Collaborative environments are online spaces — often cloud-based — where the focus is on
making it easy to collaborate and work in groups, no matter where the participants may be. As the
typical educator’s network of contacts has grown to include colleagues who might live and work
across the country, or indeed anywhere on the globe, it has become common for people who are
not physically located near each other to nonetheless collaborate on projects. Joint classroombased
projects with students at other schools or in other countries are more and more common
strategies used to expose learners to a variety of perspectives. The essential attribute of the
technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, to easily
monitor their collective progress, and to see how ideas have evolved throughout the process.
These tools are compelling and widely adopted because they are not only easy to use, but they are
also either very low cost or free, and often accessible with a simple web browser.