Wednesday 13 January 2010

Posterous- Perfect for collecting evidence of progress?



I had a discussion with Doug Belshaw a while ago where I had suggested that posterous could be used as a kind of e-portfolio because of its ability to absorb so many media types and the ease of publishing. John Johnston introduced me to posterous a while ago indirectly as I just liked the simplicity of how it collected anything that grabbed his interest-photos from walks, audio from mountain tops etc. All a student really needs to be able to do is e-mail. Posterous will support text, images, video, audio files (making it an ideal podcasting platform too via the rss feed) and will also take documents. Images can be submitted as galleries, and can cross-post to a number of places, such as flickr, wordpress, blogger, youtube etc if you wished. Furthermore, you can send mixed file types to a single post. For school use, there are a number of appealing features, such as the ability to password protect the page so that only readers you want to see your blog can see it, and even better, you can protect individual posts by e-mailing to private@posterous.com. Sites can also easily be created as group sites where a number of people can easily publish to the same place too. Students could also potentially use the bookmarklet to grab pieces of text from web pages and talk about them-a much better alternative than the open plagiarism that a class recently confided to me. Possible limitations could be the 1GB of storage if this was being used over a long period of time, but the founders are clear that they are willing to discuss this if it becomes an issue and John has consistently underlined how supportive they have been to him (as recently as yesterday).
I was chatting to the PT Computing today and showed him posterous by setting one up. It took literally a minute. He was highly impressed that he could set up a blog simply by sending an e-mail, without any coding knowledge and was also surprised by the variety of media that the platform could handle when I showed him my own posterous,. He basically thought that this is the kind of thing that a) his classes should be doing in s1 computing and b) would act as a great record of a students work over a period of time. From that discussion, I'm going to do two things. With Fred's agreement, I'm going to set the s1 computing class up with posterous tomorrow and load it with their individual slides that formed the whole of the class presentation last day. Anything we produce in class, I am going to ask that the children post it to their record. Further to that, I think it would be very useful to share the information across the school. Just from working today to set up a Wiki page for a Singapore school link, there is so much less to worry about in publishing to posterous and it gives work a much wider audience including, most importantly, keeping parents in the loop with their childrens progress. It would also allow students to demonstrate progress in more than just one way i.e. paper based evidence. I would love to hear what other people think about this?

1 comment:

  1. Loving the sound of this Kenny, will look forward to hearing more about it as things progress!

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