Class discussion by blog

Move over student gossip blogs and online diaries, make way for classroom blogs. Blogs are everywhere in the news these days, but this is new (to me, anyway): teachers' blogs for class discussion and announcements, which make total sense. For example, Mrs. Dudiak's second-grade class in Frederick County, Md., didn't have time for a full-blown class discussion on the previous day's field trip to a Native American farm, which was all her students wanted to talk about, so she had them "talk" about it in their classroom Web log, the New York Times reports. In other classroom blogs, many of which got started in the past school year, students "write about how they attacked a tough math problem, post observations about their science experiments or display their latest art projects."