Looking over details of Storillo, an online program that facilitates student collaboration on group projects, are (from left) Thomas Wilkie, English teacher Joann Pera and Tim Adowski. Wilkie and Adowski founded the company.

TONAWANDA — Thomas Wilkie and Tim Adowski, Cardinal O'Hara High School class of 2010, returned to the school earlier this year to demonstrate Storillo, an online program that facilitates student collaboration on group projects, which they developed.

Cardinal O'Hara is one of several pilot schools that ran the program this past semester at local high schools and universities.

"We are an online collaboration platform for education," Wilkie explained.

Adowski and Wilkie said they saw a need for facilitating group communication while working on a collaborative project and Storillo was born with the tagline "Group work, re-imagined."

Two O'Hara teachers, Spanish teacher Antoinette Castaldo and 11th-grade English teacher Joann Pera, used the site in their classes during the year.

"The unique and useful thing about Storillo from the educator's perspective is the way it can track individual student contributions to a collaborative writing project, thus holding each of them accountable and making the grading more equitable," Pera said.

Pera recently used the site for students to collaborate as various participants in a custody hearing tied to the book "Pigs In Heaven." Students could collaborate as part of a legal team, as character witnesses or members of the jury, Pera explained.

"Storillo was a great way for students to communicate their ideas to each other as they built their common part of the project, and I loved being able to see each student's individual contribution," Pera said. "We are looking forward to the coming year."