ICT
Theme: Collaboration
The Big Idea
When people work together they can achieve a common goal.
Explaining the Theme
In this subject section your students focus on the potential of digital communication to
share information and collaborate with others for a variety of purposes to reach a
common goal. They use and design blogs, wikis, podcasts and other Web 2.0 applications
to collaborate with their teachers, peers and other learners.
ICT Learning Goals
Students will:
4.1
Know that the study of ICT is concerned with applying technology to gather, use
and exchange information
4.2 Know about an increasing number of applications of ICT for work, communication
and leisure
4.3 Be able to use ICT safely, responsibly and respectfully
4.6 Be able to manipulate and combine different forms of information from
different sources in an organised and efficient way
4.7 Be able to use ICT to present information in a variety of forms
4.8 Be able to exchange information and ideas in a number of different ways
4.13 Understand the importance of considering audience and purpose when presenting
information
ICT Task 1
Learning Goals 4.1, 4.2, 4.6, 4.8
Collaboration in education using ICT has developed hugely over the last few years.
Interaction through websites and Web services has become much more complex and
users can now share a vast array of content and information and collaborate more rapidly
and easily. This subject section focuses on the Big Idea of Collaboration, namely how
ICT can enable your students to work together to achieve common goals. Many of the
possibilities of collaboration have come about because of the development of Web 2.0,
which has allowed adding greater socialisation, creativity and authenticity to the learning
potential of the Web.
Research Activity
Begin this task by introducing the Big Idea of Collaboration – when people work together
they can achieve a common goal. Explore the idea further by stating that when you
collaborate with others you construct and share knowledge, often to solve problems.
Explain that modern developments in ICT allow much greater collaboration between
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
people and can save both time and money.
Although your students may never have used Google Docs (www.docs.google.com; you
have to be aged 13 and over to make use of the service under the terms and conditions
which apply at the time of writing), the following YouTube video clip illustrates this
point clearly:
(To watch a YouTube video in safe mode, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Safety mode: Off’, then select the ‘On’
option)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA
YouTube video clip featuring the Google Docs in Plain English tutorial, which shows
how to create and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Google
Docs.
After watching the video clip, ask your students how using Google Docs allows people to
collaborate and how this is better than emailing attachments.
Alternatives to Google Docs can be found at:
https://acrobat.com/welcome.html
The Acrobat.com website offers another way to share files, collaborate on projects and
even host Web conferences.
www.zoho.com
The Zoho.com website offers a suite of online business, productivity and collaboration
applications.
www.dropbox.com
Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. It enables users
to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file
synchronisation.
Your students need to reflect on how they use ICT to collaborate. Ask them to discuss in
pairs how they use ICT to collaborate. They may come up with many different ways that
this is done, but there may need to be a discussion here about the distinction between
‘communicating’, i.e. texting, and ‘collaboration’, i.e. posting comments on a blog
designed to give feedback to someone. Allow time for your students to feed back their
findings.
The remainder of the research activity is a chance for your students to explore the
different types of Web 2.0 collaborative tools. The series of videos shown in the table
below, which have been sourced from the Common Craft website
(www.commoncraft.com) and YouTube (www.youtube.com), are simple to understand
and provide your students with an overview of the technology being used.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
(To watch a YouTube video in safe mode, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Safety mode: Off’, then select the ‘On’
option)
Social networking
Social bookmarking
Blogs
Wikis
Windows Live
Wetpaint Central (wikis by
Wetpaint)
Online photo sharing
www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking
Common Craft video clip featuring the Social Networking
in Plain English tutorial which provides a short
introduction to the concepts behind social networking
websites.
www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
Common Craft video clip featuring the Social
Bookmarking in Plain English tutorial which provides a
short introduction to the concept of social bookmarking,
using Delicious as the example.
www.commoncraft.com/blogs
Common Craft video clip featuring the Blogs in Plain
English tutorial which provides a short introduction to
blogs, how they work and why they matter.
www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
Common Craft video clip featuring the Wikis in Plain
English tutorial which provides a short introduction to
wikis. It illustrates how they can be used to organise a
group’s information, in this particular example, for a
camping trip.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluEYUEMjaM
YouTube video clip featuring a custom video produced for
the new and improved Microsoft Live.com.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7zJmXLWHc&feature=related
YouTube video clip featuring a useful Wetpaint tutorial.
www.commoncraft.com/photosharing
Common Craft video clip featuring the Online Photo
Sharing in Plain English tutorial which provides a short
introduction to the concept and features of online photo
sharing websites.
You may wish to use more specific websites in this section to illustrate the collaborative
nature of Web 2.0 technologies. These may include:
www.blogger.com
Blogger is the free weblog publishing tool from Google.
www.ning.com/?ne=0
Ning is an online service that allows users to create, customise and share a social
network.
www.blackboard.com
The Blackboard software manages e-learning and online communities.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
http://edublogs.org
Edublogs can be used to create and manage student and teacher blogs. It allows for the
quick customisation of designs and the inclusion of videos, photos and podcasts.
www.wikispaces.com
Wikispaces is a hosting service for wikis. Creating a wiki with Wikispaces is fast, easy
and free.
Recording Activity
In this recording activity your students complete the table below, including a statement
on the benefits of using each collaborative tool as well as any examples that they use
themselves.
Tool used for
collaboration
How does this Web tool help people to
collaborate and achieve a common goal?
An example of this
tool that I use is…
Social network
Social bookmarking
Wikis
Online photo
sharing
Blogs
Once your students have completed the table, refocus on the Big Idea of Collaboration
and ask your students for examples of the detail that they have provided in the middle
column of the table above. Ask them how their own use of these collaborative tools
allows them to achieve a common goal.
[Naturalist, Verbal-Linguistic Intelligences]
ICT Task 2
Learning Goals 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.8
This task allows more time to be dedicated to online collaborative tools that can be used
by both teachers and students, such as blogs, Voxopop (a voice-based e-learning tool)
and Writeboard (online collaborative writing software). You need to prepare for this
session by creating an account for the last two tools in advance of the task and creating
some stimulus material that your students can interact with and contribute to. To link this
activity to the Big Idea of Collaboration, it is necessary to introduce the aim and purpose
of your activity or state the nature of the problem to be solved.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
Note to teacher: Please ensure that you check the suitability of the content of any blog
used in this task, whether it is one already provided in this subject section or an
alternative one that you wish to use, as some blogs allow unmoderated comments to be
posted and so should be avoided.
Research Activity
Since the very early days of the Internet users have been able to communicate and
collaborate online by using Internet forums, newsgroups and message boards. Your
students may have used some of these, but are more likely to have contributed their
thoughts to weblogs or blogs. As an introduction to this activity, ask your students to
name any blogs that they are familiar with or that they have contributed to.
Explain the following summary to your students. Blogging is an example of the Big Idea
of Collaboration because when you post to a blog and your post is commented upon by
readers you can achieve a common goal. The majority of high-profile collaborative blogs
are based around a single unifying theme, such as politics or technology, although many
are designed to gauge readers’ opinions about films, music and fashion and to share
different views, developing a shared understanding and consensus of the topics being
discussed.
Below are four examples of blogs, each one designed to share information with its
readers and for its readers to collaborate by adding their own thoughts. You can add to
this list with examples of your own from the estimated 250 million blogs found on the
Web (at the time of writing). Allow your students time to view each of the blogs and get
them to think about the following:
 What is the purpose of the blog and who is its intended audience?
 Do any comments that have been posted add extra information?
 Which of the blogs is the best for developing understanding or achieving a
common goal?
http://indemusicnews.com
This is the blog of Independent Music News, an indie music website.
http://bookwrap.edublogs.org
These are the books blog pages of the Edublogs.org website, which offers blogging for
teachers and students in an easy-to-access format.
http://englishinguiabasico.wordpress.com
This is a blog written by the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Santa María de Guía on Gran
Canaria to help students who are learning English.
http://healthfoodlover.com/hfl
This is the blog of a health food lover which started as the author’s way to share healthy
recipes and tips. It now also aims to provide quality health and nutrition information.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
Take feedback from your students and summarise how creating a blog can allow a group
with the same interests to share ideas. By collaborating online, sharing thoughts and
opinions, the group is able to add to their knowledge and achieve the common goal of a
greater awareness of the topic that has been posted.
Recording Activity
The recording activity develops the Big Idea of Collaboration by using two specific
websites. You are going to demonstrate to your students one way of using an online tool
to do this. Your students respond to a ‘talkgroup’ created in Voxopop, then create their
own for others to contribute to (www.voxopop.com; see Figure 1 below for a screenshot
of the Voxopop home page).
Fig. 1: Screenshot of the home page of Voxopop
This Web-based audio tool enables users to record a message, discussion point or
narrative and for others to respond to it. It allows teachers and students to build up
threaded audio discussions like those found on a text-based bulletin board.
You need to register and create your own profile with an introductory message before
you can join and add to someone else’s talkgroup or create your own. Once you have
joined a talkgroup you can subscribe to it so that you are automatically updated when
new comments are added. Figure 2 below shows the Voxopop sign-up page.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
Fig. 2: Screenshot of the sign-up page for Voxopop talkgroups
To start a talkgroup login, define the aim and purpose of your audio clip, set the access
levels and then record yourself. To share the talkgroup with your students, simply share
the URL with them or invite them by email to contribute. Some suggestions of how to
use this with your students include:
 Discussion – record a contentious statement, e.g. “Facebook should be banned.”
and ask your students to respond
 Narrative – record the first sentence of a narrative, ask your students to listen and
add a sentence each to it
Ask your students to respond to your talkgroup and give them time to do so. The next
step is to share the contributions that individual students have made to the original post.
Log on to your talkgroup and share the new contributions with the whole class.
The final instruction is for your students to think of their own idea for a talkgroup, create
their own accounts in Voxopop and record them. They can then invite their peers to
contribute to the discussions. Both of the examples above allow your students to achieve
a common goal by collaborating. The first allows for a range of opinions to be captured
in order for a balanced argument to be presented, which a student can develop in
individual follow-up work, and the second can contribute to a piece of writing which
seeks to develop your students’ awareness of a literary genre.
The second example to demonstrate is Writeboard (http://writeboard.com). This is
another example of a collaborative tool that can be used for users to contribute to, edit
and amend text. It also allows for changes to be tracked and compared. The home page of
Writeboard is shown in Figure 3 below.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
Fig. 3: Screenshot of the Writeboard home page
You need to create the beginning of a narrative that you want your students to continue.
You could invite your students to contribute to the narrative before this activity so that
you can demonstrate how Writeboard works during the recording activity, or allow your
students to contribute to the story online as part of a homework task. The plenary needs
to relate back to the Big Idea of Collaboration and say that ICT can help achieve a
common goal by providing people with the ability to work as a team and share ideas.
[Verbal-Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical Intelligences]
ICT Task 3
Learning Goals 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.6, 4.8
Research Activity
The third part of this subject section focuses on how social bookmarking sites such as
Delicious (www.delicious.com) enable users to collaborate and benefit from one
another’s experience in surfing the Web and saving their favourite pages. Figure 4 shows
the Delicious home page. You may wish to view a few of the many video clips found on
YouTube about how Delicious works and how it can be used in the classroom. Some of
these are listed below.
(To watch a YouTube video in safe mode, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Safety mode: Off’, then select the ‘On’
option)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGXElviSRXM
YouTube video clip featuring the Getting Started with Del.icio.us tutorial which explains
how teachers and students can benefit from the many features of this social bookmarking
site.
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1pOsYjCvE8
YouTube video clip featuring the Using Del.icio.us tutorial and guide to using Delicious
in the classroom.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLoWw5J4Y_Q&feature=related
YouTube video clip featuring a tutorial introducing users and viewers to the Delicious
social bookmarking website.
To establish what impact the use of a social bookmarking site can have, your students
research a topic and save their favourites individually. Then, you should show them how
subscribing to a social bookmarking site can save time and allow users to collaborate.
Decide on a topic for your students to research and ask them to find the best websites
they can on the topic and add them to their favourites. You need to have researched the
topic yourself and subscribed to Delicious so that you can demonstrate its power later.
After 15 minutes ask your class how many websites they have found and to give
examples of the best ones. Next, ask how everyone could share the websites they have
found with everyone else in the class. Their answers may include exporting bookmarks
and mailing them to each other as well as more ingenious methods. The process of social
bookmarking allows collaboration to happen between teachers or classes in other schools,
working together on projects to achieve common goals, i.e. research tasks trying to
determine the best websites for finding information about a particular theme.
Fig. 4: Screenshot of the Delicious home page
Remind your students that they briefly explored social bookmarking in ICT Task 1.
Introduce them to Delicious and demonstrate how it works with the account that you
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
have created for yourself, covering the following:




How to bookmark
How to use tags
How to see what other people have bookmarked
How to add a user to a network
Your students must now create their own Delicious accounts, import their
favourites/bookmarks, share their Delicious account names and add each other to their
networks. As the number of members of a network grows so does the number of websites
dedicated to the topic they have been researching. In future, if you or one of your
students tag a site to a member of your network using network tags, a message is going to
appear in their inbox which can be saved or deleted.
Recording Activity
For the recording activity, your students are going to produce a screencast of their own
user guide to Delicious that meets the following success criteria:





It must describe why using a social bookmarking tool helps people to collaborate
It must show how bookmarks are added
It must explain how to access the profiles of other users
It must show how to add tags to bookmarks
It must be up to 4 minutes long
Allow enough time for your students to sign up to free accounts with a screencasting
website such as Screencast (www.screencast.com) or Screencast-O-Matic
(www.screencast-o-matic.com; see Figure 5 below for a screenshot of the home page).
Once completed, your students can save their recordings to their My Documents area or
to a space on a network drive. The final activity is to evaluate chosen screencasts against
the success criteria outlined above.
Fig. 5: Screenshot of the home page of Screencast-O-Matic
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
Focus on the Big Idea of Collaboration before finishing by saying that using social
bookmarking as a research tool has allowed your students to work towards a common
goal in an organised and efficient way.
[Logical-Mathematical, Interpersonal Intelligences]
ICT Task 4
Learning Goals 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.13
Research Activity
The final part of this subject section concentrates on the collaborative potential of wikis.
A ‘wiki’ (Hawaiian for ‘quick’) is an online shared space for composition. Normally,
anyone with access can edit a wiki. You need to create a wiki with Wikispaces for your
students to collaborate on for the recording activity. There are many tutorials on how to
set up a class wiki available on YouTube, e.g. this introduction to a class wiki using
Wikispaces (www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NRbbskf3cA). You need to decide whether
each student has their own page to record their work or whether your students can
contribute to individual pages.
The most famous wiki of all is of course Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) and you are
going to begin with this wiki. Show Wikipedia and then ask your students to use it to
search for an entry for your town/city or school. Ask your students how the entries on
Wikipedia are made. Explore their awareness of how entries in Wikipedia can be
changed or edited. Ask them to think about how this is different from an encyclopaedia
or other reference book. Finally get them to comment on how Wikipedia allows users to
collaborate and what the advantages and disadvantages of this might be.
The remainder of the research activity is intended for your students to explore the
different ways that wikis are used in schools.
The online presentation resource SlideShare (www.slideshare.net) can be used to
compile a list of examples. Many more examples can be found at the Educational Wikis
website (http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis).
Your students should explore each of the wikis listed below and consider their different
characteristics.
http://votw.wikispaces.com
The Voices of the World wiki project started as an eTwinning project to connect children
in Europe using their voice and their own language.
http://comparinghemispheres.wikispaces.com
The Comparing Hemisphere wiki started as a question. During a simple discussion about
where the authors live (the Northern Hemisphere) and a look at the hemispheres on a
map, students claimed they had heard that water in a whirlpool spins in the opposite
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
direction in the Southern Hemisphere. This simple question led to more questions and
finding the answer to this question and others is how the wiki developed.
http://horizonproject2008.wikispaces.com/Teams
The Horizon Project 2008 is the sister project to the Flat Classroom Project. The Horizon
2008 Report had its trends ‘student-sourced’ as students from around the world analysed
and compiled information, and shared their predications based on the report in a
‘Wikinomics’ style mass collaboration.
http://monsonclassroom.wikispaces.com
Each month of the school year, Mr Monson’s Grade 5 Classroom wiki puts forward a
question for its world audience to answer. The goal is to reach at least 1,000 answers for
each month of the school year. The wiki is used to share thoughts, get ideas for writing,
learn geography from around the world, collaborate with others and read the thoughts of
others.
http://collaborativetales.wikispaces.com
The Collaborative Stories wiki contains collaborative stories written by a group of Year 8
students (aged 12 and 13) from Bucklands Beach Intermediate School, Auckland, New
Zealand. Students of the school work in groups of three or four and decide on the genre,
setting, characters and plot of the stories.
http://hauora.pbworks.com/w/page/17046941/FrontPage
Groups using this wiki are asked to produce a booklet about Hauora (well-being) that is
then going to be sent home for them to share with families and friends. Each person in
the group takes a different aspect of well-being to research and then makes a page for the
booklet. Then, the information in the booklet can be used to see if there are areas where
group members could make some positive changes.
http://greecewebquest.pbworks.com/w/page/24351403/FrontPage
The Greece WebQuest wiki focuses on the world of Ancient Greece.
http://teambmakingadifference.wikispaces.com
The Team B Making a Difference wiki is the student human rights wiki of Team B at
Bucklands Beach Intermediate School, Auckland, New Zealand.
http://codeblue.wikispaces.com
The Code Blue wiki provides a useful range of websites dealing with body systems and
related medical websites.
http://hobbitalk.wikispaces.com
Hobbitalk is a wiki dedicated to JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
http://learningrox.wikispaces.com/Book+Reviews
This is a wiki dedicated to book reviews. Contributors need to use the name of the book
as the title, then the author’s name, describe the storyline, say who might be interested in
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
reading it and give it a rating out of 10.
http://poetryinroom5.wikispaces.com
This poetry wiki contains an anthology of poems by students in room 5.
http://adamsnews.wikispaces.com
The Adams News wiki showcases news and articles of interest for Adams Middle
School, Redondo Beach, California, USA.
Recording Activity
In pairs, ask your students to categorise the list of wikis listed at the end of the research
activity for this task into groups and take feedback to see whether they have gained an
awareness of the different uses.
Purpose of the wiki
Wiki’s URL
Collaborative project
Resource site for topic
Novel study wiki
Classroom website
WebQuest
Shared learning
To finish the task, introduce your students to the class wiki you have made. They are
going to use the wiki to record what they have learned in this subject section about the
Big Idea of Collaboration with ICT. Remind your students before they begin this activity
that collaboration is when people work together to achieve a common goal and that they
have seen this many times during this subject section. Your students need to review the
work that they have completed during the session and prepare a draft of what they intend
to record. Allow time for your students to contribute to the wiki. They may wish to
include screenshots of the websites they have encountered and they may require help in
doing this.
The plenary to this task is an opportunity to peer assess student contributions to the wiki,
which interestingly is a collaborative piece about collaboration using ICT. You may wish
to use the wiki again in further ICT sessions to allow your students to collaborate on what
they have learned.
[Naturalist Intelligence]
ICT
Theme: Collaboration
ICT Journaling Questions
What do you think are the benefits of collaborating with others using ICT?
Why do so many people think that Wikipedia is not as reliable for finding out
information compared with using traditional sources like books, newspapers and original
research?
How will the software and websites that have allowed you to collaborate in this subject
section help you in other subjects that you are studying at the moment?