Blogs ARE Dreamy

        I’ve been corresponding (does one e-mail full of questions count as corresponding?  for our purposes here, it does) with Hipteacher, an anonymous teacher blogger.  She recently sent me some information about how she uses blogging with her students, and it was very helpful.  What was "dreamy" though, to borrow a phrase, was the following paragraph that she added to her reply when she decided to post said reply to her own blog:

I forgot to mention one long-term positive I recently had the
pleasure of experiencing. I helped Taiwanese Superhero set up a blog
and showed her some student blogs during an intensely boring meeting
before the school year started. She loved the medium right away and
started using blogs with both her general and remedial classes. All of
our 9th graders did their research "papers" on blogs. So this semester,
I got several of her students, and she got several of mine. The first
day we went in the lab to learn about blogs and get set up, her
students from last semester proudly proclaimed their expertise, showed
off their lengthy blog writing to the class and helped assist other
students with starting their blogs.

If every teacher used blogs, our kids could really have a kick-butt
record of their progress in writing and in high school. Maybe they
would continue to comment on the work of kids who aren’t in their
classes anymore. Maybe it could be common ground between teachers and
subjects. Maybe it could be dreamy.

 Her description of  blogging over several years and different teachers is exactly what I am hoping to do with the blogs at our school.  Here’s my basic idea, which I may or may not have posted here:  I’d like to give each student a blog when they enter high school.  They’ll be required to use the blog for some portfolio postings that the entire school will do (and which can be, using RSS, siphoned off onto a school portfolio page — something like an online student work showcase).  The students are also free to use the blogs for other uses — some personal, some perhaps suggested or required by their other teachers.  When the student leaves, we keep the blog active for a year or so and then we ask a hosting company, or perhaps even our school district, to take over the hosting of the blog, and at that point, maybe the student is charged a subscription fee, much like using Typepad or Hosted Manila.  The blog would then split off of the school hosted site and become a tool that a student can use in whatever new pursuit that they might have.  But, the blog could still be a link back to the high school — a virtual reunion waiting to happen the moment anyone hit "aggregate" on their aggregators. 
        Student blogging provides a showcase for their best work, a playground for working with new ideas, and a place to collaborate with other students, teachers and schools.  The more I work with and discover about blogs, the more I realize that they are an entirely new way of thinking — something like the Swiss Army Knife of the Internet.  A student blogger could be a podcaster, an artist, a political scientist, a technophile, a poet, a chemist or whatever.  The blog is the management, not the content.  Eureka!
        Dreamy, indeed.