Blog in the classroom

I feel that teachers can use blogs to set up homework assignments or list missing work. I know several teacher who have set up their own web-sites that their students can enter. I think setting up a blog would allow students to converse openly about their concerns or give feedback about certain assignments or classwork. Teachers can post daily topics that students could check and respond to for extra assignments or part of the daily or weekly lessons. Basically it would set up very similar to what I am doing at Walden university.