Notebook Tip #1 – The Notebook Gallery

This tip is has a spreadsheet of all the content available in the Notebook Gallery. In case you aren't familiar with the Gallery, you should check it out! There is content for all subject areas including handwriting paper, graph paper, famous art (Mona Lisa, David, etc.), continent and other maps, MLK Jr.'s speech, moon landings, Venn diagrams, and activities for changes of states of matter structure of organs and the rock cycle.

Notebook Tip #2 – Organizing the Gallery

The first thing to do is find the collection in the Gallery. For my example, I'll use graph paper. So I would click the Gallery tab, expand Essentials for Educators by clicking the plus sign to the left of the label, expand Mathematics, expand General Resources and select Paper Backgrounds. Once Paper Backgrounds is selected, you'll notice a drop down arrow to the right of the label. Clicking the drop down arrow will open a menu of options. Select the Add To My Content option. It might take a minute, but this will copy this entire Paper Background collection under your My Content. Notice, too, that you can select an individual object in the Gallery, such as backgrounds, clipart, etc, and using the same drop down menu can send it straight to your My Content as well.

When you are ready to use the content in your My Content, just expand My Content and you will see everything you have added.

Notebook Tip #3 – Printing in Notebook

Have you tried recently to print in Notebook? With the updated version we are using, you have more printing options than before. When you go to File, Print, you have several options.

Notebook Tip #4 – Online Interactive Notebook Lessons

Did you know SMART Tech has Notebook lessons already developed posted online? These are great lessons for adding interactivity in student use of the SMART Board. These files are easy to open and ready for you to use as they are. Or you can download the file, make your changes specific to your curriculum, and use with your class.

These lesson are found at http://www.education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Ed+Resource/Lesson+activities/Notebook+activities/. You will find everything from Pythagorean Theorem, animal/human cells, biomes, ancient history, to a basic use of parts of speech.

Notebook Tip #5 – Lesson Activity Toolkit

SMART has a new Lesson Activity Toolkit. It's definitely worth downloading and checking out! It is a program that downloads right into Notebook that gives you lots of options for interactive Notebook pages - word matching, category sorting, multiple choice, word guess (hangman), and note reveal (for revealing one step at a time). The best part of this new program is there is a self checking feature for the kids to use.
 
The download is available at http://www.education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Ed%2BResource/Software%2BResources/toolkit/download.htm
 
Once you have it downloaded, access each option for activities through the Gallery tab. There will be a Lesson Activity Toolkit category under your Essentials for Educators. Expand the Lesson Activity Toolkit, then expand Activities, choose an activity (Category Sort, Key Word Match, etc.) and open it in Notebook by dragging it into the working area of Notebook (the white area). Then set up each activity by clicking the Edit button and follow the directions for editing. When you are done, click OK to get back to the interactive activity. It's literally that simple! Your Notebook files can now be very interactive, self-checking and engaging for your students with very little work and time spent by you! :)

Notebook Tip #6 – Capturing in Notebook

This tip is to remind you of the capturing feature in Notebook. Capturing to SMART Notebook allows you to take a document and make it interactive. The easiest way to do this is to first open Notebook. Then open your Word, Excel, PowerPoint or even Internet page, go to File, Print, select SMART Notebook Print Capture from the drop down menu next to the printer name and then click OK. When you go back to Notebook, you'll have the entire document or site captured.
 
Advanced tip - you can also capture just certain pages. In the same way you tell the printer you only want to print pages 2-7, you also can capture pages 2-7. Try it out at a site like http://greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Tools/Index.htm with a graphic organizer or http://dese.mo.gov/divimprove/assess/content.html with MAP released items.
 
This is a great time saver when you have a premade document such as a study guide, graphic organizer, or other document and you want to be able to annotate on it.
 
For more specific directions, see this document.