SMART Board Notebook Tutorials

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7 tutorials covering a range of features for the SMART Board Notebook.

Text Only Version

Copying and pasting picture sources from the internet

In this tutorial I will show you how to find an historical picture, and to paste it from the internet into a SMART Notebook presentation so you can use it in your lessons.

First I will go to the SMART Notebook icon, double click this and you'll get a blank presentation. Here's my blank presentation and this is where we want the picture to be copied to, now we need to find a picture. To find a picture I'm going to click on the Internet Explorer icon which is the blue 'e', this takes me onto the internet.

And my homepage which in this case is the Tameside Council website, will open up. I'm going to go to the British Museum website and to do this I need to click in the address bar, and use the back space button on your keyboard to delete the Tameside web address and replace it with the address for the British Museum. This happens to be www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk Link to External Website , I can then press enter on my keyboard or I can also press the green Go button.

It brings me to the British Museum homepage, and as you'll see the left hand side are further options. The Children's Compass is an excellent resource of historical pictures, and the best way to access these pictures is to click on the Search button. You are then presented with two different sections, a blue section and a purple section. You need to make a choice in the blue section and the purple section to help narrow down your search and find the pictures you're looking for.

For today, I'm going to look and see if I can find some pictures of ancient Egypt. So I'm going to select the blue Ancient Egypt button, and I'm going to look for some pictures of daily life of Egyptians so I'm going to select the Daily Life button. I'm then going to click on Find. It then presents me with a range of pictures from Egyptian daily life. It reminds you here of your search.

If I wish to look at the resources in more detail, I can click on the pictures. You can then increase that detail by clicking on Larger Picture. At this stage there is always an option to go back to the previous menu.

Now I'm going to show you how I can copy and paste this particular resource into a SMART Notebook Presentation. I click on the picture, I click on the Larger Picture option. I then right click on the picture then click on the copy option. I'm now going to my SMART Notebook Presentation, and now I need to paste my resource into my notebook. To do this I right click and select Paste from the menu. When the pictures are pasted in, you can move them around by clicking in the middle of the picture, holding down the mouse button and dragging it to where you want it to be.

With any object pasted into SMART Notebook, a small white circle in the bottom right hand corner will appear. If you click on this and hold the mouse button down you can drag it and change the size of the picture. We call this resizing and you can do this to ensure the picture is the right size for the children in the classroom to see.

Copying and pasting words from an historical text to create a labelled diagram

After reading an historical source I was able to check children's understanding by combining the written with a picture. In this case I asked the children to use the text to label a picture.

With text in SMART Notebook you can double click to enter the editing mode. When in the editing mode, you can click at the start of a word, hold the mouse button down and drag along to select that word. Now point the curser at the selected word or phrases, hold the mouse button down and drag to the side. When you release the mouse button you will notice you have copied that particular piece of text. Notice however you have not cut it, the original text remains intact.

You can then use the white circle by clicking on the text box and resizing to an appropriate size. You can move the text box by placing the curser directly in the middle of it and dragging it around you SMART Notebook page.

In this case I asked the children to label the picture. You can use either lines, or in SMART 9 an arrow to help children label the historical picture.

Using screen shade to reveal a source

The screen shade is an ideal tool for covering parts of a picture or text. You can access the screen shade by clicking on this icon in the top tool bar. You can now move the screen shade down from the top, up from the bottom, from the left and from the right. You can do this by clicking on the top centre section of the screen shade holding your left mouse button down, and dragging down.

Notice that when you start to move the screen shade down from the top, the option to pull it up from the bottom disappears. Likewise if you pull in from the left, the option to pull in from the right disappears.

You can turn the screen shade off by clicking the red cross or by clicking on the screen shade icon.

You may not wish for the children to see the picture first, so an ideal way to get around this is to move to the previous slide, apply the screen shade, and then move forward to the next slide.

Rub and reveal to uncover multiple aspects of a source

Rub and reveal works in a very similar way to the screen shade however it gives you greater flexibility allowing you to view parts of your picture source when you want to.

First, pick up a pen from the pen tray. Now pick a pen and tap on the line thickness tool and select the thickest line. Now begin to scribble over the source that you have pasted into SMART Notebook.

When you've done so, you can use your eraser in the pen tray to rub out parts of you annotation and therefore reveal aspects of a source. Remember, you can rub out more or less of your source by selecting the eraser thickness tool.

At each stage you can question the children so that they can investigate different parts of the picture source.

Transparency tool using old and new maps

If you are studying a local history unit, you may wish to compare old and new maps of the area. you can do this easily by going to www.old-maps.co.uk Link to External Website where you will find a search engine which will look for old and new maps for your local area.

When you have found these you can copy and paste them into a page on your SMART Notebook presentation. I've copied the old map here and a newer map of Dukinfield on page 8.

You may wish to overlay these maps so that you can point out features that have changed and features that have stayed the same. To do this you need to select the map by clicking your left mouse button on the map and going to the transparency icon in the toolbar.

By clicking on the transparency icon you can select varying degrees of transparency you want this picture to be.

Click on the Page Source tab and then repeat the procedure with the new map, selecting it, clicking on the transparency tool to make it transparent.

Now you may wish to compare these maps by overlaying them. To get both maps onto the same page I'll click my left mouse button and keep it held down and drag this page to the Page Source tab. Then I will drag the new map on top of the old map on page 7.

If I click on page 7 you will see both old and new maps are on this page. You can line these maps up, and then you could point out certain features. Remember, you can always change the transparency by clicking on a map, going back to Transparency and making it more or less transparent.

When you've overlayed the maps and you're satisfied that you can see features from both the old and the new maps, you can annotate them with your SMART Board pens to show roads that have changed, or new roads, new buildings or new features on the map.

Screen capture to photograph one particular area of a source. Selecting sections and placing them into a table

Before I use screen capture, I have have found a picture of a Greek plate on the British Museum website and pasted it into a page in my SMART Notebook presentation.

On the next page of my presentation I have created a very simple table to enable the children to interrogate the Greek plate source. I've asked them to focus on objects they can see in the picture of the Greek plate. If we go back now to the Greek plate, we can focus in on individual objects.

Using screen capture, which is the icon which looks like a camera, you can click on this icon and a small window is launched. You have 3 options, the first option allows you to take a picture of an aspect of your page, the second will take the entire window, and the third will take your entire display.

Today we're going to focus on the first option which allows you just to take a specific section of a page. You click with your left button, and you'll notice that your curser changes to a camera with an arrow. And today we're looking at the objects in this Greek plate.

I'm going to draw and imaginary rectangle around one of these by left clicking, holding that button down and dragging an imaginary oblong around the object. When I'm happy with the size of the oblong so that I've made sure that the object is in frame, I release the left mouse button and a copy of that section of screen is taken and pasted into a new page in my SMART Notebook presentation.

I'm then able to drag this into the Page Sorter and then into the table that I've prepared. If I click on page 11 I'll notice that I've dragged the image into the table.

The teacher then, can ask children for their ideas and jot these down in the remaining sections of the table.

Annotating pictures and moving the annotation

In much the same way you might annotate a big book using an acetate sheet you can perform a similar operation in SMART Notebook.

I have 2 pictures, both taken in King Street, Dukinfield. The first I've copied into my SMART Notebook presentation from the Tameside archives on the internet. The other I've taken with a digital camera.

You may wish to talk to the children about things that have changed and things that have changed the same, and annotating these. Before we start to do this we need to lock both the pictures in place. We can do this by clicking on a picture, going to the top right hand corner of the picture where there is a drop down menu, selecting this by clicking on it, and then selecting Lock In Place. If you accidentally lock it into the wrong place you can always click on the picture, click on the padlock the select Unlock Annotation. This allows you to move the picture into the position you wish it to be locked into.

I'm going to carry out a similar procedure with this picture. Now both our pictures are locked in place and you will see we're not able to move them. We're going to annotate over them now and I normally do this with a pen from the pen tray on the SMART Board, if you're working at home or on your laptop you may wish to use the pen tool which is in the top toolbar. Use the small black arrow to bring up the tools, choose a colour that you think will stand out on the picture and select it.

The children could then annotate over the picture things that are different or have changed. Once you've annotated the picture, go to the Select tool and draw an imaginary rectangle around all your annotations.

You can then select these annotations, hold the left button on your mouse down and drag them onto the other picture. Once you've aligned them the children will be able to see where these features would be today.

You can talk about the changes that have occurred and the things that have stayed the same.

Page last updated: 19 March 2009