One of the roadblocks to teaching children how to blog is that many of us teachers don't know how to do it ourselves. Should that be a requirement? Not necessarily. Teachers need to embrace the authenticity that is derived from blogging, though, and make that their goal. Kids need to write, (we all know that) and blogging provides a great venue. I won't dive into the enormous topic of why you should have students blog due to the exhaustive supportive reasons you can find online if you search for the cognitive whys--the purpose of this blog is to persuade you that it's time to quit postponing what you should be teaching.
Ask your students: Do you read online? Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account (or any other) in which you have dialogue with many people? Do you SMS / IM with people? Do you follow any online magazine or blog? Chances are they will answer "yes" to at least one of those questions; middle school students may surprise you by answering yes to all of them. Want to make this conversation more interesting? Ask those same questions in an online survey (Google Form), then review the questions with students and reveal the answers statistically. Then you will have support for why students need to practice their online voice + share information they are really interested in learning about (themselves) + a quick lesson in stats if you want to squeeze that into the lesson.
So, what's stopping you from having students blog? I bet they're the same reasons that stopped me initially. Someone will be hurtful, there are privacy issues, some students will refuse or barely try, and I bet most teachers ask themselves these two: With what (safe) platform? and About what topics? How big an investment is this, anyway, to teach blogging?
First of all, there are plenty of platforms where you can set up a class, moderate student blogs, and then publish them after review. Kidblog and Edublogs are two of the most popular. That solves the privacy issues because you can control how student information is viewed and moderate hurtful or bullying comments. Visit their sites to explore how they work but rest assured that they make student blogging incredibly easy.
Second hurdle: what to write about. There are plenty of resources for ideas. Here's a great one that Miguel Guhlin shared in his blog Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Stuff to Keep, and I've written about this before myself with Visualize the Web and The Digital Writing Workshop. Students initially need you to lead the way on topics, but then turn them loose to explore their personal interests.
Don't stifle them by too-strict writing standards (ignore a typo, non-capitalized proper noun, or misused comma). Severe standards can lead to "shy" writing; they'll be so afraid of penalization that they will write minimally. Use writing models that demonstrate great writing for an editing lesson. Focus on changing what students know by showing them great examples. Jeff Anderson addresses this beautifully in Everyday Editing, one of the best books I've read about teaching students how to edit. (Here's an interview with Jeff at Education News.) I begin every school year with a couple of brief writing assignments that carry no grading assessment for the express purpose of evaluating what each student needs to address to improve individual writing. Anderson additionally explores this in depth with Mechanically Inclined.
Your personal investment as a teacher I can't really help you resolve, but I want to encourage you. Find one or two bloggers you enjoy following. Share that with your students. Try blogging yourself. Once you blog, you'll realize how important it is to reflect and most importantly, you'll see the benefits of blogging--you must address a topic, demonstrate understanding, and map how you'll write (opener, main content, closer--my processes for this blog). The subject matter is not nearly as important as the motivation when it comes to writing. We need to allow blogging for the pure pleasure of providing student expressiveness.
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