Getting my Year 2 class on the net!

I am very eager to get my class of 24 Year 2 students interacting with the world wide web.

A year 3 teacher is doing wiki's with his class. Although a great idea and tool it would be much too tricky for my class.

A prac teacher I had back in 2007 had a fantastic website solely for his Year 5 class. Its fundamental functions were a blog for each of the thirty students nicely contained within the website itself and a place for their work to be uploaded whether it were podcasts, powerpoint presentations or poetry. Also the students could private message to one another on it, there were pages of info on "homework policy", "website rules", "reward status" and other things.

Ultimately, I'd love to do this myself, however, my IT and web designing skills I doubt are capable of this.

I would love to have a website for had 24 self contained blogs for my students. As well as a place to showcase some of our work over the terms.

Any advice of how to go about it? OR...

Are there any websites at the moment which allow and provide, to whatever degree, for my class and I to have a blog each and a place to showcase our work?