From Teachnet Blog (http://blog.teachnet.ie/?p=1970)
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) have announced that all major interactive whiteboard vendors have agreed to make their educational content available in the UK in a common file format (CFF), a move that will make IWB content much more accessible by allowing teachers to share content and resources that are not proprietary software dependent.
In 2007, BECTA teamed up with the RM Group, to address the issue of multiple IWB solutions each having their own proprietary software and commissioned them to to develop a common industry-wide standard that would benefit educators by allowing the exchange of resources within and between schools. The result of this collaboration is a newly created file specification (.iwb), a Viewer application, and a code library that software publishers can used to integrate support for the CFF into their own applications.
So far, eInstruction, Hitachi, Luidia, Mimio, PolyVision, Promethean, RM, Sahara Presentation Systems, SMART Technologies, and TeamBoard have committed to adopt the CFF in the UK.
It should only be a matter of time before this format will go global saving educators everywhere the headache of grappling with proprietary and incompatible formats. Considering our own proximity to the UK, one would think Irish teachers will be sharing educational content and resources across different IWB platforms sooner rather than later.
0 thoughts on “New common file format for IWBs”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_Interoperability_Framework
Sadly BECTA will be disbanded this year as recently announced. RM have pledged to carry forward the CFF work started with BECTA. I would wonder if this CFF will become a reality any quicker if it is not associated with one geographical area (being in the U.S. I hope so). I think manufacturers, particularly those with software that’s been highly rated by customers and on blogs like this one will have small incentive to collaborate on or promote a format that might destroy any differentiation they have now. On the other hand publishers (like my employer) may have a new choice when developing content for multiple boards: .flp, .nbk, .swf . . . or .iwb?