The European Schoolnet (EUN) commissioned EdICTs to produce a stakeholder report. The report had to explore current practices associated with the procurement of Interactive Whiteboard technologies (IWBs) across 13 European Ministries of Education, and to make recommendations for how IWBs should be procured. The report recommendations were expected to reflect the challenges and requirements of participating IWB suppliers and Ministries of Education, as well as EdICTs own expertise in this field. The scope of the report had to be broad enough to fully support the range and scale of potential programmes and procurements. The report was designed to inform the decisions of individual schools wishing to provide small numbers of devices into existing learning spaces, larger scale school refurbishment and building programmes, and regional/national initiatives providing large numbers of devices alongside or separate to ICT infrastructure developments.
A programme of stakeholder engagement was devised in order to inform the development of the recommendations. The stakeholders comprised four IWB suppliers/manufacturers (eInstruction, Mimio, Promethean and SMART Technologies), and the 13 Ministries of Education that were participating in the EUN’s IWB Working Group in the first half of 2010.
EdICTs accepted that due to the complex nature of the research, it was essential to make use of existing forums, working groups and favoured channels of communication (both international and national) to publicise the project and to recruit contributors for the research element. Consideration of how developments outside Europe, and standards other than the CFF/IWB initiatives may influence, support or align with the outputs of this programme also had to feature highly within the report.
Our involvement with other programmes identified related developments which were used to inform the IWB programme. Certain important related developments, although outside the scope of the programme, were used to inform the development of the outputs. For example, we were project managing the development of the technical profile for e-learning ‘Content Packaging’ and we had contact with the RM team working to identifying a common file format for IWBs and Becta’s proposed Content Ecosystem.
