I see both advantages and disadvantages in having synchronous and asynchronous tools in the classroom. Personally, since I am teaching overseas, synchronous chats and meetings with other educators in MET (mostly from North America and others from different parts of the world) do not work well for me due to differences in time zones. Otherwise, face-to-face and video chats are great ways to communicate and get things done. I remember using Elluminate for one of my MET projects and we were able to create an outline and delegate the work among the members within 10 minutes. We then worked on our parts of the project individually and presented our ideas onto a Google Document (asynchronous tool).
Asychronous tools, although lacking immediate feedback for the user, does the trick better. It does not require all members to be available at the same time (very hard to coordinate if not in the same location or city), and it allows participants more time to think about what is said before making thoughtful responses.
As a language teacher, I feel that asynchronous tools, such as Wiki and forums are great for students to build their confidence in writing – reducing the pressure of needing to perform and present right away.
However, the tools above can make the classroom atmosphere seem too distant. Better solutions would be to include tools such as Live Chat, Wimba, and other tools that allow for multimedia. Students would be able to discuss through voice and visuals, rather than just text. The disadvantage would be finding places that can host larger video or audio files.
For my Moodle project, I am interested in adding both synchronous and asynchronous lessons and activities for students to work on. Hopefully it would make the content material much more interactive and make learning a more enjoyable process.