SMART Notebook Update for Mac - Floating Toolbar

Your SMART Notebook software for Mac has a new update if you have not noticed so far - 11.3.  Most of us should be at 11.2 currently.  Though this update is not much, it does have a couple of nice features.  The SMART Technologies package that comes with the update includes SMART System Menu, which, when launched, provides an icon in your system menu bar.  This icon acts as a hub for all of your SMART products, including Notebook, Screen Shade, and more; as well as the ability to show or hide the Board Tools.

If you are a frequent, or even minimal, Floating Toolbar user, you are familiar with the Board Tools icon that appears in the dock on your laptop.

From this application you are able to utilize the Floating Toolbar of SMART Tools to integrate with any application on your MacBook.  This is great when you want to annotate or interactively feature something on your projector from your computer for the classroom.

With the 11.3 update to Notebook, you can access the Floating Toolbar from the SMART System Menu - Show or Hide.  No longer will you see the Board Tools icon in your dock; so, don't be alarmed. It's nice having the one, integrated center to access Notebook and the Notebook features and tools.  And, the SMART System Menu icon will remain in your system toolbar when you log in to your laptop.

Student Access to Pages Documents At Home

The great thing about iCloud and the Apple apps that are associated with iCloud, is that you can access and continue to edit the content (documents, spreadsheets, notes, etc) at home without having to bring the iPad home.  Since we have not allowed the students to bring their iPads home yet, this may be a valuable resource.

Let's use the Pages app for demonstration.  Any editing or new update to a Pages document is automatically saved, and saved to iCloud as long as the student has set this feature.

(We went over backing up to iCloud with all of the students at Deployment Day and had them all back up their iPad using iCloud.  I mentioned this part because there is always one or two that may have not listened and did not choose to back up their device in iCloud)

With this auto-save feature of Pages in iCloud, students can access their documents at any network-connected computer.

Simply log in with Apple ID at

icloud.com

From there any Apple user with their Apple ID can access the iCloud features, like Pages.

Users can select an already created document for viewing or editing, or they can create a new document right from their web browser.

Users can also right-click (Mac: option-click) on the thumbnail of the document and download it either as a Pages document, a PDF or as a Word document.