alice’s posterous

In an attempt to get my Spanish students to practice their Spanish outside the classroom, I decided to set up a blog for them to be able to view, read and listen good stuff related to Spanish culture and language. To also share and view their work. The main objectives of this blog are for more students to keep up with their Spanish and to also make them share their views in the "comments" section. Especially when they listen or read other students' works, they will be able to compare, assess and see how work can be improved.

At my last school, I already set up a school blog using Edublogs. I chose http://edublogs.org/ because it was free and I suppose their tag line "Blogging for students and teachers made easy"! drew the attention on me. Nevertheless, it was not that easy to set up and at times, it took a long time to download resources.

My personal blog is with http://posterous.com/ and I find it so much easier to use, especially if you're not a geek :)
All you have to do is to write an email as your post (as I am doing now) and send it to Posterous. Posterous takes care of the rest. If you want to send a video, you attach it to the email or copy the URL into your email and Posterous will show the video in your post. If you want to send a picture, just copy the image location or attach it to your email. Again Posterous will show the picture in your post. If you want to send a slideshow or a document, attach it to your email, Posterous takes care of the rest.
I did a lot a recordings this year with students using a little microphone plugged into my laptop and Audacity. I save the recordings as .mp3 files and attach them to the emails I send to Posterous. Posterous insert the audio files into the new posts and this way, students can listen to their own recordings (which they looove!).
So far so good... They are not many comments made by students yet, but I know it takes a while and it is a learning process. The blog is http://spanishblog.posterous.com/ and of course, your comments are welcome as well :)

What about you? which platform do you use to blog and why?

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I was reading Isabelle Jones' post about her nomination in the Top 100 Language competition when I discovered I am also nominated but in a different category: language teaching.

I am still  shocked (in a happy way ;) as I started blogging not even a year ago thanks to my dad. I must admit I thought blogging was for pretentious people who wanted to show off their work. Again, I didn't understand the concept of sharing and collaborative work! But my dad pushed me and at first I found it hard to think of ideas to write in my blog. Also, I use Posterous which is the easiest blogging platform as all you have to do is to send an email as your post. When I started blogging last summer, Posterous was new and it feels now like I am part of the Posterous family with Garry Tan and Sachin Argawal co-founders of Posterous.

But my blog wouldn't be nominated without YOU, my regular visitors who always add meaningful comments to my posts and make my blog a great place for discussions and conversations rather than a boring monologue! So a big thank you to Marcy Webb, Shelly Terrell, Sherry Amorocho, Anne Hodgson, my dad, my mum and all the kind people who give their time to comment on my blog :)

By the way, the voting is opened until the end of the month. The best 5 language blogs of the overall top 100 list will receive a Kiva starter account. Kiva lets you help people by financing projects with micro credits.

Click on the voting button below or on the sidebar:

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