The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has broken down what skills students should have at a variety of ages. You can check out these standards here.
Communication and collaboration are a great foundation for these standards, as they allow students to maximize their learning and growth potential while they work toward the other standards: creativity and innovation, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, digital citizenship and technology operations and concepts.
I think that creativity without collaboration is limited. The best work that I see from my students is when they are working together. (If I have any students who end up reading this, feel free to comment on times you really benefited from working in groups in my class or other classes!) Likewise, problem solving and decision making lean toward being better activities that are done with others.
Web 2.0 applications allow for seemingly endless creative productions and collaborative and critical thinking options. As long as teachers take the time to think through what their goals are and to thoroughly explore the web 2.0 tools, they will find a perfect tool (or combination of tools) to suit their task.
I was amazed at what even the youngest of students (ages 4-8) are expected to be able to do when I read through the Profiles for Technology Literate Students (to view these, use the same link as above, but click on “ISTE Standards Student Profiles”)! The action words of what they are supposed to do (such as research, justify, evaluate) are very intense! Learning these things at such a young age allow for increased skills at doing those actions as they grow as well as movement into very advanced tasks in high school, such as configuring hardware.
Additionally, collaboration can help all students to meet the NETS-S by allowing students that are more fluent in using technology to be a great asset to those who are not, as long as they work together and the stronger one helps the weaker one learn.
The opportunities that technology affords today’s students are very exciting!
References
ISTE Standards for Students. (n.d.). Retrieved June 7, 2015, from http://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards/standards-for-students
