blogging in the classroom

Yes I am going to blog about blogging so here goes. Starting this blog myself has given me some ideas on how I can use blogs in my classroom. While it might be useful for me as a teacher to use a blog to communicate to my students, a website might be a better option there. What I was really thinking about was having students create their own blogs as part of some type of extensive project. They would simply have to blog at certain intervals about what they have learned in constructing and/or researching their project and what struggles they are having. This would serve many purposes. First of all, it would give them a chance to organize their thoughts which is very important for any kind of large project. Secondly, it would help me as their teacher intervene when I could tell students were not making progress or where having difficulty with the assignment through another possible avenue of student-teacher communication. Also, being able to name the blog and customize it would give each student a little piece of ownership over what they blog, their learning, and the entire project. Finally, I could assign groups so students would be required to comment on each other's blogs (like this class). Peer feedback would really be helpful to student motivation and quality of work.