I seem to be becoming an evangelist for Posterous at school, so I thought it would be the best choice for my first post for the new school year (after a long hiatus :cry:).
Last year I used Wordpress MU for the blogs my students wrote for the World Religions class and I loved the results. However, students needed time to learn how to post, and the dreaded spambots arrived. At the end of the year I decided that I was spending too much time managing spam and teaching the technology. I needed something easier.
Posterous is definitely that. @DAJBelshaw has been talking about it since its arrival last August and I certainly agree with him about its features. It is the simplest way to post text (by just sending an e-mail to post@posterous.com), or pdf, office, image, audio, and video files (by just attaching them to the e-mail. In fact it will even embed youtube videos, or images from the url in your e-mail. It presents content in a user friendly manner and is thus perfect for teachers to use as a homework blog or even as a place to host files for students. Students can set up their blogs in moments and subscribe to each other with one click. My World Religions blogs have been set up in almost half the time of last year :-) . Most importantly it is free to use, and advertisment free (at least at the moment).
Some warnings however…
Posterous is designed to be easy to use… but it is not automatically set up for an educational environment. Here are three things we had to change to make it more appropriate…
- Removing student names from the blog – Posterous automatically uses the author’s name from their e-mail for the title of the blog and profile. Easy to change in the settings… but you have to notice!
- Making the blog private – Posterous is an open community where anyone can subscribe/comment on other’s blogs. A number of outsiders subscribed to student blogs almost immediately. We have changed our settings to be private and password protected. Not essential, but it allows us to work in a closed environment.
- Using predetermined URLs – Posterous uses your e-mail address for the subdomain of the URL. We changed ours to the usernames my students use for their moodle accounts. This makes it easy for me to find their blogs.
All in all… not a bad deal. We had the same problem with outsiders commenting last year with Word Press MU, and the other issues were fixed by most students on their own. There are just a few to follow up with this week.
What do you use to blog? Do you have your students using Posterous?
I’d love to hear your ideas!
PS I’m planning on blogging every other week this year… let’s see if I keep up 
