Posts made in August, 2008

Smartboard Tutorial – Themes

Posted on Aug 6, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, SMARTboards, Tutorials and Guides | 4 comments

Here’s another video about a new feature of Smart Notebook 10 – Themes.

With themes, it is possible to set up page templates – with the font size and style that you want, along with any colour schemes, images and watermarks.

Themes could be useful for title pages, Lesson objectives and suchlike.

Whiteboard Tutorial – Themes from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

It is worthwhile also thinking about what pages you use a lot – and adding those pages to the My Content area of the gallery. I have done this with graph axes, experimental results grids, lesson objectives. To do this, from the page sorter, select a page and click on the little grey box with the arrow in it – and choose Add page to gallery. You can do a similar thing with Promethean software too.

Smart Notebook 10 Activation

Posted on Aug 1, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, SMARTboards | 2 comments

I know that people are still having issues upgrading to Smart Notebook 10, so here’s a quick post to explain how to do it.

For those of you who want to upgrade to Smart Notebook 10, the download process is a little more complicated than it used to be. You can’t just download the Smart software and promise them that you are a valid Smart user anymore. You need to prove it by having a Smart product serial number.

Annoyingly you can’t just use that serial number to activate the Smart software. You need to go to a website, use the serial number to have them send you a product key. Then you can use the product key to activate the Smart Notebook software.

In a nutshell you install a 30 day trial, then you need to activate it so it becomes a full version. If you don’t activate it, then it stops working after 30 days.

You can read more about the process here: http://www2.smarttech.com/kbdoc/124761

The Process

First you should get yourself a product Key. So go to this page:

http://smarttech.com/nb10productkey/

On this page you need to know your Smart product serial number. This will be on the side or on the bottom of the smart board or on the back of your Airliner tablet. There’s a guide to finding it here

http://smarttech.com/nb10productkey/FindYourSerial.aspx

For those of us on our summer break, you may not be able to do this until you get back to school. Don’t panic, you can still install the software and activate it at the end of the 30 day trial.

Once you have entered your serial number, Smart will email you with a product key that you can use. You can use this product key on your classroom computer, but also on your home computer if you want to prepare resources away from the Smartboard.

Next you need to download the smart 10 software go to the software download page

http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Support/Downloads/SBS/NBSv10WinEval.htm

Download the “trial version” – this version is OK to use, once you have the product key we can activate it and make it work permanently and then install the file that you downloaded

If you did not type the product key during the installation, you can activate Notebook software after the installation.

1. Press the SMART Board icon in the notification area, and then select Welcome to Notebook.

2. Press the Help/Support tab.

3. Press Activate Software and the Software Activation dialog box appears.

4. Follow the on-screen instructions – this is when you will enter your product key that Smart emailed you.

Hope that helps!

Whiteboard Challenge 2

Posted on Aug 1, 2008 in Activity Ideas, Interactive Whiteboards, SMARTboards, Tutorials and Guides | 1 comment

Here’s my second whiteboard challenge. Both Smart and Promethean software lets you alter the transparency of images, and also to make parts of an image completely transparent, which is useful for getting rid of white space around an image.

Whiteboard Challenge- Transparency from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

Try some of these out, and use one of them with your class;

Use a slighly transparent image as a watermarked background for a piece of creative writing, then write over the top of it. Maybe a beach scene or an image of a landmark

Overlay one image on top of another – maybe a new and old photograph of a building or a place. Or a Google map overlaid on top of the satellite image. Then fade one out to reveal the other.

In art use a photograph of a landscape – or a portrait photograph – and trace over the top. Then fade out the image to make the tracing easier to see. You could also use the straight line tool and show all the lines of perspective in an image

There are other uses too, see if you can think of any more.

Again, the challenges won’t be going live until August 11, but check out the Challenge site for more info.