See Jane Blog

Today I discovered, via the computer lab, that most of my students blog. They also use xanga for their sites so I'm not in any immediately danger as I guess using blogger is "old school". Now, I was looking over some of their sites as they were intently writing. ( It's interesting that none of them have ever noticed that most of the time when I am in the lab I am blogging or reading the blogs of others.) Their blogs tend to be either highly theme oriented (ie one student had a Cowboy BeBop blog and all of his friends had anime specific blogs ie Vampire Princess Miyu, Gundam Wing, Inuyasha) or detail oriented ( one student was typing in her entire spring schedule-she then added another post which detailed what her evening schedule was going to be so people would know when to catch her on her AIM).

I have in the past considering using blogging as a teaching tool, coming up with some class blog, or requiring students to keep a reading blog, so that I can periodically check on the reading ( although keeping track of 35 different blogs on a weekly basis seems like a daunting task when you consider everything else I have to do for the class). I am still considering how to use it. If they are already using the technology on their own, why not use it to my advantage?

What do you think? Any ideas? or as my old camp counselor would say at the close of every meeting "Questions? Comments? Anybody want to make a speech?"