Simple and easy:

Minimal setup required, and this tool allows students to collaborate with one another on a group project without them needing to exchange email addresses.

Supervision: 

As the instructor, you can view students' collaborative documents at any time.

Sharing flexibility:

You can select students one at a time or share a Collaboration with an existing student group in your course site.

• Copy and paste notes that everyone can access.
• Share bullet-point lists or agendas for upcoming synchronous class or group time or meetings.
• Create a text-based whiteboard that everyone in the classroom can see and refer to later.
• Assign student groups a collaborative assignment as a graded assignment (instructor feature).

The user who originally created a collaboration item can delete it both within Canvas and within Office 365. For this reason, we strongly recommend that only instructors create collaborations. This way, it is extremely difficult for a student to accidentally delete a collaboration item.

We recommend that you use Office 365 rather than Google drive collaborations. Because Collaborations are using external applications, the settings in Google and Office 365 need to be kept in mind. A student may accidentally remove their access to a Google drive collaboration item if they remove it from within their Google drive account. This is more difficult to do in the Office 365 interface.