Back to School - it's all Manic!

Happy Back to School Everyone!

Where did the summer go?

I hope you're all enjoying the first days back with a fresh bunch of kiddies. I admit a bit of sadness to not have a nice group of kids with little (but scared) smiles to greet me on the first day of school.

However, I have had the extreme pleasure of meeting & working with hundreds of teachers in the past three weeks or so, all over British Columbia.

There were probably a good series of 3-5 questions that came up with most groups of teachers I encountered - so I'm going to answer a lot of them here.

#1 - How can I get my Microsoft Word, Excel, PDFs etc...into Notebook?

I have been modelling the SMART Notebook Print Capture (Windows only, sorry folks) and with the new 10.8 upgrade, it's working swimmingly for me!
Here's a video for you -

#2 - How do I do that thing I saw one time with the reveal & the magnifying glass?

Ahhhh...there is no magic in that white magnifying glass! It's all about colour matching & using your ordering. Check it out here -

#3 - I teach another language. How do I change the Notebook Interface to be in the language I'm teaching (i.e. French).

As someone who has taught French & comes from a family who speak a million different languages (even made up ones!) I LOVE how many languages Notebook supports. Here's the easy way to swtich over Notebook to another language

#4 - iPads are coming into my school & I want to be able to use the SMART Board & the iPad. What do I do?

Apple has VGA adapter for iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch. (see photos below) this allows you to connect any of those products to a projector with the VGA connection. You won't be able to touch on the SMART Board (hopefully Apple will have a double VGA/USB soon...OS 5 perhaps?

I just bought my adapter so I haven't played yet, but I will get a video up and running when I do!

Apple-iPad-Dock-Connector-to-VGA-Adapter

SMART's latest EdCompass Newsletter (August 2011) has some other great ideas for using the iPad with the SMART Board. (on Page 3)

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/a840f6ea#/a840f6ea/1

#5 - I heard there are some great new additions to the SMART Table Toolkit...what's new?

I will always have a special place in my heart for the table - I saw it TRANSFORM learning for some of my kids. There is now the option to automatically add audio to almost anything right in the toolkit! Yea! Yea! Yea!

How?? Have a look -