At present messaging is either on or off. I propose a '3rd way' whereby students can send and receive messages to/from teachers but can't send messages to each other. We tried, as I'm sure many schools have, to moderate the messaging but it's impossible as they just use them to IM each other when they should be working.

This suggestion could be further expanded to include allowing/disallowing messaging down to individuals and/or class groups so that it could be turned on for specific tasks.