Do you really need whiteboard tools?

Yesterday I had the privilege of watching Doug Dickinson working with some teachers at Manor Road Primary School in Lancashire. It was a Textease CT training session, a product for which I am a trainer, and I hoped I was going to pick up some good tips on its use. I wasn't disappointed, it's always a pleasure to watch someone who is passionate about their subject and passionate about their product.

Afterwards Doug and I were chatting about Textease on a whiteboard and wondered why any schools using a product as powerful and flexible as Textease CT would be bothered to used the whiteboard tools supplied with their board. His argument was, "Why would you use software to teach and demonstrate, when that software is not available to the children on their pc?" And, to a large extent, I agree. If you have a Smartboard, your software licence allows you to install it on any pcs in your classroom, and I am certainly not alone in advocating that you install their excellent Smart Notebook software on every pc and laptop in your school. With a Promethean board this is much more problematic: a board only comes with five software licences so installing it on all your workstations will be a breach of your licence conditions. This amounts to a powerful reason not to buy their product, in my opinion.

The conversation got me thinking, "what would I miss in Smart Notebook" if I just used Textease on my whiteboard? Certainly Textease has some brilliantly simple tools  such as the spreadsheet tool and branching database tool which are a joy to use on a whiteboard and there is nothing comparable in Smart Notebook. I would miss the screenshade and spotlight tools in Smart Notebook, but the biggest loss for me would be the brilliant camera tools and screen recorder that Smart Notebook comes bundled with. In practice this is not a problem, as both of these utilities run independently of Smart Notebook, so it's quite straightforward to run these utilities while using the superb  Textease CT package as my  software of choice on my whiteboard - let's face it, if you've paid for a site licence for this product you want to extract maximum value!

Textease CT: Top Tips

Incidentally, if you haven't upgraded to Smart Notebook 10, then do so (get your Smartboard serial number noted before you go to the download site). There are some nice new features such as the new spotlight and magnifier tools.

Comments

[danny]

I'm a big believer in having the IWB software on all machines in a school, not just the few that are attached to the boards. I'm still waiting for Microsoft to realise they only need to make a few tweaks to PowerPoint to make it into "proper" iwb software.

I haven't played with the most recent version of textease, so I can't really comment - but for those schools who have not got Smart or Promethean boards and are lumbered with the awful software that often comes with those boards - then being able to use stuff like this is ideal.

I do like the camera and spotlight tool though, I'm amazed that I still see whiteboard software bundled with boards that doesnt offer something as simple as an area capture (we don't always want to capture the whole screen/window)