Notebook software is a terrificly powerful tool. In the ES here, students are doing all presentations on it INSTEAD of PowerPoint for exactly the reasons you stated. No fancy-ish ANYTHING. So the kids have to focus on content and on how and what they are going to present. Makes me think PP is the poorer cousin!

As far as sharing between teachers, keep in mind that in Notebook, you can export as PowerPoint, so those teachers can still get that if they don’t have a board. They are certainly no worse off using Notebook from their computer (as opposed to PP).

BTW, you can also import PowerPoint into Notebook for those teachers who do have the boards and love to write all over their presentations without having to worry about saving their writing into the presentation.

In a school with some interactive whiteboards, but not in every room, the issue of sharing resources among teachers in a team is important, and they sometimes wonder about the benefit of Notebook files if they only have a projector but not a board. In that respect, the Notebook software looks a bit like a poorer cousin of PowerPoint: no fancy(-ish) templates, no animations, etc and who cares if you can drag things around or draw on it if you have to sit at the teacher’s computer and use the mouse!

However, as a tool for note-taking or brainstorming, this flexibility becomes very important. You can, of course, put text boxes in word processing programs, but it doesn’t have the same immediacy and flexibility there. Resizing a text box also doesn’t resize the text.

I think I’ll explore this a bit – we have the notebook software on all computers in the school which makes it all that much easier to suggest it as a useful tool for teachers. Having said that, I agree that the it may be a bit unstructured for teaching to students – teachers may well worry about this, in any case. For experienced note-takers, however, it looks interesting. Love the tag-cloud analogy!