Collaboration

Collaboration
The cLc presents students with access to authenticated audiences drawn from within their own class, the wider school community, their family, friends and learners and experts drawn from different communities around the world. Access to diverse audiences presents unique opportunities for authentic learning, authentic assessment and raised individual expectations when called upon to read, write, speak, and listen or when presenting audience-specific information such as multimedia presentations, podcasts, forums or blogs. Collaboration is at the heart of the cLc as students are equipped to negotiate, construct, and co-construct knowledge in partnership with an equally wide and diverse set of collaborators, allowing students to own the learning process, to engage in deep learning, critical thinking and affording all learners access to global perspectives in communities where they have a voice and a capacity to exercise choice.

Authenticated access to a suite of familiar social networking tools contained within safe and secure learning communities allowing students and teachers to establish authentic learning relationships with approved partners within the same class or grade or even with partners and audiences drawn from a global UniServity community of 3000 schools with 1.5 million active members drawn from 21 countries around the world.

Access to a rich community of learners with different skills, viewpoints, languages and backgrounds can become the most useful resource in your classroom as your students collaborate in discussions, share tasks, review and assess each other's work, maintain learning blogs, construct and co-construct knowledge, arriving at a shared understanding and deep learning in alignment with core skills and standards.

ePortfolio
"Even if social-networking sites (like MySpace and Facebook) are effectively blocked in schools, most students will still access them. To think that simple Internet filters will eliminate or even minimize the real risks associated with social networking is a dangerous misconception. It will take educating students about the appropriate use of Web 2.0 to genuinely protect them."

The UniServity cLc ePortfolio places the student at the centre of the learning process. It promotes teaching and learning practice that encourages reflection, creativity and skill development, and acknowledges emerging tools and technologies that our ‘Facebook and MySpace Generation' of students like to use. Such practice encourages the capturing of evidence of processes and outcomes ‘as they happen' and scaffolds and values reflection in many forms. It encourages feedback and collaboration beyond institutional boundaries, and understands the various audiences for ePortfolios and collaborates with them to meet their needs as well as those of the individual the learner.

The cLc permits and encourages the expansion of learning extended into home and into the broader community whilst fostering the "development of virtual relationships among learners'.