New perspective on learning

With SMART Ideas, you can create multilevel concept maps that take students through concepts one step at a time for greater clarity. And you can easily convert the maps into a multipage website for everyone to share.

A bank of colorful and descriptive graphics helps teachers break down information in highly visual ways so students can understand each element of a concept. You can enhance maps with curriculum-specific clip art or external links to make lessons more dynamic.

Show concepts from multiple perspectives

Multilevel maps are the key to illustrating the logical and thematic connections within a lesson. Viewing separate levels of a map helps students think about concepts in chunks that are easy to understand. And with SMART Ideas, you can present information from a variety of perspectives. Show all map levels at once or switch between the text-only and visual views to demonstrate the connection between graphic and written elements. For presentations, you can clear the toolbar and present your map in an easy-to-view format.

Link multimedia

You can add links or attachments to your maps, so they’re sure to capture the attention of today’s digitally literate students. And students can use multimedia to enhance their own presentations, making their projects as descriptive and captivating as possible.

Create curriculum-specific maps

SMART Ideas comes with over 2,000 resizable pieces of clip art, and they’re all organized by curriculum topic. You can find subject-specific, searchable clip art displayed in a thumbnail preview.

Integration with the SMART Board interactive whiteboard

Use SMART Ideas with a SMART Board interactive whiteboard for touch control, handwriting recognition and more.

Style collections

Build concept maps by dragging and dropping ready-made symbols, basic and deluxe connectors, images and interactive clip art.

Curriculum-specific Clip-Art Gallery and cliplets

Make use of over 2,000 resizable pieces of clip art to enhance your lessons - they’re all organized according to curriculum topic. Or use cliplets to tell time, measure angles and much more.

Visual effects

Change connector styles and add patterns, images and shading to symbols. The software comes with sticky symbols, so you can layer objects and move them together to easily categorize ideas. And when you create tree diagrams, you can expand them one branch at a time.

Legend creation

Create legends to emphasize the meaning of symbols and their relationship to information.

Multilevel diagrams

Add sublevels to symbols to create multilevel diagrams, and then export maps to create navigable websites.

Multimedia linking

Add links or attachments to files, websites and levels within diagrams. You can also link to multimedia files and play them within SMART Ideas software. And it’s easy to create new, linked symbols with a single keystroke.

Easy-to-share formats

Save concept maps as a Microsoft Word document, HTML file or image file, keeping all map levels intact.

Cross-platform compatibility

Open maps on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

Multiple views

Switch between the Diagram view or the text-based Outline view to demonstrate the connection between visual and written ideas. Or show all map levels at once in the Global view.

Presentation mode

Remove toolbars for ease of viewing. You can also automatically organize diagrams by choosing a layout style.