The Virtual School: An integrated collaborative environment for the classroom

A significant opportunity presented by the availability of high-speed network access in the classroom is the ability to collaborate with remote students and mentors. To be successful, however, the design of tools to support collaborative activities must consider the unique constraints of the classroom. In this paper we discuss these constraints and overview the Virtual School, a collaborative environment developed by the Learning in Networked Communities (LiNC) project at Virginia Tech. We describe the types of collaborative activities for which the Virtual School has been used, the features of the environment designed to address the constraints of the classroom, and experiences with using the environment for a variety of cross-age and cross-school collaborative projects in six classrooms over several school years.