[This piece appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday, March 28th. Click here to go to the original post. To see how blogs can be used to support literacy-learning activities, scroll down the sidebar on the left and click on the links to my students' blogs, which are under construction.]

Until about three months ago, I thought that a blog was a particularly big clog in my kitchen sink. But over the last few months my students have introduced me to a world I hardly knew existed. Recently, the technology director at my school taught me how to set up and manage my own blog. Now I use the Internet site to showcase my own writing and to communicate with my students about coming writing projects.

Blogs have been the subject of a lot of negative press lately. There are at least three common misconceptions. First, the word blog (noun: short for Web log; verb: the practice of posting content to your own blog, or to someone else’s) does not sound like a serious word, much less a dignified activity. In fact, many adults look at blogging the way the far left looks at golf. Anyone who has time to blog must not be working very hard.

But maintaining a blog—and keeping up to date with other people’s blogs—is hard work. The practice requires a complex set of literacy skills that shame most of the mundane habits of the tabloid-reading public.

Second, most adults are notoriously suspicious of things they don’t understand or can’t control, and therefore think that there must be something wrong with what is happening in the blogosphere. But there is nothing wrong with the vast majority of blogging activities. Blogs that cater to young people are bustling hives of human activity.

Pick any time of day or night, and whole choruses of conversations and interactions are taking place—many to many, many to one, one to many, one to one—all out of range of most adults’ radar screens (and screenshots). And get this: Kids are writing more now than they ever did before. Unless you think that adults need to oversee kids 24/7, this is not a negative development. Would we rather our kids locked themselves in their rooms and didn’t talk, or write, to anyone?

Media giant Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. last summer purchased the widely popular MySpace site for a whopping $580 million, is betting that blogging is not a fad. At last count, MySpace claimed more than 55 million users, mostly between the ages of 14 and 23. These numbers, combined with the wider blogging public, indicate a paradigm shift for how people communicate (and a rich new source of advertising space).

The third misconception about blogs is that they are dangerous cruising grounds for sexual predators. Children have a higher chance of getting abducted on the way to or from school, it seems to me, than as a result of any of their online activity. The minuscule chance that a criminal will actually make contact with a child and locate him or her in real-time falls to zero if children promise that they will never post their last names, their addresses (home or e-mail), their phone numbers, or clear individual pictures of themselves on the Web—nor ever, under any circumstance, agree to meet a stranger.

These are big “ifs” for parents, especially for parents of elementary and middle school children—but they’re nothing that an adult with an Internet connection (and a monthly service charge) can’t handle. What kids need is less browbeating and more open dialogue.

When I ask my Internet-savvy high school students what they do when they receive messages from unknown parties, particularly from suspicious users who appear to be older than they claim to be, they tell me that they delete them or just don’t respond.

Online dangers are real, but in my opinion, overblown. Instead of retracing our children’s footsteps and logging on, registering in secret, and running around with a net (your eyes), or installing tracking software on your home computer, parents would better serve their children by engaging them on their own turf by asking them to see their blogs (all of them); asking them what they blogged about today; or by entering the blogging world themselves to see what all the fuss is about. I promise: There is more than one amazing blog for every interest under the sun, from spelunking to Spitfires to Spielberg.

This spring, I am requiring that all of my students design their own blogs, upload all their writing projects from around the curriculum, and link them to my blog in a virtual classroom. This project will replace the tangible portfolio-chapbooks that I have required of all students for the last 15 years. No more paper.

Kids, left largely to their own devices, are currently churning out relatively immature posts and pictures on today’s social-networking sites. I won’t deny it. But adults need to quit standing around and acting like a bunch of amateur plumbers who don’t know how to diagnose the problem. Kids are way out ahead of us in cyberspace, and they’re not coming back. We need to find our Internet voice—so that young people might improve theirs.

[Mark Franek is the dean of students at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He also teaches English.]