Well, you've made it so far! Blogs can be very useful for teachers and pupils because you have a channel of communication you can use for each other - and for the parents.
When you set a blog up you can also choose to make it entirely open and accessible (like this one) or more or less hide it altogether, so that only the people you've invited to read it can even find it. It'd be a bit of a pain at the start of the term, but let's say you've got 20 pupils in your class, each of whom has a school e-mail address and each of whose parents have one mail address between them.
That'd involve you in sending a list of 20 addresses to Blogger to be listed as authors and another 20 addresses to be listed as readers. Once you've got the list, it takes no more than a couple of seconds (it's getting the accurate list which takes time). Then you'd have a blog which the pupils can write in and their parents can read which is only accessible to them (and you).
If you wanted to create another blog for the general public, it'd also be possible, perhaps with just you as the author. Let's say you wanted to circulate a particularly good post from the private blog. You just click on the Dashboard link (the B in an orange box), click on View Posts and Edit Post, copy everything from the private post … and go over to the public blog, create a new post and paste the private post into it.
If your school uses a course management system (like Moodle or Blackboard), there'll be a blog function in that. The only problem is that the parents might not have access to it … and it'll be an even bigger pain negotiating with your IT Department to give them access. The parents would probably have to use a different e-mail address than their ordinary one to log on to it too.
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