Collaborative Technology

Collaborative Technology Ken Koltun-Fromm and Miriam Pallant Handing technology off to students distances their education from the more vibrant, co-creative process of active learning in the classroom. But when students and teachers engage technology collaboratively, a sense of communal involvement and commitment energizes the learning environment and produces strong pedagogical results. For this presentation, we offer various strategies and concrete examples of our collaborative involvements with technology in the classroom: deploying iPads for active student content creation, using TEI markup software to develop close reading skills, and creating a visual syllabus with Prezi as a final student paper. Each of these projects involve close teacher/student and student/student collaborations, advancing pedagogical strategies and cultivating student interactive engagement. But each technology has its limitations, and requires creatively adapting classroom use to fit designed learning goals. When students fail to understand the value and benefit of the technological medium, they tend to disengage from and so drastically alter the learning process. Collaborative technology is an active, pedagogical process that develops a more egalitarian classroom: leveling the playing field, as it were, by fostering collaboration among verbal students and those less inclined to participate in more traditional ways. Students learn from and with each other in a communal, engaged learning environment