Smart Notebook Lessons for the SMART Board

I like to "wow" the teachers in my training classes by showing SMART Technologies' Notebook Software Lesson Activities page. I search for an activity and then I bring up the state standard for that activity.

I recently saw a biased video on YouTube where the presenter was saying that Mimio (another interactive whiteboard tool) is better because it gives teacher-created lessons and the other companies do not. Really? I challenge anyone to compare SMART Technologies' Lesson Activities page and Mimio's Lessons page and say that Mimio has more teacher-created lessons. Actually, Mimio's Lesson page has a grand total of only 21 lessons.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm for any tool that helps increase a child's ability to learn, including Mimios. However, their marketing (at least by the salesperson in the video I watched) is a little misleading and in my opinion, SMART Boards and the resources provided by SMART Technologies and SMART Board users still stand out from the rest.

To solidify my point, here's a great non-commercial website that has at least 10 times the number of "teacher-created" lessons than the Mimio website. The Notebook files are in zip format but it only takes a few extra clicks to get them unzipped and loaded into Notebook.