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A Great Use For Blogs

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I'm going to head off today and talk about something in the blog world, and not at all about testing.

Every now and then I hear of a new use for blogs that I really like. Most of us are used to the standard paradigm, I write in a blog so my family and friends can keep up with me easily, I write in a blog to share my ideas about the discipline I work in. But I was talking to a friend of mine who came up with a great use for the technology, and thought I'd share it here.

He's the computer teacher at a private school down in California, and for this year he decided it would be great to set every teacher up with a blog. They can use this to post homework assignments, communicate status updates, and update parents on what they'll be covering in class over the next week; all kinds of stuff.

One of the teachers even took it further. She enabled comments on the blog and the first day had her kids go out and do some online tests and post the results as comments. This got all the kids involved and interested in the blog. It was a great success.

I was talking to him this week and he said this has been a huge hit with everyone. He used Blogger to set up all the pages, and raved about their interface (my personal blog uses Blogger, I'm also a big fan.) Most notably, all the teachers have to do is send an email to a specific address and it gets posted up on the blog, complete with formatting.

It always makes me happy when blogs make roads into non-technical sectors. I think they're a wonderful communication tool and have lots of great uses ahead of them. Stories like this remind me they have a lot of places to grow to. I look forward to the day when people stop having to ask what a blog is, then give a puzzled look as I try to explain it. I fully expect it to be just like the web, email, instant messaging, and plenty of other communication tools - soon enough blogs will just be another tool we use to keep in touch and share information.

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