One of the headaches of running an interactive file sharing site is that there are two major file types for whiteboards.

You may well have had the frustrating experience of developing material for Promethean ActivBoard and then finding your new school has Smart, or visa versa.  That’s exactly why we encourage Powerpoint – because almost everyone can read and edit the same files.

However, it looks like a solution might finally be in sight in the form of a common whiteboard file standard.  Becta in the UK is trying to push all the main whiteboard manufacturers into allowing import and export of a standard type of file (a bit like the interactive version of Rich Text Format).  If you are responsible for buying equipment for a school, then you can do your bit by asking the supplier if they will support a common file format.

If this gets off the ground we’ll be able to offer convertors to take your existing Smart / Promethean / other files and convert that to something everyone can use.

In the meantime, do email us any whiteboard files you think you could contribute.  We are seriously considering supporting Flipchart and Smart files in the near future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 11:02 am and is filed under Contributing, UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.