Generosity of SMART Technologies

A shout-out to SMART Technologies for their generous act by handing out a full license of SMART Notebook 14 to one of my students. This particular student is one of my exam students and is handicapped and has very limited motor skills and he's not able to write and/or use his arms and legs properly. He is able to use a laptop computer during his exams and by law it is permitted that he uses a few software programs such as MS Word, Excel and a snapping tool to copy the things he created in one program to another. Now both his math teacher and the student himself dropped the idea of using SMART Notebook, because of the drawing functionality and the GeoGebra add-on. I send an email to Deena and Ainhoa and responded with a positive reply. How about that! Besides the fact that it's very nice that SMART granted my student with the software, I particularly like the fact that this student benefits from using Notebook and the GeoGebra add-on with his disability of writing and drawing.

Fred van Dijke - math teacher of my student: "Lesley has diplegia spastic infantile and has fewer features, among others in his left arm and shoulder. His entire coordination and fine motor skills are in such a state that it is very difficult for him to write and draw. In mathematics, the exam requires to make drawings. When he works in SMART Notebook can he simply put the drawings from the exam in SMART Notebook (Snapping Tool) as add other things as well."

Reply of Ainhoa Marcos (SMART Technologies) to my request: "I´ll be happy to provide you with the license, I´ll just ask you to write an EdCompass blog, video, or any other content about the experience, as I think is an amazing one. I´ll come back to you soon with the license ..." 

As Lesley responds to working with SMART Notebook 14: "I am very happy with the program SMART Notebook. It was intended for my math drawings, but I also can use it with other subjects to draw and create schedules. It takes me a little longer to create drawings because it's such a large and comprehensive program, but in this case it is a good thing because I need less different programs. At the beginning I needed to discover how everything works, but once I knew how it worked, it is working very good for me. All that I used is now in just one program. If I have I do not have the copy-paste to other software anymore. I could not draw in depth, but with the pre-created pages in Notebook I can now also draw in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Very often I had to tell my teacher that I couldn't do such things, but now I can. Until now I haven't come across anything that I miss in the program. With SMART Notebook I can improve my skills."

And SMART Exemplary Educator Gonzalo Garcia responded to our story: "One of the best features of SMART solutions is the ability they have to help attention to diversity inside and outside the classroom. And this is another example of the commitment of SMART with Education in capital letters."