Netbooks, cloud apps encourage collaboration
Students who have access to mobile devices at home constantly communicate on Facebook, Twitter and other sites, said Wayne Weber, the Laconia High School principal. But at some schools, administrators tell them, "Stop collaborating, stop communicating and put those devices away."
"And so, this is a means of addressing that Digital Divide as John said, and then trying to capitalize on what they’re doing outside of school already and honing those skills to get them to be better at collaboration and communicating.”
For the past three years, students have collaborated through cloud apps such as Google Apps and Dropbox. And now, the netbooks provide more opportunities to collaborate.
In "Future Prep" class, a teacher has classes in four sections working on projects centered around the movie "Waiting for Superman." Each section split into eight groups that represent different education stakeholders, including students, school boards, communities and teachers' unions.
Randy Kolset on 05 Jan 11"Saywire provides a unique and engaging online learning platform in which people can create private, secure communities to collaborate and communicate with one another. Each Saywire community provides its members with a wide set of tools to quickly and easily build their own autonomous communities or "Spaces" as we call them, within the confines of their organization's parent community. These Spaces are great for learning, sharing, working together, or just connecting with other members of a defined organization/business/educational institution. Each Space can have its own member base, blogs, wikis, discussion boards or any combination of over 12 different features or tools depending on the needs of the Space. Sound interesting? Learn more."