Smart Notebook 10

[CheeseDog]

Well the serial number thing is slightly annoying but at least it will stop the majority of staff downloading it at home.

Not going to bother here for now. I might play around over the summer holiday if I get enough time.

[conehead]

I've not ventured down the v10 path, but have just discovered the Lesson Activity Toolkit, which apparently is already in there, but you can install on earlier versions anyway. It goes in the Gallery Items as a download and has quite a few useful games and activity building tools. The keen teachers will love it.

SMART - Lesson Activity Toolkit Download Toolkit


http://downloads.smarttech.com/media...b10qrmar28.pdf

[Andie]

Quote from John 15/04/08:

"Although first annoyance is i need the SN off one of my boards to download and obtain a link to download, thats pritty annyoing, I know that the reason will be to stop anybody just downloading and using it on a Promethean, Hitachi etc board but slightly annoying as I'm going to have to trek over to get one"

(Sorry for the DIY quote but the LEA filter has suddenly started blocking some edugeek functions!!)

The company who installed our SMARTboards very helpfully attached a sticker to the front of each junction box listing the serial number of the board and projector, so at least if I do get round to/forced to upgrade, then I shall be ok on that front!!

[SimpleSi]

Reply from SMART over documentation for Admin Installer

Hello Simon,

Here is a link to the information you are requesting. Our documentation team has finally caught up with our application developers.

http://www2.smarttech.com/kbdoc/123394

regards

Simon

[NickJones]

Okay, so stretching past bashing the registration process, what do people think of the application itself?

I've just been playing with it, and it seems to have some nice additions - most notably tables finally (!), although I don't see how to delete them. You still can't easily draw a perfect circle or square, though (I know about the autoshapes, before anyone says anything, but these are ellipses and rectangles, not circles and squares). The Magic Pen or whatever it is called looks fun, but is limited in what I can do without being attached to a board.

I'll probably put it on my personal laptop and test it on a board, then maybe ask one of the tech-savvy teachers to trial it for me in the classroom.

What do other people think of it?

[eean]

It seems hard to move the tables too. They have changed the floating tools to this cool little bar that can disappear except for one button - but you can ONLY have it on the left hand side of the screen and even when minimised it gets in the way of certain applications' buttons (e.g. abacus on Easyteach).
Found my first bug - draw a square and colour it in - gradient fill is the default, but select ordinary fill and you get gradient again.

As for the application setup utility - it just doesn't ativate the product! I told SMART but no reply! Here's my solution:
Use the utility to make a .MST that set up all your settings - but don't enter the product key.
Then, use wise install tailor (it used to be free to download) to make another .MST and enter the key this time.
Install using active directory - specify smart's mst as the first transform and the wise one as the second.

I've looked at the msts and I can't work out how they're different. But this has worked on all of our machines*. If anyone wants - I'll post them here.

*Actually, on two out of 12 it failed

[SimpleSi]

I put it on my most SMART savvy teacher's machine and we had a play with it on Friday after school for about an hour.

Apart from adding tables (I didn't try moving or deleting them!) I think it could best be described as a gloss-paint job - looks nice - doesn't really improve ability to teach.

She thought the number of buttons you have to press to fill in a shape was a very big leap backwards.

I just installed it and said no to downloading gallery and it took about 8 minutes to install (from a pen drive).

Then another few minutes when we realised that we had to install the driver as well!

I said no to online installing gallery and it kept the old one.

I just hope the file format is compatible with 9.5 so I can save myself a lot of work and not bother with it until I find it does something really good and worth the effort of doing so

regards

Simon

[north]

I tend to carry this around with me on a usb pen and install it, as I visit several Schools this seems to be the easiest way! is there a way to embed the serial number into the software so I dont have to input it each time? I have asked smart but they pointed me to the administrators toolkit, but this seems to just be for active directory roll outs!

[NickJones]

The Administrators Toolkit creates a .mst file which, as you say, only really helps in AD rollouts, but you could use something like Masai or Wise to merge the .mst and .msi into a single .msi, which you could then run from your pen.

Of course, this would mean that all your schools had the same serial number, which is tied to a board in one of those schools. Don't know if that would be a problem or not...

[north]

Thanks for your quick reply!

is the wise builder free? I will have a look to see if i can find it! I dont think it would cause a problem using one board in one of the schools to get the serial number!

Thanks!

[NickJones]

Not sure what/if it costs, sorry.

[Geoff]

You can also use Orca to do that, which you can get from MS for free.

[eean]

Originally Posted by NickJones

The Administrators Toolkit creates a .mst file which, as you say, only really helps in AD rollouts, but you could use something like Masai or Wise to merge the .mst and .msi into a single .msi, which you could then run from your pen.

You could make the mst and just run it as a command, e.g:
msiexec /i "e:\smartnotebook.msi" transfoms="mytransfom.mst" /qb+

I tried the above without the quotes and it didn't work. So I asked Smart and they said put quotes in even if there aren't any spaces (this is non-standard... typical smart!) I haven't actually tested it though because I use AD installs.
The /qb+ switch at the end just means it will run straight through without asking questions. Use /qb- and it won't display a 'done' screen at the end.

[TimJing]

Having some problems installing it here as well.

First, if I use the Install Manager to generate the MST, the program will install in default settings, but takes forever to DL all the gallery files.

If I set the Gallery path, I get Buffer over flow error on the MSIEXEC. It allows me to continue, but prompts for which Gallery files to install(Read, no longer a silent install).

[NickJones]

@TimJing - similar results here too, the .mst from the Install Manager seems to get ignored, and if I try to configure any Gallery settings with it, it crashes on install, Event Viewer lists an "unknown error". Helpful.