If you are looking for a really basic blog to use with your students for a writing project or learning log, you might consider Easyjournal. It doesn't have some of the bells and whistles you find with blogging tools such as Typepad (which powers this blog) and Wordpress (which I have used for student projects) but it's free and you can be signed up and writing posts in no time at all. A practical feature is the 'Notify your readers' function, which enables you to let people know that your journal has been updated. Very useful if you have a classful of blogging students and don't want to have to visit each blog to see what they've written. Or you could just subscribe to the RSS feed of each blog. On the downside, you have to sign up for the paid Pro version to post photos. And don't even think about embedding video.
