I work at a private school in South Korea. Each teacher is assigned a blog in the event the country goes to war, we can communicate with our students when everyone is evacuated. The system is a bit cumbersome in that it is very private, for example I never see the parents email addresses when I write to them, unless they send me a personal email not through the program.

I teach grade 6 math and science. I have used the blog to post passwords and websites for textbooks, brainpop, class video's and slide shows of students working. I believe parents in middle school would still like to see what their children are doing in school but the students do not want any part of them there...so showing video's or slideshows of their daily activities is great P.R.

One teacher tried to post daily homework assignments, but it is time consuming and if she ever missed a day, the students would use it as an excuse not to do the assignment so she stopped. I post large project due dates on a calender in the blog.

I have also tried using a wiki with the 4 grade 6 classes. 100 students and all their parents became quite a logistical nightmare. the students all wanted to create their own pages in the wiki, kind of like personal webpages with all the little gadgets. But with 100 students each creating 5 to 10 pages of their own, it quickly became unmanageable. I have not set up personal blogs for each student so I do not know how manageable this will be. I think having the RSS reader set up will help but it does take time to set each child up.

I foresee the best use of a student blog as a personal electronic portfolio of their student career. If the blog was set up for them in Elementary, it would be a great resource of their growth through the years