I have used a blogs to relay information to my students for years now. I am happy to avoid wasting paper but also to prevent any “I lost the form” or “I missed class, I didn’t know what the homework was.” claims in class. In this way, it leaves a sort of (non)paper trail that shows my students had all the information they needed.
The blog, or any online communication platform for students, should be more than that, of course. In the past, I have pushed the internet tools part of class as far as I could and found diminishing returns very quickly. In my current classes, I can only use ten percent of the student’s grade for homework. Having the students sign in to a common website and share information and consistently spend time is difficult to impossible.