Easy media publishing

I’ve come across a variety of tools that I’ve been testing in my personal life as well as seeing how it may apply to academia. The first such tool is posterous. In a nutshell this is a quick blogging platform that allows for simple, yet elegant media publishing.

I co-teach a course for a group of honors students, and one of the exercises we have them do is to output a short powerpoint presentation to enable them to share the content on their iPods. I found this tool to be a tremendous asset for me to display their final output in a quick, relatively uniform way, also adding capability for them to critique each others content. I just gave them the post e-mail address, they composed an e-mail with their photos attached. I received a request to post through my e-mail as well as the posterous administrative interface, and after I approved the post, all the work was done for me.

On the personal side, I coached Ryan’s first grade soccer team this year. I used this as a tool, along with sms and e-mail to push updates as to when soccer practice was canceled, changes in schedules, etc. I didn’t formally ask the parents what they thought of my process, though for me it was major time saver.  None the less, we only lost 1 game the entire year. Go Magic!