Asynchronous communication is a great way for all students to be heard and to learn at their own rate. With the move in my classroom towards technology based learning and continuous integration of computers, asynchronous communication continues to grow. Students are able to gather their thoughts and provide insightful responses at their own rate, eliminating the risk of a student's opinions being shaped by another person's eagerness to share. Through the use of online discussion forums and "comments" through the google platform, my students can effectively communicate with one another and share ideas.
As I look to shift my classroom to a paperless virtual environment, students are going to rely more and more on communicating with each other through asynchronous means. Right now, when communicating asynchronously, their communications are predominately with me. They also collaborate with one another on projects through the google platform. Our class discussions are held in person and require students to be able to quickly synthesize their responses. Through asynchronous communications, students will be able to focus on developing their own viewpoints as well as the skill of conveying their viewpoints.
By going paperless, I envision my classroom evolving into an ongoing discussion of hot topics where students feel safe to formulate and convey their opinions. Through the use of discussion forums, students will post their opinions pertaining to hot topics, such as global warming. Students will then be able to comment on one another's posts to continue discussion. In addition to discussion forums, students would be able to collaborate to solve problems. Lastly, students can communicate with external sources in order to build relationships to work towards solutions to environmental issues.
This is a model that I have been using in my graduate courses. At first, I didn't see the value of responding to other people's comments and posts. Now, I realize that being able to synthesize a response to someone else's opinion shows a higher level of thinking. Students will be able to productively and constructively communicate and discuss with one another. Due to the lag time of asynchronous communications, students will be able to formulate respectful responses and questions relating to the topic. Often times students can get personal with one another in a live class discussion-asynchronous communicating and learning gives kids the opportunity to "proof read" and check for effectiveness. 
