Located in rooms 2207 and 2221, the Sympodium® displays data just as a normal computer monitor but gives you the ability to draw and annotate on top of whatever is on the screen. It is an excellent teaching tool, giving you the freedom of having drawing and annotion tools incorporated into the computing environment. It is also of great value to those taking your course off campus as the notes, diagrams, and text written on screen are much easier to capture and deliver to the student than conventional blackboard drawings.

Sympodium® tools are easily turned on and off by means of easy to find buttons found at the top and bottom borders of the monitor.

"Using the Smartboard® Sympodium®

Enable “floating sympodium® tools”

Press the “wrench” button on the bottom border of the monitor to enable (press wrench button again to minimize the toolbar).

Open Floating Tools

The “floating toolbar” is now open at the top of the screen and may be repositioned anywhere on the screen by using the mouse cursor to grab a blank area of the toolbar and drag.

Floating Tools Open

Choose the pen tool and color

Press any of the pen buttons on the top border of the Sympodium® monitor. Begin writing/drawing on the screen with the stylus attached to monitor.

Pen and Mouse Buttons

Clear what you have written

Using the mouse or pen tool, press the “CLR” button on the “floating toolbar”.

Clear Button on Floating Tools

Exit the “pen mode”

Press the arrow pointer button on the top border of the monitor to go back to regular “mouse mode”.

Using the Sympodium® with PowerPoint®

Sympodium® and PowerPoint® considerations

WARNING!

When closing your PowerPoint® file, if you have drawn on top of any of your slides, the Sympodium® will (by default) try to save these additions to your PowerPoint® presentation. Most likely, you will not want to save any drawing/annotation additions as you will need to re-use this file in its original form for teaching.

Do Not Save Changes if You Have Written on the Only Copy of Your PowerPoint® Presentation

When you close your PowerPoint® presentation, you will be prompted with the message “Do you want to save the changes you made to yourslideshowname.ppt?” CHOOSE NO

When opening a PowerPoint® file in Slideshow View, you may be prompted to select a method for advancing your slides. The choices are to “Single Press” or to “Double Press” the monitor screen.
The default setting is to “Double Press” and seems to work best.

SMART Shortcuts for PowerPoint®

What this means is if you are in drawing mode while in PowerPoint® and would like to advance to the next slide without having to get out of drawing mode, simply use the pen stylus to “Double Tap” anywhere on the screen.