Pervasive Pedagogy: Collaborative Cloud-Based Composing Using Google Drive

Cloud-based services designed for educational use, like Google Apps for Education (GAFE), afford deeply collaborative activities across multiple applications. Through primary research, the authors discovered that cloud-based technologies such as GAFE and Google Drive afford new opportunities for collaborative cross-platform composing and student engagement. These affordances require new pedagogies to transform these potentialities into practice, as well as a reexamination of contemporary theory of computers and composition. The authors’ journey implementing Google Drive as a composing and communication environment required continually remediating content, relationships, practices, and their own identities as they interacted with students in the cloud. This chapter addresses how GAFE and Google Drive engage students in the composition classroom, redefine and transform pedagogical and curricular concepts, and improve students’ experience and learning.