Using Blogging and Microblogging in ELL

My love and interest increases towards blogging and microblogging day by day. This process of learning is really more engaging, meaningful and interesting for me. I think that I will be able to implement both the blogging and microblogging in language teaching processes. I think that learning with blogs can be used beginning from the intermediate high level students, because they are more able to recognize for what purposes blogs are going to be used. It would be more convenient to use blogging in computer labs than in usual classrooms. When introducing the necessity of using blogs to my students I would point out the following things: that blogs are more useful than usual notebooks, because in this case the blogger has more responsibility in what he/she is writing, because it is going to be shared with a wide audience. Besides, blogging is more interactive, where you don't only write for yourself and your teacher, but also for the community you are in. Moreover, the students can develop different computer skills by using blogs. So, in their blogs students would refer to their daily lessons, would write summaries of different texts, would comment on other's blogs, etc.
What refers to twitter, I would suggest my students to use it in the case they would like to, which would be for short tweets, basically refering to the difficulties in understanding something, or, vice versa, to something which they liked, and also could make some suggestions. Microblogging, though, doesn't have to be about the learning materials necessarily. It may be about the students' daily plans and other casual things. But, anyway, this is a way of using the language, and also a way of interacting and communicating by that language. So, in my opinion, both blogging and microblogging create an environment for active learning.
Evaluation is an important aspect for both the teacher and the students. I would not grade the students for blogging and microblogging, but I would provide some comments on the content, writing accuracy and fluency, lexical complexity and other linguistic aspects.
I think that there would also be some challanges for the students who are a little behind the others in terms of their knowledge and abilities. For example, they might be shy or might feel not confident to share their piece of writing with a wide audience. For this case my suggestion is to ask those students to actively read the posts of their friends, and to make their first steps by leaving comments on their posts, thus getting used to the process. They could also show their piece of writing to the teacher before posting it, till they would be able to do it by themselves.