Posterous is a super fast way to create and maintain a blog using email. Came across this thanks to
Horst Sievert.
The subject line of your email becomes the blog post title with the message text becoming the post text. But, it doesn't stop there as
Posterous lets your attach files (photos, MP3's, documents, video), which are also placed in the body of your post.
If you attach more than one photo in the same message,
Posterous automatically creates a very nice looking image gallery.
You can also insert URLs into your email message and these are added to your post as links, with a video link being converted to an embedded player. An
RSS feed is included as standard. The only down side is that there doesn't seem to be any way to tag posts.
It really couldn't be easier. As I use email quite a bit I decided to set up a
college blog with
Posterous to use for posting notices for my classes during the year. The idea being that the students will add the
RSS feed to their
college personalised start page and can keep track of notices whenever they sign in.
Being a blog, it will also allow students to post comments about a notice if they have any queries or questions!
Be warned, it will probably be BLOCKED on your network - it is on ours!!! Apparently,
Posterus is a no go area :-(
But, all is not lost because
Posterus also lets you autopost, via email, to some of your other services - blogs, twitter and flickr. So, you could set up a new
edublogs blog, not blocked, which will receive all the 'email' posts.
While this will work for text, urls and some 'non blocked' video links it is not the complete solution as the other content hosted on
Posterus (images, audio) is still blocked and will not show up on the student network!
A much better solution is to see if your 'education network manager' will unblock your individual
posterous blog. I recently asked for three of my blocked blogs to be unblocked and they all were :-)
Thanks
NCTE.
Previously, I would have sent notices directly to the students' email addresses but I am interested in seeing if the whole
RSS setup and commenting feature will work better.
Technorati Tags: edublog, posterous, rss
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Patricia Donaghy is an ICT Teacher in Dublin, Ireland. You can read some more information 
