Blogging for your class

As I see it, there are at least two ways to use a blog for your class. One is that you as a teacher write a blog using the target language to do so. The students read it, and since it is a class, you could tell them that they must comment on it. You could then grade the comments. The second way to use a blog is to set it up as a multi-administrator blog, giving your students the rights to "publish" on the class blog. Here is an example from a non-language class. This way the students can each be posting an "article" each week as a blog post that collectively shows an area of expertise to the outside world. This would work very well in a literature class that is covering one author/literary movement/country or in a Civilization and Culture class. As the students post and then critique each other, they will all learn corporately rather than just handing in a paper for you to grade while no one else gets the benefit of their research. Simply the fact that it is a blog rather than a research paper will add to the enjoyment factor on the part of the students as well as lower the effective filter. It also helps prepare those who are not using the blogworld to enter into the new era's flow of information.