Collaborative Virtual Classroom

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The present work focuses on Google App Engine discussing its use as .... are supported by windows and android tablets too and can support lessons such as art ...
Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

Collaborative Virtual Classroom A perspective view of a Collaborative Virtual Classroom via Google App Engine Atsalaki Xanthoula Department of Applied Informatics and Multimedia Technological Educational Institute of Crete Heraklion,Crete,Greece [email protected]

Abstract —Τhe use of virtual worlds for supporting education is widespread and increasing. One application of prime interest is education as evidenced by numerous studies. The present study will use Google App Engine to show how it can become a powerful collaborative tool of a great value in the hands of the educators and how can it be used to efficiently create a collaborative virtual classroom . A first simple scenario with Google Docs will be tested and the results will be discussed. Keywords—Virtual worlds; Google App Engine; Collaborative virtual classroom

1. INTRODUCTION The ways of obtaining knowledge and getting across with people have changed with becoming widespread of new communication and informatics technologies. Service and manufacturing sectors have started to get and use these technologies. Education sector has been included in this rapid development, and many researches have been done on contribution of new communication and informatics technologies on education [1]. So we have moved on from the traditional classroom to the virtual classroom as the one described in Aslım-Yetiş work, “Virtual classroom site in French written expression lesson: a practice sample” [1]. The virtual classroom, a synchronous form of elearning has been embraced by many organizations in their attempt to promote workforce learning while trying to cut travel time and costs associated with face to face instructorled training. However many of those responsible for creating and implementing the virtual classroom are new to this form of multimedia learning and as such fall into the trap assuming that synchronous classrooms are simply recreations of a traditional classroom settings. How can we make sure that participants paying attention and actually detaining the materials that we are covering, planning and facilitating frequent and relevant interactions and forming what we call a collaborative virtual classroom? What features of this collaborative environment can be of great value in education? These form some of the general questions being discussed in this essay.

The present work focuses on Google App Engine discussing its use as digital medium for building a collaborative virtual classroom. In addition, it elaborates some features such as word clouding and their practical application in learning contexts. What's the added value from such an implementation to the learning process? What are the benefits and how can Google App Engine and especially Google Docs can be used efficiently in the implementation of a collaborative virtual classroom? These are some questions that will be clarified and give more feed for future work in areas such as Tag Clouding in Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments like the one that Google App Engine is offering. The structure of the paper is the following: Section II presents an analysis of the concerned theoretical threads that influence this study. Section III outlines Google App Engine focusing on some distinct features that could be used to create a real-time efficient collaborative virtual classroom. Section IV illustrates an educational scenario that entails Google Docs and specifically World Tag Clouding, Revision History and a Google app specifically created for this purpose. Section V discusses future work while section VI consolidates our conclusions and highlights the great value that students and teachers can gain by using transformative technologies such as Google App Engine to create a RealTime Collaborative Virtual Classroom. 2. THEORETICAL LINKS AND MOTIVATION A. Virtual Worlds and Virtual Teams The use of virtual worlds for supporting education is widespread and increasing [2]. There are various studies on virtual world’s usage in education. Virtual worlds are mainly used for collaborative or simulation based education [3]. In his work Duncan Miller, “A taxonomy of virtual world’s usage in education”, reviews 100 papers from the literature that shows how the traditional classroom shifts into a virtual classroom. In Milosevic's work “Facebook as virtual classroom – Social networking in learning and teaching among Serbian students” 238 students from the University in Belgrade (Serbia) participated in a study that SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) was applied and tested based on adequate fit index. There has been an evaluation of measurement models and structural model and the analysis 1 | Page

1st individual assignment for ‘Computer supported collaboration’, Summer semester 2014-2015

Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

showed that use of Facebook as virtual classroom has a goal for students, improving the quality of the education process and widening quantum of knowledge [4]. Virtual teams are two or more persons who are typically geographically dispersed and work interdependently toward common goals using technology to communicate and collaborate across time and space [5]. In virtual teams, knowledge sharing is positively related with job effectiveness (Lin, 2011) and perceived job effectiveness (Lin, Wang, Tsai, & Hsu, 2010).To date, the foundation for the majority of definitions is the notion that VTs are functioning teams that rely on technology-mediated communication while crossing several different boundaries [2]. B. Virtual Classroom and Digital Footprints A virtual classroom is an online learning environment that can be web-based and accessed through a portal or software-based and require a downloadable executable file. Just like in a real-world classroom, a student in a virtual classroom participates in synchronous instruction, which means that the teacher and students are logged into the virtual learning environment at the same time [6]. The literature offers several definitions and structural models for building Virtual Classrooms with a variety of technologies. Nonetheless, one area that remains relatively unexplored relates to the digital footprints of participants in virtual classrooms. A digital footprint (Figure 1), sometimes called a digital dossier or digital trace or digital identity, is the body of data that exists as a result of an individual’s actions and communications online. Data in digital footprints can impact an individual’s career and personal relationships. It can also lead to security vulnerabilities, for example by providing details that enable identity theft. The ‘digital identity’ refers to the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the relation between people's experience of their own identity and the identity as shaped by others in the cyberspace [7]. A person’s digital footprint is relatively permanent and it is very difficult to eradicate data traces once they become public. Other people might copy or share them and the person who originally posted them has little control over the matter. For that reason, a major focus of digital footprint management is limiting the amount of data created in the first place and being judicious about what data you make available online. Thus, Digital footprint management (DFM) is an approach to controlling the amount and types of electronic data existing about a particular individual that can in some way be traced back to them.

Figure 1. Digital Footprint Collaboration Environments A collaboration environment is an environment in which a virtual team do their work. Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers. There is persuasive evidence that cooperative teams achieve at higher levels of thought and retain information longer than learners who work quietly as individuals [8]. Further evidence comes from Samuel Totten (1991), who claims: The shared learning gives learners an opportunity to engage in discussion, take responsibility for their own learning, and thus become critical thinkers. Proponents of Collaborative Learning claim that the active exchange of ideas within small groups not only increases interest among the participants but also promotes critical thinking (Gokhale, A.A., 1995) [9]. Alina Crian and Roxana Enache in their study concluded that the increase of the learning process efficiency is a problem assiduously followed by teachers. Their research clearly proves that the work tasks through collaboration and the formation of certain virtual classes/groups increase the efficiency of the learning process through the development of competencies requested by different fields. Not only the student performances were increased but also their competencies were developed and diversified [10]. Nic Finelli, a GCT from School District Five of Lexington and Richland Counties, experienced the benefits of faculty collaboration on a letter to the school board, recalling that “More than 20 faculty members contributed to the letter on their own time, without having to meet or stay around before or after school.” Shifting collaboration to an online environment also opens up a new set of document contributors. Students from different classes, different schools, anywhere in the world, can work together on assignments by sharing secure access privileges. “More than 40 students worked together, editing one spreadsheet,” explains Millburn High School’s Michelle Blakley. “This let students from different classes work together, so that everyone was involved in the work” [11]. C.

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Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

D.

Word Tag Clouds A word tag cloud is a special visualization of text in which the more frequently used words are effectively highlighted by occupying more prominence in the representation. Grammatical words and non-frequent words are hidden so that the resultant representation cleanly shows the most frequently occurring words of importance”. In McNaught’s and Lamp’s work Using Wordle as a Supplementary Research Tool the two experiences in using Wordle to inform research have led them to suggest that word clouds can be a useful research tool to aid educational research. They have demonstrated that they can allow researchers to quickly visualize some general patterns in text. In the research setting, these texts are likely to be informants’ spoken (transcribed) and written responses. The visualization allow researchers to grasp the common themes in the text, and sometimes even to find out main differences between sets of responses [12]. There are a number of online free tools that will create word clouds including Wordle, TagCrowd, ToCloud, and Google’s Tag Cloud Generator. 3. USE GOOGLE APP ENGINE TO CREATE A COLLABORATIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that lets someone build and run applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as one’s traffic and data storage needs change. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain, you simply upload the application and it’s ready to go. For our purposes, it is worth briefly reviewing some of the tools of Google App Engine intended Teachers and Students to make Collaborative Virtual Classrooms. A. Suite of tools Google Docs. They make collaborating as easy as creating. You can use a google doc to collaborate on lesson planning. All the students of a classroom can work at the same time in the lesson planning doc editing it, making comments all together at the same time and they can watch who is doing or commenting what. This is real time collaboration. Everyone is on the same page, and that page is automatically stored in the cloud. You can also use google docs list as a shared lesson repository. There are also the google docs add-ons, that offers you an amazing variety of things you can do while you editing a doc using Google docs ,such as consistency checker that Checks consistency of formal documents to help get articles and reports accepted and deliver winning proposals and bid documents, plantUML gizmo that creates and updates UML diagrams easily and fast in real time in your Google Docs via PlantUML(a text-based diagramming tool that uses Graphviz), Pdf Filer with which you can open any Google Doc as a PDF, and instantly edit, sign, or send your document with PDFfiller's powerful

annotation and export tools, Kaizena Mini (Highlight and speak instead of typing, track skills so students know what to improve, avoid repeating yourself with quick links), Bible Verse that Bible Verse allows you to search the Bible and insert verses into your Google Document(for a theological lesson), VexTab music notation with which you can add music notation, drum notation, and guitar tab to your documents using the VexTab language, various Gliffy diagrams, draw.io, LucididChart for drawing flowcharts, mockups, UML, wireframes, diagrams of any type, mind maps and more by working together in real time with your team or students. Web-based Google Docs safely stores documents online, making them accessible to authorized users from any computer or mobile device. Teaching and learning doesn’t need to stop when the bell rings, with Google Docs, writing, and online collaboration, can happen anytime. Finally, Google Docs lets users invite others to work on the same document at the same time, without the hassle of attaching and sending documents. Sharing privileges ensure access by only the right people or groups, and allow either editing or read-only access. Google Forms - You can use Google Forms to give your students a pre-assessment at the beginning of class. Also you can modify your instruction based on the results and then give students an "exit ticket" at the end of class to see what they learned. Moreover, you can use Google forms and spreadsheet to collect data, share data, analyze data, graph data using the motion chart or even create a questionnaire or a survey for the classroom. Google Groups - let students easily create and work in teams. You can create your own safe, private online community for collaborating and communicating with your colleagues, your professional learning network, or your students. Post a topic and ask your students to discuss it, get analytics of the answers by using google analytics visualization ability. Google Play for Education - comprises various apps that are supported by windows and android tablets too and can support lessons such as art, paint, music, anatomy for Medicine, mathematics, physics and science in general that have been developed for children from 0 to 12 years old. However you can create your own app using the developers session of google play for education. Calendar or IST Lab Calendar which is an enhanced google calendar makes sharing calendars and schedules easy. Post and tag individual work or collaborative work. Retrieving accessing tagging uploading exercises from wellknown social media like YouTube, Flickr, twitter and other. You can create a grade level calendar and even send out a weekly meeting invite and grade level notes. Google Hangouts allows people to connect any time via video, voice or text. Use text chat for quick questions and Hangouts for group video calls, virtual office hours and field 3 | Page

1st individual assignment for ‘Computer supported collaboration’, Summer semester 2014-2015

Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

trips. You can use the Hangouts add-on inside the Google Docs when you are editing a doc. Google Maps helps students explore the world around them. They can go virtually anywhere in the world because of Street View, Google Earth Pro is now free, and teachers and students can use Google Maps Engine Lite to create custom maps for a variety of projects. Google Sites allow students and teachers to manage their own sites. You can create a digital classroom on the web and create digital hubs for your classroom. You can combine everything you have created using google apps forms, calendars, video and other resources all in one place for student and parents to have access. Students can also use Google Sites to showcase their work and create digital portfolios that can follow them from year to year. Google YouTube can be an excellent tool for teaching and learning. While educators can tap into existing YouTube content, this medium also does a great job of equipping teachers with the ability to create original content for their students. Teachers can begin by locating and organizing existing video content, and then gradually shift to creating their own. B. AutoSave, Comments and Revision History Continuous auto save ensures that current work stays safe, preserving ongoing drafts and edits. A complete revision history makes it easy to review, compare, or revert to a prior version at any point. Furthermore, if you have more than one person working in the document, it keeps all of that data – you can see who adds, deletes, and edits the document – all color coded, time stamped, and easy to work with. In the virtual classroom, it’s then easy to track what students do in a document. Did they do the edits you suggested? Did they share the work evenly on their team? Did they do all their work last night or was it the last moment? In the real world, it’ simple to track revisions from start to finish, and both clients and writers can watch the document come together. Remember, while you have access to the revision history, which is technically a bunch of separate version of the same document, you’re always looking at the latest version of a document anytime you enter and use a Google Doc. Moreover, using the Revision history and comments teachers can now keep total control over the entire edit process. By combining the power of revision history to keep track of all the changes, with the power of having access to all the edits required and feedback regarding the document, it’s easy to check what has been done, and what’s left out. In the classroom, when teachers give formative feedback on an intro paragraph, they can now verify whether or not the student actually took their advice and made changes. In the real world, it’s easy to move back and forward in the document while referencing clients’ needs and wishes in the comment stream.

Comments are an obvious way to leave feedback on a document and the great thing about them is that they stay with the specific document that is shared with the specific students and teacher. The revision history tool and the ability to add and reply to comments are extremely useful in most situations. No more having to second-guess what was written and deleted last week, or to wait for a final product to leave valuable feedback for a student. And best of all – the edit workflow in the classroom matches that of the real world, so transition time and learning curves are minimized once a student leaves school. C. Some ideas for using Word Clouds with students Text analysis in Google Docs What is a word cloud? In Wordle [4] for example a teacher can paste in short texts such as sample chapters or news articles that the class has been reading. Show the class the word cloud and see if they can remember what the text was about and how the words were used within the text. You can build up a bank of word clouds and use them to get students to recall the books they have studied and their vocabulary. Google Docs have an add-on that creates Word tag clouds inside a specific document. It is real time and every time someone adds some text it can be refreshed and shown again. Below there are some other ways a teacher can use the word tag clouding in classroom. Text comparison - Create word clouds from a number text genres (news article, poem, story, speech, etc.) and use the cloud to if students can identify the genre and state the clues for their decision. Another comparison would be to have two different text segments that have some kind of relationship (such as articles or poems written on the same topic) and then compare the clouds created by each. Assessment analysis – Create word clouds related to the criteria associated with an assessment, such as the content in a writing paper assessment, objective descriptions. Course content – Create a word cloud based on the syllabus contents, the course description, or the standards met in an activity. Prediction - You can create word clouds of texts to use as a pre-reading activity. Ask students to make predictions based on the word cloud content developed from the text. Vocabulary KWL - Create a word cloud based on upcoming content and have the students evaluate what they already know about the topic by reviewing the word cloud. They could also check or discuss new words from the word cloud that they are unsure of before they read or listen. Another way to use the vocabulary concept would be to copy definitions form several sources and then create a cloud from the compiled definitions. Website Evaluation - Create a word cloud based around a topic being researched on the internet. They could also use this as a component of a KWL, as they evaluate what they 4 | Page

1st individual assignment for ‘Computer supported collaboration’, Summer semester 2014-2015

Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

already know about the topic by skimming the word cloud and the relevance placed on each word.

Figure 2.Wordle cloud created from Shakespeare's Love Sonnets #31 to #60 They could then use the terms to identify what they want to know more about. Test Review - Use the word cloud to review for a text or exam. Instructors or groups students could develop word clouds and then share them with the class and explain what they know. This can work especially well for texts or textbooks that have online versions, where the content can be copied and pasted into a word cloud tool. Self-Analysis - Students can create word clouds based upon their own stories or writings. Speeches - Create word clouds to visualize the topical content of political speeches. If you search online you should be able to find a number of the speeches from the presidential race that have been clouded. This can be a great method for quick speech analysis on what words were used in speeches. Readability - Students could use a word cloud as an analysis tool, such as for the five finger readability test. With the standard the five-finger test, students are asked to select a page from the book to read to themselves, starting with five fingers and dropping a finger each time the student encounters a word that is hard to read. Here they could do it for the hundred most occurring words. Summary - Use the word cloud as a means of summarizing the content of an essay or other piece of work, provides a quick and useful means of telling you what the article is about. Also the visual representation of such a summary is very different than a list of bullet points (such as may be at the start of a textbook chapter). Assessment – The word cloud can be used by the teacher by asking a student to create a word cloud from his/her paper/presentation, and use it as the basis for a discussion, rather than the paper/presentation itself. Survey – Word clouds can provide a quick analysis tool for summarizing survey results where the survey uses free text fields. Illustration –A teacher can use the word cloud to create a visual representation image as a multiple intelligence/learning styles approach.

Author study – take sections of text from different books and combine as a study of an author’s diction (Figure 2). Rule cloud – create a word cloud based on the classroom or school rules, or the student expectations. Character/setting analysis – copy sections of text that describe a character or the setting in a story or use your own sets of character/setting descriptions to develop a cloud from. Bias analysis – Use news articles from several sources on the same topic and then analyze the clouds for word indicating bias. Word wall – create a cloud composed of terms that want students to use during a period of time. Repeat specific words that you wish to emphasize to increase their size. The Tag cloud Generator add-on of Google docs is a very powerful tool for teachers in a Virtual Classroom. A teacher could combine some of the above features of Google App Engine or all of them and create a Collaborative Virtual Classroom with pedagogical value combined with an exciting and efficient learning process. 4.

CREATING A SCENARIO WITH GOOGLE DOCS IN REAL-TIME VIRTUAL CLASSROOM

A. Research Objective The purpose of this essay is to show how a transformative technology such as Google App Engine could be used to create an efficient real-time environment. How could the students and the teachers benefit from such environments is a question that would be answered by the following scenario. So the scenario I implemented uses some features of Google App Engine and indicates how they could be used to create a collaborative virtual environment. These features are based in Word Tag Clouding either offered by already existing Google Apps or the app I created for the purposes of this essay. The findings are discussed. B. Method and instruments In my study I have been concerned with two things. Firstly, I decided to create a virtual classroom with my students in Technological Institute of Crete in lesson “Data Structures with C” in an experimental way. The students didn’t know that they were part of an educational experiment. I gave them 10 different programming assignments-3 to each team- and I used Google Docs to create each team assignment. I created 25 different documents (3 students each) describing each team’s assignment, I shared the documents using Google Docs and I gave them some simple instructions how to work with their assignments using Google Docs. I explained how comments, auto save and revision history works and I invited each of them in a document based on the teams they have created in the classroom. In the real Classroom, I gave them simple assignments to solve that were small parts of the assignments I gave them in the Virtual 5 | Page

1st individual assignment for ‘Computer supported collaboration’, Summer semester 2014-2015

Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

Classroom. I chose constructivism as a pedagogical theory to teach this lesson. Secondly, I created an app (called myApp), using the google docs developer’s editor, that tag clouds the revision history, the comments and the replies of each document editor in Google Docs (Figure 3). The app could ran from every Google Document as a Google Docs add-on. What the app did was to take all the documents (assignments) of a folder I created for the specific Virtual Classroom and create word cloud visualizations for every each editor of a document comment or reply to a specific Google Docs’ document. C. Findings I observed carefully every team’s progress through real time collaboration with them. They had a deadline for doing this assignment, after that I made the word clouds for every teams solutions using word tag cloud generator a Google Docs add-on and I also created the word clouds of every student’s comment or reply in each team’s Google document.

Figure 4.myApp visualization of a student-editor comments and all replies to comments of a specific document, who contributed a lot to the solution and the comments.

Figure 3.myApp add-on Studying all the above word clouds, the Revision History, and the real-time everyday progress of each team I reached the following conclusions: 1. Among the students in the same team– In almost all the cases the student of the same team who contributed a lot in comments/replies word cloud of the document, was the one that contributed the most in the correct solution of the given assignment (Figure 4). On the other hand there was one case of a student who contributed a lot in the comments/replies word cloud more than the other team members but he/she contributed less to the solution of the assignment than the other team members. 2. Among all 75 students of the Virtual ClassroomIn most cases the students who contributed the most to the comments/replies word cloud of the document were the ones that contributed the most in the correct solution of the assignment. 3. Among teams-In most cases the teams that contributed more in comment/replies word clouds were the teams that took the best grade according to their solution but on the other hand, there were teams that took very good grade and have not contributed a lot in team’s comment/replies word clouds (Figure 5). These last teams, of course had a significant revision history contribution and the solution was as good as the first team’s who contributed a lot to the comment/replies word clouds.

Figure 5.myApp visualization of two students-editors who contributed only one or 5 words to the comments but a lot to the solution. 4. Revision History- Studying all the teams’ Revision History (Figure 6) one could easily understand that for all the cases of the students the ones who worked more among their team members or more among all the students as shown by the Revision History of each document these were the students that contributed the most to the correct solution of the given assignment. 5. Students Opinion – In the beginning of the experiment most students expressed many complaints concerning how they could manage to do all these I gave them to do. But in the end the most of them were satisfied by their work. 6. Teacher’s Benefit- I could easily identify and give rewards and good marks to the students that have worked hard and collaboratively with the other students of the class.

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Computer-supported collaboration TEI-Crete, 2015 |Dept. App. Inf. & Multimedia

specific document left behind using a transformative technology. There is still much work and educational experiments to be done in the creation of an efficient, exciting and pedagogical Collaborative Virtual Classroom.

Figure 6.Revision History of Google Docs In conclusion, by studying these results someone could say that the collaborative environment of Google Docs, Word Tag Clouding (Figure 7) and Revision History can be combined to a powerful educational tool that could be of a great value in the hands of a teacher in a Real-Time Collaborative Virtual Classroom.

6. CONLUSIONS Changing of the pedagogy models and knowledge production models is crucial for future school classroom or Education in general, not just in the terms of High school or University. Transformative technologies are advancing and are becoming more and more popular among the students and their educators. It is of great value to use these technologies to create Collaborative Virtual Environments such as a Virtual Classroom. Google App Engine is a transformative technology that is been used by the majority of students and educators around the world. It is designed and could be efficiently used as a platform for creating a Collaborative Virtual Classroom of great value. In my study I described all the features that it has and can be efficiently used in a Virtual Classroom by a teacher. I created a prototype app and tested some of them in creating Real-Time Collaborative Virtual Environment with great value to teachers and students too. Acknowledgement This study was part of the assignments that were given in terms of the Lesson in my Master called “Computer-Supported Collaboration” taught by Dr. Akoumianakis Dimosthenes in the Technological Institute of Crete. I would like to thank him a lot for all the understanding, the significant guidance and encouragement he gave me during the whole time I was making this study that was the start of an idea he gave me. Lastly, I would also like to thank George Ktistakis who helped me with the creation of the app. Without them I wouldn’t have made it so far.

Figure 7.Google App Engine Tag Cloud Generator 5.

DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, FUTURE WORK This work has been done in the terms of an assignment we had in one of my Master’s Lesson called “ComputerSupported Collaboration” to prove the benefits a teacher could have in using Google App Engine (a transformative technology) in creating an efficient and real-time Collaborative Virtual Classroom with great pedagogical value and an interesting learning process that could engage both students and teacher in an exciting learning process. One last thing that could also be taken into consideration is that of the Digital Footprint Management value-the traces someone leaves in a Collaborative Virtual Classroom environment either he/she is a student or a teacher. These word clouds that were created either for the editors’ comments/replies in a Google Document or what was written inside the document are the digital traces the editors of that

REFERENCES [1] Aslım-Yetiş, Veda.”Virtual classroom site in French written expression lesson: a practice sample,”Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences,vol. 2(2),p. 466-470,2010. [2] Luis L. Martins,Lucy L. Gilson and M. Travis Maynard .Virtual Teams: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go From Here? , Journal of Management, 30(6) 805–835.2004. [3] Duncan, I., Miller, A. and Jiang, S. “A taxonomy of virtual world’s usage in education. British Journal of Educational Technology,” 43: 949–964,2012. [4] I. Milošević, D. Živković, S. Arsić, and D. Manasijević, “Facebook as virtual classroom – Social networking in learning and teaching among Serbian students,” Telemat. Informatics, vol. 32, pp. 576–585, 2015. [5] N. A. Ebrahim, S. Ahmed, and Z. Taha, “Virtual Teams : a Literature Review,” vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 2653–2669, 2009. [6] Definition of Virtual Classroom, as retrieved from Tech Target’s co-site WhatIs.com in 2/05/2015, A knowledge

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exploration and self-education tool about information technology. [7] M. Camacho, J. Minelli, and G. Grosseck, “Self and Identity: Raising Undergraduate Students’ Awareness on Their Digital Footprints,” Procedia - Soc. Behav. Sci., vol. 46, pp. 3176–3181, 2012. [8] D. W. Johnson and R. T. Johnson, “An Educational Psychology Success Story: Social Interdependence Theory and Cooperative Learning,” Educ. Res., vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 365–379, 2009. [9] M. Laal, M. Laal, and Z. K. Kermanshahi, “21st Century Learning; Learning in Collaboration,” Procedia - Soc. Behav. Sci., vol. 47, pp. 1696–1701, 2012. [10] A. Crişan and R. Enache, “Virtual Classrooms in Collaborative Projects and the Effectiveness of the Learning Process,” Procedia - Soc. Behav. Sci., vol. 76, pp. 226–232, 2013. [11] A. Google, A. Education, A. G. Docs, and G. Docs, “Google Apps Education Edition : Improving the writing process with Google Docs.” [12] C. McNaught and P. Lam, “Using wordle as a supplementary research tool,” Qual. Rep., vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 630–643, 2010.

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