Collaborative Environments are online spaces that focus on helping people to collaborate and work together in groups no matter where they are located.
Collaborative Learning is a very effective tool in K-12 education. Psychologists John Dewey and Lev Vgotsky conducted many studies in the mid 1900's showing that students benefit from collaboration and concluded that educators should incorporate small groups into the teaching process. In 1996, Robert Slavin (an American Psychologist) said that collaboration in the classroom was "one of the great success stories in the history of educational research."
Cloud Based Collaborative Learning really took off when computers and mobile devices with internet capabilities became accessible for educators to incorporate into their lessons. Students are encouraged to collaborate with peers (near and far) through threaded discussions, blogs, wikis, social media, etc. Teachers are also able to collaborate with other teachers or mentors around the world when planning curriculum or to get ideas.
Very early moves into cloud collaboration were made by Amazon Web services in 2006. Cloud computing began to take off in 2007 when Google moved part of its email service to a public cloud. Soon after, IBM and Microsoft did the same which caused cloud collaboration to evolve.
Google Drive is a popular cloud based file storage and synchronization service provided by Google. It was released in 2012 and it enables file sharing, cloud storage and collaborative editing.
