Elementary Music/Music Technology Blog

For the past two days, my colleagues and I ran a workshop about the uses of a SMART Board and the Notebook software at our school. Our school just upgraded the Notebook software form 9.7 to version 10. Notebook software allows you to utilize tools such as games (like vortex, crossword, hangman, basketball, and more), activities (such as balloon popping, word reveal, multiple choice, and more), animations to the screen (some that you find in powerpoint), recording techniques with the software, and the SMART response system, to enhance your current curriculum and lessons. There are some new additions to the Notebook software version 10. These include:

• The Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 comes with the installation disc. In 9.7, we had to download the lesson toolkit. The lesson toolkit has many educational advantages as it gives you many options on how to utilize it in a lesson as a teaching or assessment tool.
• In the Welcome Screen, you will find a redesigned Teacher’s Hub to offer more resources for teachers, even those who are very experienced with Notebook.
• The Gallery has more templates.
• Magic Pen allows you to write on the SMART Board and then your writing disappears in 10 seconds. This is fun to use with your students because you can write a rhythm pattern on the SMART Board with the magic pen and the students have 10 seconds to clap it before it disappears.
• The Properties Bar on the right allows you to animate words, photos, or objects on the screen. They can fly in or out, spin, fade in and out, and more. It also allows you to easily change the background of a slide and allows you to record one page of a slide and all of the animations and drawings that you do to that one page.
• The SMART Response system allows you to give a test, quiz, exam, assessment with the students and record the students’ answers with the clickers hardware. These clickers look like remote controls. When you set up a test in SMART Response, the students press the correct answers using the clickers. It is then recorded for the teacher and the teacher just goes to a page in the software to see how the students did. Basically, it records and grades your multiple choice tests for you.

After intensely working with the version 10 software for the past few days, I generally like the new additions. However, Notebook 10 is unstable on a MAC. It crashed my computer several times during the workshop. My laptop is only 6 months old, so I did not feel that it was the laptop. When all of my colleagues and the participants had the same problems with crashing, we all realized that it is the software. However, with that said, we called the tech help at Smarttech.com and they were extremely helpful.

Check out some of the lessons that were made during the workshop!

Has anyone used Notebook v.10 in their classrooms? If so, what were some of your favorite items?