My year 9 class spent part of their time earlier last academic year
working on a podcast topic. At the time I said to them I would try and
find a way of uploading their material to a webpage so that they could
show it at home. It was only at the beginning of this year that I came
across Posterous as a means of doing so and I thought it would be a
fantastic idea. So today I have been getting my students to email their ogg sound files
which they produced in Audacity and I have been adding them to our class
blog http://year9ict.posterous.com. Posterous converts the ogg files
into a nice embedded audio file for easy playback. The girls have loved
it (some didn’t but decided to send me their files anyway) and some of
said to me they will be showing the blog to their parents at home.
Google Analytics data might prove interesting on this!

This certainly was an example of what I would call doing ‘simple things
beautifully’. The email your blog system which Posterous uses is
extraordinarily simple and their ability to handle different file
formats even down to obscure ones like .ogg audio files gives teachers a
lot of power.

Coupled with the ability to tag posts and it is quite possible to run a
Posterous blog as a basic e-portfolio system for students which they can
then in turn quite easily show to their parents at home.

I will be exploring how to use Posterous to support the MFL department
at our school who are looking for a better online solution for their
audio files. Perhaps a further post this week will be forthcoming!