What's New in SMART Lumio

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by Heather Schrader, Education Sales Consultant at SMART

First and foremost, if you haven’t heard, SMART Learning Suite Online (SLSO) is now “Lumio by SMART”! 

Lumio makes it easy to transform your PDFs, Google Slides, PowerPoint, and SMART Notebook files into lessons that you can send to student devices (anytime, anywhere) with interactive activities, games, group workspaces, and assessment tools. This change took effect in June and, here at SMART, we couldn’t be more excited. Finally, SLSO has a short and sweet name that reflects the illumination of learning, those “ah-ha” moments, that our online tool is built to inspire.

So, besides the name, what’s new in Lumio? In two words: A LOT!

Changing the name from SLSO to Lumio was just the beginning of a marathon of updates. July brought two major changes that teachers had asked for: new editing tools and undo/redo functionality! You can copy and paste, group and ungroup, and even order elements within a page in your Lumio lesson. Plus, you can undo and redo actions on a page.

In August, SMART released quick training videos embedded inside of Lumio to help you quickly and easily learn how to use different features. Look for the graduation cap symbol and click it to watch the video! Also, SMART expanded the new Explore Resources section of Lumio. Find ready-to-use resources more quickly and easily with the new search function that includes a filter to easily narrow down results by grade, subject, and standard. Remember SMART Exchange for your Notebook lessons? Explore Resources is the new SMART Exchange built into Lumio!

Then, in September, SMART released a new Graphing Calculator from Desmos. Math teachers rejoice! Add an interactive Desmos graphing calculator activity to your lesson to help your students visually explore and express mathematical concepts and improve their math skills. Want an example of this new tool in use? Check out this Quadratic Representation lesson!

Last month (October), SMART added new page templates to Lumio. We know most teachers create their Lumio lessons by importing one or more pieces of content (PDF, Notebook, PPT, Slides); still, there are some teachers who like to build from scratch in Lumio. Now, you can leverage a variety of templates to help you quickly get started creating your lesson! For example, to see what we are currently featuring, click here.

OK, maybe right now you’re thinking, “that’s a lot of improvements in just five months.” You’re right!

But we aren’t slowing down. This month (November), we released a custom color wheel for the Text tool. As a student or a teacher, when adding text to a page, you can now use the color wheel to select any color you’d like. To open the color wheel, click the color option from the Text tool’s toolbar and then tap the three little dots.

 More updates are coming soon in December and beyond. (Sneak peek: one of them will involve PHET!)

 Want to keep up with all the latest updates and get great ideas for using Lumio? Check out SMART's “What’s New” site for Lumio and/or follow @Go_LumioPLN on Twitter, @go_lumio on Instagram, and join the open-to-everyone Lumio Educators group on Facebook!

Want some formal training? Enroll in the self-paced 4 hour SMART Lumio course. You can find it on Unified Talent, just search Lumio.

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