to use it in anger so I’ve made a tutorial that shows how you can very simply set up Smart Notebook to create a pictogram using the Infinite Cloner tool. I love using the Infinite Cloner for things like arrows to label diagrams and suchlike. Every time you click on an item it will be copied over and over again. it’s great to do with images of coins for shopping tasks – drag out the coins to pay for an item that costs £1.63 or whatever.

One issue with Jing is that it seems to render the video actual size. So capturing a 800×800 area still produces a 800×800 video with no options (that I can see) to scale it down. Obviously putting that size video in my blog would totally bork the layout. So I’ll just link to the video for now. I don’t know if I am missing an option somewhere, so I’ll have a play.

Until then click here to view the video.

Smart 10 Beta released

Posted on Jan 9, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, SMARTboards, Software | 0 comments

Looks like they’ve finally released the Beta version of Smart Notebook 10. The placeholder download page now seems to work and I managed to download something

Haven’t installed it yet. As far as I know it won’t run alongside Smart 9 so I will have to remove the old version. I may try it out on an older laptop first to avoid messing up my desktop.

Visit the download page here.

The Notebook software 10 beta version is available until February 29, 2008, so you have plenty of time to get hold of a copy and evaluate it. Don’t forget to send your feedback to Smart via the feedback forms to help polish the final release.

If you are going to download this, please be careful. This is a beta version and so will still contain bugs and will probably crash and freeze on you. You can’t install it on the same computer as your Smart 9.5 install without taking the old version off first. Files made with the new version will probably not be able to be opened with 9.5.

I would suggest you install this on a different computer to your main PC that you usually use on the SmartBoard or use for lesson preparation. Only install if you are keen to play with the new features or want to help with the testing of it. Don’t expect it to be release-ready.

Art Attack

Posted on Jan 9, 2008 in Art Resources, Interactive Whiteboards, Promethean, SMARTboards, Software, Useful Links | 1 comment

The other day James, over at Teachers Love Smart Boards, linked to a great online drawing package called Imagination Cubed. Basically its a drawing program that runs in your browser. This is great as it can be used on any brand of IWB irrespective of the software you use on your board.

I’m a scientist, not an artist but I’ve always enjoyed using art packages on the IWB. I used to play with packages like Painter and Photoshop. Drawing with a mouse, or even a graphics tablet, is a real pain and it is so much easier to be able to paint with my fingers! After all an IWB is only really a HUGE graphics tablet!

A quick trawl around the web led me to a few other interesting drawing packages. There are a lot of them out there covering a range of painting styles. And the best thing is they are free! I love Photoshop but it is rather pricey!

A really nice one is Brushter, which is an abstract painting package. You can choose from a wide range of brush styles and different paint effects. Autocolour chooses a different colour paint each time, which should sound annoying but actually can give a nice abstract effect. You can even click an Auto button and have Brushter generate an abstract image on its own while you watch! Here’s a little something I knocked up:

Another one I quite liked is ArtPad. It’s much simpler than Brushter and only gives one style of paintbrush. You can choose colours, size and opacity though. Like Imagination cubed you can replay your painting from start to finish.

Finally, there is the much simpler online Colouring-in pages at TheKidszPage.com. You can choose from a range of different line drawings to then colour in. Again this is not as powerful as the Brushter one, but foundation pupils will love colouring in the pictures with their fingers!