About
What is CollabKit?
CollabKit is an online collaborative learning engine for school-age children, parents and educators. It is currently in the early development stage, with an expected launch date in late 2012. CollabKit will be a free, open, online and mobile platform for individual and group projects. It will feature a variety of tools to allow a community of K-12 educators and others to contribute relevant subject material in multi-media formats, including text, audio and video. CollabKit will be available to students worldwide in multiple languages.
Why now?
Information overload is outpacing our traditional learning models. The Internet provides seemingly endless opportunities for learning, but few gathering places for children to develop projects together in a smart sophisticated way.
Today, when students need to work as a team, they utilize a variety of 20th and 21st Century tools: land-line and mobile phones, in-person meet-ups, PCs, Macs, iPads, Facebook chat, Powerpoint and Google docs. For research, they use Wikipedia and Google, in addition to their school or local libraries. Each of these tools contains one or more valuable components. CollabKit will provide students with these necessary components, all in one place.
Today, all classrooms are not created equal. Some children have access to top-of-the-line technology and media, and receive one-on-one attention from high quality educators. Other children, in fact most children, don’t have the luxury of tools nor attention. CollabKit will help level the playing field and provide all children with the opportunity to create and learn.
What makes CollabKit unique is that its engine relies on knowledge sharing: the compelling component behind successful social media/on-line concepts such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and Google docs. This knowledge sharing will be applied to the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of educational content. Through strategic partnerships, CollabKit will feature audio, video, text, multimedia and interactive content which will allow students to develop high quality, personalized school projects.
Bottom line
In short, CollabKit will make it easier for students to do what they are already doing. Kids will be able to write, edit and design projects, all while utilizing modern intuitive software. All for free. Best of all, like Wikipedia, CollabKit’s interface will be open source, meaning that students will be able to customize the platform, thereby creating their own personalized educational process.
By attracting an open community of users and contributors (e.g. teachers, students, parents, innovators, academic and research institutions, administrators and innovators), CollabKit will become a significant online resource. The engine could be used as a primary source of education, a supplementary resource to existing instruction/curricula or as general reference. With learning formats spanning standard text to video to augmented reality formats, the potential is limitless for content providers and users.