As a classroom teacher and now a technology instructor, I have always modeled what I wanted my students or co-workers to do.  To me, everyone from 9th graders to 25 year teaching veterans are benefited by actually seeing what they are to do, before beginning on their own.  This holds true for teaching 21st Century Skills in the classroom.

One of these skills is collaboration.  If you've read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, and read many of the other articles and blogs about the 21st Century workforce, then you know how important it is for today's students to collaborate with each other synchronously and asynchronously, in the classroom or across the globe.

But as I said, teachers should model 21st century collaboration before expecting their students to do it.  There are many ways you can do this, but I'll give three quick examples:

Diigo: Diigo is a social bookmarking web site that does a lot more than del.icio.us, though del.icio.us is still useful and works with Diigo.  Here is what Diigo does:

First, register to the site like you would with any social bookmarking site and then download the toolbar extension.  The first thing you can do with Diigo is bookmark websites you like rather than using your IE or Firefox browser.  This means, you can get to your bookmarks no matter what computer you are using since your sites are saved online rather than on a single computer.  Furthermore, you can set up Diigo so that if you bookmark a site, it will send that info to your del.icio.us account automatically.  Second, you can belong to or create groups.  For example, I belong to 6 groups, mostly about instructional technology or geocaching.  In these groups, you can meet other people with similar interests.  Third, Diigo allows you to actually highlight web pages and leave comments directly on a web site.  Then, other Diigo users who happen upon the site you marked up can see what you wrote.  Last, and the best part that merges the first three functions, is that you can set up Diigo to e-mail you daily when a member of a group you belong to bookmarks or highlights the Internet.  That way, you can quickly decide if you want to research other ideas or web sites that a stranger of similar interests thought was important.

I would suggest you and your team of teachers register for Diigo accounts, create your own group, and then highlight and bookmark the web anytime you find something you think will help your team.  You may not be able to get your students to use Diigo in your classroom, but understanding how easy it is for strangers over the Internet to collaborate can give you other ideas of collaboration in the classroom for your students.

Wikis: The most well known wiki is wikipedia, which is a good and bad thing.  Bad, because since many people don't trust wikipedia, they then shy away from creating their own wikipage.  There are many free wiki sites and near-wikis teachers can easily use to help collaborate.  Some are: PBWiki, Wikispaces for Teachers, and WetPaint.

With a wiki, a teacher can easily post lesson plan ideas, share the site, and have other teachers edit or add lesson plan ideas to the site.  It can be organized by textbook chapter, state standards, or whatever works best for your team. 

The best part of this, is once you start understanding how a wiki works,  you can have your students create classroom wikis.  Imagine having your students create a video supplement to your science textbook, or a current events wiki that matches your government textbook.

Google Documents: Here's another great tool for a team of teachers to use, learn the applications, and then have students do in the classroom.  Google Docs is online productivity webware and all you need to do is register for a free Google account.  It has word processing, a spreadsheet, a presenter (like PowerPoint), and forms that work with the spreadsheet.  You can use these tools just like you do with Microsoft or similar products and even save documents as a .doc or .ppt. 

With Google Documents, teachers can collaborate on a common syllabus, test, worksheet, whatever.  Students can then co-write essays, peer edit, gather data with students in the classroom or from across the globe.

These documents are online, but they can be private, or with an e-mail address, you can add collaborators.  So ensuring that everyone has an e-mail address might be the hard part to get students to collaborate with Google Docs.  Plan ahead.

In summary, Diigo, Wikis, and Google Docs are all free Web 2.0 tools you can use for your team at school, and then turn into an instructional tool for the classroom. 

If you've used any of these in your team or with students, please leave a comment below on what you did: a quick 4th example of online collaboration!

Mike is responsible for implementing 21st Century Skills and technology into his high school in HCPS, a district with a one-to-one laptop program. Mike was a classroom teacher for 10 years before becoming an ITRT in 2005 and was once Teacher of the Year for King William County Schools and Teacher of the Year for Varina High School. He is also the proud father of two daughters and writes to a number of other blogs.

Mike has a Bachelors Degree in History and a Masters in Teaching from Virginia Commonwealth University where he is also an adjunct professor teaching Advanced Computer Applications in the Classroom. He also has a Post-Masters Degree in Administration from VCU.

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