When I started teaching eight years ago, we all had just gotten Smartboards for our classrooms and I felt we were truly moving into the future. I had just come from a job where we thought we were on the cutting edge of technology but we had nothing close to a Smartboard. I often joked with my colleagues from my old job that they could come and try out my Smartboard and see what the future was going to be like.
That was eight years ago and while I used my Smartboard for everything that I could for all of my classes, it became more and more just a whiteboard that you could click links on. Today, I mainly use it for giving presentations and launching Youtube videos and the word from our tech people is that the Smart Notebook software won't work with Windows 10, so we will need to either pay for the upgrade or figure out a different plan. I have opted for the different plan.
For the last year I have been steadily using Google Apps more and more since they allow me to be more flexible in where and when I can work. As a school, we have also been better at using things like Google Docs and Google Forms to collaborate and share documents among ourselves. So I have taken the last big step and have started to move from Smart Notebook to Google Slides as my main method of presentations. After looking at my presentations and what I was doing with them, I realized that there was no magic that the Smartboard was giving me for 90% of my content. My classes have become more and more project-based and I was trying to get away from me standing in front of class giving a presentation at all. So while using Google Slides was not a big change, getting all of the content that I had created over the years into slides was going to a monumental task, or at least I thought.
I started by exporting my Smart Notebook files to PowerPoint. I thought that this would at least give me something to work from. Originally this was going to my plan anyway, if I could use PowerPoint at least I wouldn't be using Smart Notebook and PowerPoint still had some "pen" functionality that would work with the Smartboard for those times when I need to write on the board. But after exporting to PowerPoint, there were a ton of formatting changes that I had to make just to get PowerPoint to be functional. Since I had to make the formatting changes anyway, I decided to look into how hard it would be to take the exported PowerPoint file and convert it into Google Slides. This wasn't difficult, simply opening the PowerPoint as a Google Slides file in Google Drive created a Google Slides file and then I could make the formatting changes. Once I started doing this it was ridiculously easy so I just kept going. It does take time, but it has allowed me to add animation which I was never able to do very well in Smart Notebook and to insert my Youtube videos directly into the presentations and not a link. This is important because of all of the times that a video has been taken down and I have to scramble to find a replacement. Now I can see when I bring up the presentations which videos work and which don't. I've been steadily working through my Smart Notebook files and I'm hoping to have a majority of them completed before the end of the school year.
My final problem with this conversion was that there were still some times when I needed to write on the Smartboard or have the students come up and interact with it. But I think I have a solution for this also. OneNote is one of those Microsoft apps that has flown under the radar for years. I've used it for a long time because I like to write my notes out but I use a tablet instead of paper and pencil and OneNote has be great for that. Well, I have just found a new application for this program: using it to write on the Smartboard. I can create content, such as text that needs to be proofread and corrected, and then use the Smartboard to "write" on that text in OneNote. It will also let me write on it when I show the students how to use binary. Finally, it will help because I can then share what is on the board with students without having to go through some kind of export process like I used to do with Smart Notebook.
So my conversion process of getting away from Smart Notebook and replacing it with other tools, will work out a lot smoother than I originally thought it would thanks to Google Slides and Microsoft's OneNote.
