Perhaps one of the most obvious and beneficial effects of IT on schools is the expanding ability of students, teachers, administrators, and parents to communicate and cooperate with one another. Students email each other about assignments, teachers share lesson plans and activities with other teachers, administrators send announcements to students, teachers and parents, and parents stay abreast of their child's progress in an individual teacher's classroom.
IT affords different groups in a school the opportunity to communicate with each other easily, eliminating choke points in the line of communication. Instead of a student's comment or question to a principal being filtered through a teacher, a student may email the principal directly. In opening direct lines of communication, IT also implicitly expects its users to learn and employ professional communication strategies with each other. That is, while a teacher might have filtered and cleaned up a student's message to a principal prior to the advent of IT, now a student must filter and clean up her own message prior to delivery.
Davidson and Goldberg argue IT has an implicit value in improving the academic achievements of an individual student and school. This value, according to Davidson and Goldberg, stems directly from IT's ability to put educators and students in direct and constant contact with one another. The authors claim the limited time of a school day is an antiquated concept, as more and more students email their peers or their teachers after hours with questions about homework and assignments.
A further benefit of IT on schools -- though some might argue, a possible detriment to students -- is the increased ability to monitor students' behavior it gives to school administrators. Davidson and Goldberg point to the School of the Future in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as an innovative example of the ways in which IT can be used to monitor students' physical locations in a school building, as well as their web use and food consumption in the cafeteria. Though school officials might consider this added ability to monitor student behavior as a strong safety feature, students, parents and some teachers might consider this type of observation as institutional intrusion into a student's right to privacy.