Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
Collaborative Environments
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.
Relevance for Teaching and Learning in Singaporean K-12 Education
! A class or project group can assemble a collaborative workspace very quickly using
widgets that pull information from a range of sources.
! Collaborative environments are an efficient way for students to work together, whether
the groups are composed of students in the same physical class or not.
! Large-scale collaborative environments can facilitate an almost spontaneous development
of communities of people who share similar interests.
Collaborative Environments in Practice
! At the 2012 Google Apps for Education Singapore Summit, presentations and hands-on
workshops informed educators seeking collaboration tools for classroom:
go.nmc.org/biyww.
! In the First Peoples' Project, children on five continents have used technology to share
their respective cultures in a digital cultural exchange: go.nmc.org/zytbi.
! The international eLanguages project facilitates collaboration between teachers and
classrooms around the world. Teachers can select or propose projects for their classes to
take part in, exchange ideas with other teachers, and share resources: go.nmc.org/gsgvm.
! The Flat Classroom Project joins K-12 students to collaborate virtually on assignments with
real world relevance: go.nmc.org/psoan.