So, how can you use a blog site for class discussion? Several ways - the easiest is to post something, an article, audio clip, comment, and then have students write comments to that post. All comments are connected to the original post, so you can see what everybody thinks. Try to do this without requiring x-number of comments per semester, but in a way where students are engaged in adding their thoughts or contributions to the topic.

You can also have students post work for others in the class, as well as outsiders such as experts, to review and comment. This is an excellent way for them to publish and get feedback on their work. This works best if each student is developing their own personal sites where they are compiling their work. Use the RSS feature to feed updates back to the main class site so people know what's been posted. What's RSS? That's another post here...search in the RSS category for more info. 

Class discussion posts, comments, discussion, rss