Collboard: Fostering new media literacies in the classroom through collaborative problem solving supported by digital pens and interactive whiteboards

Education systems worldwide must strive to support the teaching of a set of New Media Literacies (NMLs). These literacies respond to the need for educating human capital within participatory cultures in a highly technologized world. In this paper, we present Collboard, a constructivist problem solving activity for fostering the development of specific NMLs in classrooms: collective intelligence, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation. Collboard encompasses successive individual and collaborative work phases that prompt active student participation and engagement. It integrates digitally augmented appliances, namely, digital pens as a means to support individual work, and interactive whiteboards as a collaborative knowledge construction space. We report on the conceptual design of Collboard, its different technological and software components, as well as our findings from experiences we conducted in a Swedish school with 12 students from a 7th grade maths class. Findings from the experience provide an indication that Collboard can be well integrated in classroom teaching, and that it can foster the development of collective intelligence, distributed cognition and transmedia navigation in different knowledge domains.

► A problem solving activity for fostering new media literacies in classrooms.
► Integration of digital pens and interactive whiteboards in classrooms.
► An exploratory study was conducted involving 7th grade students and teachers.
► The study indicates that the activity may be integrated in classroom teaching.