Using Blogs in Chemistry Class

I enter my classroom each morning, ask each 10th or 11th grade student to put their cell phone away. By 7:30 atleast one student has received a text message too tempting to ignore and slyly reads it under their desk. These are the students of the "communication age" a term developed by Dr. David Thornburg.
Instead of fighting their technical prowess on a cell phone, laptop or desktop, I could enter the communication age and invite them to apply their interest in social networking to the learning of the subject at hand -- NY State Regents' Chemistry. Designing a blog for my chemistry classes to read and post to would serve several purposes. If we use our classroom blog to collaborate, each student could post a chemistry problem, solve it, and explain how they solved it. This would allow all students to:
- Practice defining and explaining their problem solving strategies.
- Explore and work through their own thinking and put it into wordsin their posting, improving their metacognition in the process.
- Examine how their peers are solving the same problems, possibly seeing different problem strategies for the same or similar problems.
- Interact with other problem solvers.
- Use the collection of problems as review before tests or the final exam.
- Post links to online chemistry resources.