Collaborative Writing in a Computer-integrated Classroom for Early Learning

This paper describes a collaborative experiment with a special software application supporting the acquisition of initial reading and writing skills embedded in a computer-integrated environment for young children. The NIMIS project has set up three Computer-integrated Classrooms across Europe with appropriate “roomware” environments, i.e. furniture, hardware and software to support early learning. Here, we present a collaborative writing task facilitated by a shared workspace system, that has been evaluated with first graders using one of the software applications T (Today’s Talking Typewriter). Mixed pairs of children used the shared workspace provided by the application to perform a typical first graders writing task collaboratively. The speciality of this experiment lies in the study of domain-specific collaboration in a rich real-world learning environment.