Two Unsung Heroes of Smart Notebook

Two Reasons to Love Smart Notebook: Hyperlinks and Screen Capture!!!

Here are reasons to love the two...

Hyperlinks - Allows you to create more interactive games.  Hyperlinks basketballs to questions, having a hoop that is linked to a sound so if they hit it, it makes noise, hyperlink to videos online.  I even have an archery one that links to other slides so that whatever the students hit first is the amount of points they scored for their team for answering a question correctly.  Hyperlinks allow you to link between slides, websites, etc. so that you can create whatever kind of experience you want for your students without going far.  

Screen Capture - ever need something off a pdf that you can't access, but you only want one little part?  SCREEN CAPTURE!  Using the camera option of smart notebook allows you to take a photo of what you want and use it.  Now there are some down sides - 1) If you want to make it bigger the quality goes away as you enlarge.  If you want to make it smaller, it looks great!!!  An example: reallygoodstuff.com has this great underground railroad quilt, but to save on paper I used to make it a group project and with certain students working really hard and others not exerting as much effort the quilts can always be hit or miss in their final results.  By using the screen capture I can capture the individual quilt squares, shrink them onto one quilt and then have each student responsible for their own quilt and it only takes a piece of paper.  We then practice summarizing skills on the back of the quilt by taking the little paragraphs listed for each square and then shortening it to hit the key points in five words or less.