student blogs

My level 2 students now also have blogs of their own. We started by setting up the accounts after discussions about the meaning of community and how technology has created an international community. The following week they started to look at their profiles and researching other blogs who have similar interests.
There were a couple of problems with this week. A couple of the students forgot thier password or user names so had to create new ones. And this caused the same problems as the week before, in that the user names they were trying to use had been taken already. What most of them have ended up using is thier name with 2005 on the end and this seems to have worked.
Today is the fourth week for some of them to be posting. I'm surprised by a couple of things. On a positive note they say that they really like writing thier blogs and seem very keen to be doing it in class. However, no-one has written an entry in thier own time, and last week I was off sick but they didn;t post anything even in the class time.
The second thing I'm surprised about is their weak IT skills. Some of the students have very good transferable skills and have had no problems logging in, posting, adding comments, etc. But many of them have needed support through all the stages. They're not sure where to go to start (which site - even when i've emailed them the link!), they're not clear about the process of logging in and get confused between viewing their blog and posting within it. And the biggest surprise to me is them forgetting thier user names and passwords, and their poor study skills where they've either not written them down or have forgotten to bring their files with them! These are supposed to be higher level students, many of whom are hoping to go to university!