It is funny that I just received a letter from a school in New Jersey asking questions about our school, community and our state. The kids really thought is was neat as we were working on the answers to the questionnaire. We get so wrapped up in the TEKS/TAKS that we lose sight of opportunities like this. This did not use technology but it could easily be changed to correspond with someone by email. I really like the example of the students in a spanish class actually talking someone in that was a native speaker. It was a good educational experience to learn that these students were not what they expected. Parent contacts are stressed at my school. The family connections discussed would be great. In our rural school district we have a lot of families that do not have internet access. We do have teacher web pages as part of our school web site. It is not utilized very much. We do post our weekly newsletters on it. Empowering teachers really hit home about teaching left-brained methods to right-brained children. This definitely is a cry for a change in teaching methods and you can really see that it is hard to keep kids motivated in a traditional classroom.