This reading selection focused on podcasts, wikis, and blogs as a means of increasing communication throughout a school system and the surrounding community.  I was really interested in the scenario where the English teacher was sharing podcasts with parents so that they would hear her read science fiction stories to their children.  I think it would be really neat to record sessions of my course or even have my students record their thoughts or concerns and post them on a class website.  I love the idea of informing parents about class discussions and topics.  When I was in high school my younger brother and I would often reenact class discussions for our parents at the dinner table.  We were fourtunate enough to have family dinners every night but sadly, this is not a common trend for many families.  Posting recorded podcasts and making them available for parents is a great way to continue the process of informing the parents on class topics.  I really like the idea of the students posting their thoughts because this allows their reflections, concerns, and thoughts to be directly heard by others.  I believe that this experience would enhance the critical thinking skills of the students and truly engage them. 

I think one of the biggest benefits of this scenario was the inclusion of everyone.  Administrators, parents, other faculty members, board members, and students were all engaged in a multi-faceted way in this scenario.  I was especially impressed with the amount of increased support and communication between all of the teachers within this school system.  I think that teaming up on concepts and subject matters across disciplines builds legitimacy for the topics in the minds of the students.  I often benefit during semesters where my classes all seem to align in subject matter.  For example, I might be taking a professional selling courses, an integrated marketing course, and business management course which would all cover interpersonal skills and communication.  This would make the concept clearer for me and studying for tests easier as the concept was the same across disciplines.  If we could do this for high school students, I think we would reinforce their knowledge by providing them with more breadth and depth of knowledge on specific tested concepts. 

Perhaps a weakness of this scenario is the amount of additional time it would require to manage the multi technical aspects of this environment.  Instructors would not be able to manage these sites during class time because it would take away from their students.  They must screen the content that is being posted to make sure that the students are learning and posting appropriate content which could become tedious.  Also, we experienced difficulties with wiki’s in our class as multiple students tried to simultaneously edit the same post.  If multiple students or administrators were trying to accomplish this task and ran into the challenges that we faced, they might become reluctant to continue with the process.