Collboard: supporting new media literacies and collaborative learning using digital pens and interactive whiteboards

The high-penetration of information and communication technologies in our daily activities renews the question about the type of skills learners need to develop on the 21st century. Seeking to foster the development of new media literacies skills in the classroom, we developed Collboard. The Collboard approach combines a pedagogical rationale based on a collaborative strategy aiming at solving open-ended tasks and a technological workflow that incorporates the notion of seamless interactions across different kind of media. Collboard integrates digital pens to support individual work and interactive whiteboards as a collaborative knowledge construction space. We report on the conception of Collboard, its different technological and software components, as well as our initial findings from the experiences we conducted in a Swedish school with 7th grade students in the field of mathematics. Our qualitative observations and initial results provide some indications that this type of learning environments can support the development of new media literacies skills such as collective intelligence, distributed cognition, transmedia navigation and visualization.