SMART Notebook 11 Review

 

Here are some of the changes you’ll find with SMART Notebook 11, and my first impressions of them.

When you open the notebook, you’ll notice that, unfortunately it takes as long as ever to load the program.  The tools across the top of Notebook 10 would sometimes fill the toolbar and you’d need to pull down some extra ones along the side.  SMART Technologies has addressed this by giving the ribbon across the top greater height –now there are two rows of icons—this created enough additional space that it allows for contextual buttons to appear.  With Notebook 10 you would click on the corner of a tool and some choices would drop down—for the pen you could choose from a number of colors, for the shapes tool you could choose between squares, circles, etc., With Notebook 11 all that is handled by having the “contextual tools” appear on the right side of the ribbon.  As with the Office applications (Word, etc.) the new ways of doing things are often added as another option, and the old procedures are still available.  That’s fine, if you’ve been using the program right along.  However, to a new user, all these options can be a bit overwhelming.

Okay, let’s talk about the changes I see as really significant.

 Activity Builder – Having been given a brief introduction to the activity builder at the EdTech conference in March, I was really looking forward to all I imagined it might do.  Therefore, my initial reaction to it was one of disappointment that it didn’t do more.  However, after looking at it further, I’m impressed with its possible uses.  Basically, it makes it easy for the teacher to create an activity where if the student drags an object or word into the correct spot, it will snap into place, fade away, spin, or in some way celebrate the fact that the student found the right spot.  If, however, it is misplaced, it snaps back to where it started and gives the student the opportunity to try again. 

After looking at the examples I began to see just how very useful this type of activity might be.  It can be used for categorizing, filling in the blank, true/false, ordering, labeling, sorting, and they even provide an example of “free form”. 

Although it didn’t really occur to me until I read it in a Notebook 11 review by Mike McGowan,  this is a step toward more fully integrating the Notebook software with the SMART Table—any of the activities will work equally well on the SMART Board and a SMART Table.  As such this feature will surely be welcome by our Special Education teachers. 

Reset Page option—this is such an obvious improvement that I’m surprised SMART Technologies didn’t think of it long ago.  How many times have you had students make changes in a Notebook page and then wanted to have another student try the same exercise?  In the past you would either have to manually put everything back where it started, or close and reopen the file (and lose any changes you did want to save.)  Now, you can just use the “reset page” option (which pulls down under the “edit” menu) and the page goes back to the way it was when the file was first opened.

Sound Recording- I initially listed this as a “minor” change.  But, upon reflection, I can think of a couple of teachers who might make real use of this feature.  I’ve had teachers who wanted to include their own voice, pronouncing words or letters of the alphabet. I’ve helped some do this, but found that the teacher  may or may not remembered how to do it the next time the need arose.  Now it is so easy that anyone can do it and I’m thinking a lot of teachers may really want to make use of this possibility. 

Speaking for all the ITRTs, just let us know if you’d like us to come around and install Notebook  11 for you—or download and install it yourself by clicking here.  Also, let us know if you’d like some help becoming familiar with any of it’s features.

In my next posting I’ll discuss some of the less significant changes found in Notebook 11.  Until then, have a great day.