Information and communication technology (ICT) empowers collaborative learning in many aspects, since it facilitates the exchange of information, knowledge and dialogue among students, facilitating access to a large amount of shared information, which allows them to know what is referred to the educational contents, the emotional aspects of education itself, perceptions, visions, opinions, emotions, among others.
It should be noted that, nowadays, collaborative learning is a teaching - learning proposal based on the concepts of cooperation, teamwork, communication, and is also based on the enhancement of the student 's emotional intelligence for proper educational and personal development. . The basis of collaborative learning is based on the constructivist approach that postulates that knowledge is discovered by the students themselves, transforming it into concepts with which they can relate, and reform the experiences as they progress in their learning process.
There are many technological elements, available to teachers, which promotes collaborative learning, among which are:
Collaborative Environments:
- Moodle: A platform for online course management that is based on a constructivist pedagogy. This platform is open source, and helps educators create online learning communities.
- Blogs or Weblogs: They serve as support for e-Learning, establish an informal communication channel between the teacher and students, in addition, they serve both in-person education and distance education.
Resources in the Cloud:
- Dropbox: Allows you to create folders and upload files to them. These folders can be shared by invitation through email address to other users, and all users can upload files in common to those folders.
- Google Drive: It is an excellent tool for manipulating files in a collaborative way and the most interesting thing is that at the same time those who have access permission can make modifications to the file by simultaneously visualizing the actions of the different connected users.
In short, if as research teachers we use information and communication technology (ICT) as a support to achieve a collaborative learning in students and understand that learning is a social process of knowledge construction in a collaborative way, we would strengthen in them, the feeling of solidarity and responsibility, we would diminish the feeling of isolation, allow them to be an active part of their learning, we would promote the shared construction of knowledge and, most importantly, the necessary socialization of the student.