Workbook (and hence Alphateach) imports SMART Notebook files.  However there are a number of considerations to be understood:

Backgrounds & templates:  Although plain colour backgrounds are imported, we do not import other backgrounds and especially templates as these are subject to SMART’s copyright and were not created by the user.  This is the most common source of user complaints when importing SMART Notebooks; often users do not appreciate that they have relied upon a publisher’s content in preparing their own lesson materials, and hence believe that an error has been made through the import.

"SMART" pens:  Plain “ink” lines are of course easily and accurately imported.  These consist of a vector with properties including line style, line thickness,  colour, opacity, etc.  However this is not the case for the several “SMART pens” in Notebook (Workbook has its own version of such drawing tools).  These pens deliver stylized strokes making use of a design by SMART illustrators, eg a rainbow, or stripes, or stars.  Workbook does not import these out of respect for SMART’s copyright.  In the event that a Notebook file containing these is opened in Workbook, then the item is simply ignored.  This means tso that if a SMART pen is relied on in a hide-and-reveal activity then the answers will be revealed in Workbook post-import.  The work-around:  User replaces SMART pen strokes with plain ink in Notebook before import – or repeats the strokes using any pen in Workbook after the import.

SMART Flash files: These are subject to SMART copyright and are not imported into Workbook (note – Workbook will import Flash files which are not known to be sourced from SMART and do not rely on proprietary hooks in the Notebook file structure).

Page dimensions & object locations:  There are differences in how SMART Notebook and Workbook define page size and make use of page dimensions. By default, the Notebook and Workbook pages are subtly different in aspect.  These differences can in certain circumstances result in differences in object positioning and page layout, however in most cases such changes will go unnoticed in converting content from Notebook to Workbook.    

Text fonts & sizing:  While every effort is made to match fonts and text sizes, because of the differences mentioned above the post-conversion page will usually appear somewhat different to the Notebook starting point.  Usually these differences will be minor enough to ignore, however in some cases they will call for some editing (scaling and moving) in the post-conversion Workbook in order to recreate the Notebook document exactly.

No chapters:  Notebook supports a concept of Chapters (in which pages are grouped into chapters); Workbook does not and so chapters are simply ignored in the import process.  Thepages are imported sequentially as they would otherwise appear in Notebook.

Categories: Workbook / AlphaTeach.