Collaboration is an essential element in designing a powerful learning environment for schools. When designed properly, a collaborative network will cultivate relationships that thrive on the exchange and formation of knowledge. An effective platform will provide students and teachers the opportunity to reflect, discuss, agree, debate and challenge their existing knowledge. How is collaboration designed?

Purpose

Purpose can guide decision making. It is the motivation to improve. It is why you take action. It gives meaning to your actions. Collaboration will not exist without a meaningful purpose.

When students are involved in academic goal setting they take ownership of their education. Standards based goal setting gives students and teachers a clear picture of where they currently stand and where they need to be. Once they understand what needs to be learned, the standards and goals have meaning. It gives them a purpose.

Platform

Collaboration occurs through communication. The proper platform will allow individuals or groups to interact. Whether it is a face-to-face conversation or an online application, there needs to be a vehicle for collaboration to occur.

Like doctors practice medicine and educators practice teaching, we at Schoolbinder practice collaboration. Schoolbinder was developed to allow users to easily set multiple goals for multiple people. That is the easy part. Managing the setting, monitoring, and approval of hundreds of goals, while actively collaborating with hundreds of users, is the hard part. Schoolbinder is built around a collaboration framework. We keep in constant communication with the users and actively make changes to the interface. Eventually the user interface disappears and the collaboration becomes natural.

Schoolbinder is creating a scalable collaboration application that will allow students and teachers to build a strong personal learning-network of users that will work together to collectively increase their knowledge. It is a learning community where knowledge grows exponentially.