During the many lackluster lunches I had in my high school cafeteria the conversations were comprised of typical teenage stuff – weekend plans, tactless teachers and the like – but once I remember a conversation actually downshifting into...Shakespeare. School work. And while today's kids are chatting online about bus rides, boys and basketball, they may also be talking about, yup, you guessed it, school work. According to an online survey created by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) in Alexandria, Va. and research firm Grunwald Associates LLC, 50 percent of nine- to 17-year-old students reported that they talk about their schoolwork when text messaging, on both cellphones and instant messages, blogs and social networking sites. Educators and parents may be concerned about all this time spent online is wasted on vapid, less-than-meaningful dialog or content, but consider the interactive nature of online communication as opposed to the passive activity of watching television. These young multimedia entrepreneurs are uploading pictures, original music and videos that they have taken, created and edited. These collaborative communication skills translate into those that employers will be looking for after college. The study, comprised of three surveys of 1,277 students and 1,039 parents, reported that 59 percent of online students say they talk about college, learning outside of school, careers, politics, religion, and schoolwork. However, chatting about these topics when students should be practicing Calculus or memorizing lines to “Much Ado About Nothing” can be an intrusion to traditional classroom learning. To address this issue, many educators are embracing these new technologies, seeing how they aren't going away any time soon. In fact nearly all school districts included in the survey say some of the teachers assign homework that requires the Internet to complete and use Web pages to communicate with students outside the classroom and assign work. Thirty-somethings and anyone older probably can't easily imagine contacting a high-school teacher after 4pm or on a weekend, because this would have meant making a phone call, and that seems left only for emergencies. But with today's technologies, a single message can be communicated to the whole class and students can use the Internet to help each other. Of course there are safety issues, problems with inappropriate language being casually used, and the risk of sharing too much information, but I imagine that as young students become more sophisticated users, these issues will become less and less.