Using a Blog as a Teacher

When the school year began and the mug on my desk was still full of newly sharpened pencils, I discovered that my students could all set up accounts with Google through our school. Possibilities kept spilling from my mind as I bounced ideas off my resourceful librarians.
I created a mini-unit specifically for blogging about the book my classes were reading at the time, The Count of Monte Cristo. My objectives for the students included deeper understanding of the complicated plot, nicely composed responses to student written questions, and greater familiarity with the process of blogging itself. Some students responded to the lessons with enthusiasm, while several seemed reluctant to "play" with this available technology. Since there were a few students in each class that did not have reliable internet access at home or had not returned their permission slip to create a Google account, I put them into pairs. I had hoped for more student buy-in, but these digital natives did not turn into digital citizens automatically.
Because of my experiences with the blogs earlier in the year, I have not revisited a way for my students to use them successfully. The two biggest obstacles I found included lack of access to the technology, both at school and at the students' homes and the students' hesitation in experimenting with something new.
In my ideal world, the blogs would be an ideal place to start a constructive "back channel" venue for them to question class lectures, post their thoughts that come in the middle of a lesson, learn more about themselves as composers, and deepen their connections to our lessons in class. I am looking forward to finding out if next year's sophomores will be more likely to write a blog post than the kids I have this year.
Since student blogging is still something I am working out as a teacher, the most effective use of blogging as a teacher comes from the information I see on other blogs. There are so many relevant ideas for me to find when I need help adding to my units of study. Most of the time I search for school-related information, I find a blog entry or two (or twenty) to read. NCTE also links to several noteworthy blogs in their weekly email called Inbox.
I will keep reading those ideas and searching for the best practices to include blogging in my students' academic lives.