Weblogs, or blogs for short, were created as a tool for people to create online journals without the need of any programming experience or knowledge. They allow the user to keep records of their writing on a website. The term was coined by Tim O’Reilly in his article What is Web 2.0? in 2005. Blogs strike the perfect balance of providing information anytime and anywhere, social networking and interaction, and the ability to openly share thoughts and achievements. Although not originally intended for use in EFL classes, blogs have immense potential as an extremely valuable tool for teaching.

The use of blogs is a supplemental aid to the teacher. The amount of time students use their weblogs is at the discretion of the teacher. Students can use it once a semester to submit a paper, weekly for class assignments and notes, or anything in between. The introduction to the idea of blogging commonly happens in the lesson before students are asked to create their own. The first step is to explain what a blog is and what can be done with the help of this tool.

You can :

• post entries (texts);
• put in hyperlinks;
• put photos (Flickr or Photobucket) directly if you sign up, just click the "blog this" link;
• publish PPрresentations of your lectures - SlideShare allows you to post your Power Point;
• embed video files from YouTube or Vimeo;
• add music/audio files - Add Del.icio.us's playtagger and you can listen to mp3's on the web directly on your blog.

In other words, you can just a couple of clicks embed online videos, multimedia presentations, slideshows and more right into your blog posts.

If you decide to introduce students to blogging you have to do it gradually:

• Set up the class blog.
• Invite students to use the blogs for a few days just for fun -- until they get used to how the system works.
• Teach students the etiquette of online posting.
• Assign one blog entry per week on a class-related topic; keep required lengths short and emphasize reflection.
• Over time, encourage students to provide feedback on the online assignments and posts published by you.
• Grade students on their blog entries, evaluate such factors as time management, content, and grammar and spelling.

Blogs have great didactic potentials so they are usually used by teachers:

• to publish and accumulate various assignments and materials, courses syllabi, educational web resources, anything that you post to your blog will instantly be accessible by your students;
• to keep students informed on the course and engaged in their learning (for example, collaborative online class publication). It could also be a forum in which students discuss any problems they have with the homework;
• to get feedback - use comments, forums, or even customized forms to collect feedback, survey data, or ask anyone you’d like to give input or ideas;
• to create ePortfolios, web projects, school newspapers, class websites, etc.;
• to set up a multi-layered, in-depth, multimedia rich website – that hardly looks today like a blog at all.

Blogs help teachers extend the classroom to any place with access to the web and collaboration with classmates and even people all over the world. Blogs are also implemented in order to promote autonomous learning of foreign languages. For example, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has established a blog in which both teachers and learners can interact through their entries and comments, resulting in a large corpus data of written short essays in English.

Blogs have been used in education since the turn of the century when Livejournal was launched by Bred Kirpatrick in 1999. Campbell (2003) goes into various ways blogs can be used by teachers and students to communicate in an EFL environment. He suggests using class blogs as a forum for students to express opinions, ideas, and interesting information. Additionally, the use of a ‘tutor blog' is a way for teachers to share with students and point them to other interesting links.