Blog-easies: Posterous/Tumblr

By Jerry Bates

Table of Contents

Introduction
Today’s bloggers like to insert many kinds of artifacts into their web logs. But having to master the appropriate code strings so those precious objects display properly can be a deterrent, especially for bloggers who do not want to spend a lot of time with the technical aspects of maintaining a blog. A family of tools has emerged which removes the need to tinker with technicalities. We like to call this class of blogging tools “Blog-easies.” Reminiscent of “Big Easy” and “Speak Easies,” their hallmark is utter simplicity.

Examples in K-12 Settings
Although the following classroom blogs may not have been built with a Blog-Easy, they do illustrate blogs in K-12 settings:

• A fifth grade class blogs about literacies outside of class
• Ideas for classroom blogs for math classes
• Teacher of gifted students uses a blog to post composition assignments to accompany the class reading
  
• Blogs reported in use to hone writing skills (Education Week article)
• Iditarod blog for teachers
• AP Microeconomics
• Social Studies teacher blog with important historical documents
• Classroom blog for students to discuss Sarah Plain and Tall (Note: this one also illustrates what happens when teachers fail to curtail who can post comments--see comments posted under "theme.")
• Teacher shares her trip to Greece with students back home

Popular Services
Posterous

• Want to blog fast? Posterous lets you do it simply with your email account, even if you don’t already have a blog. In that case, Posterous automatically creates your blog for you. Sounds a bit “pre-posterous,” but it isn’t. (Posterous is actually pronounced like "poster" and "us".)
  
• Posterous blogs can be public, private, or collaborative (group sites for classes). The email subject line becomes the title, the body of the message becomes the text, and attachments are embedded in a media-appropriate window.
• Posterous accepts text, video, audio, and still photos. Send a batch of photos at once, and Posterous assembles them into a gallery. Word processing documents are embedded in a viewer (Scribd) so readers can scroll through them (or download to their own computer).
• Once you've joined Posterous, you’ll want to subscribe to others’ posterousings, so you can check in on what they’re saying/doing from your Posterous page.

Tumblr

• Tumblr is another quick-start blogging station. People who use Tumblr are “tumbleloggers”. Like Posterous, no need to master any coding, since Tumblr presents your objects automatically based on document type…. the way they should be (photos in a photo gallery, for instance). Post and go.
• Tumblr does not have comment feedback boxes. Instead, readers may “like,” and “reblog.”
  
• Posting to Tumblr is done from the Tumblr dashboard which has icons for each document type. Click the icon, enter your information (or search for the document that should be uploaded), and then post.

Getting Started
Posterous

• Start from your email account and send your first post. Posterous automatically creates your blog for you. Email your first message to post@posterous.com, and attach any documents you want. If you prefer, you can go to Posterous first to create your account. Either way, all your posts are sent to Posterous via your email account. You may use different email accounts to post, but you must register them with your account.
• Posterous creates a web address for you, such as "[myblogname].posterous.com"
  
• You can edit your blog text and titles. You can delete an uploaded attachment, but you cannot swap it out for another.
  
• Tutorials
• Daniel Honigman and Michael Quigley walk you through the process
• Tom Larkin’s job aid: http://www.larkin.net.au/resources/posterous.pdf
• With Posterous, you can simultaneously autopost your Posterous postings to other services you use.
• Posterous Tutorial on YouTube
  

Tumblr

• Go to www.tumblr.com Enter your email address, password, and the name for your blog. Customize the appearance of your Tumblr page.
• Tutorials
• Creating an account
  
• Creating a Private Tumblelog
• Creating posts
  
• Create multiple tumblelogs and invite others to collaborate
• Adding tags

Uses in K12 Educational Settings
Teachers could….

• Post notes and assignments for your students; add interest and emphasis with embedded videos, audio, photos.
• Build a community of peers interested in testing and sharing a variety of pedagogical practices: try something, then share the results with fellow teachers, inviting more ideas from your network.
• Engage a group of fellow middle school teachers in your district in a “book study” of the latest “strategies to improve student achievement” publication.
• Finally get those new social studies textbooks in your district? Collaborate with fellow grade teachers as you try different strategies and activities buried in the teacher’s manual.
• As long as all the students have ready access to the Internet, embedding handouts in your blog (so students can download, or so parents can follow along) creates instant access without excess printing.
• Did the students take a field trip? Did you bring the digital camera? Does your cell phone have Internet access and a camera? Capture key events in the field trip and post them to the blog. Use those images as story starters when you return to the classroom. Have children recreate the experience using the pictures as visual prompts.
• Remember the weekly “letters home” to parents? Why not put that on your classroom blog? You can feature photos (or videos) of student work to share. (Be watchful about posting children’s names, however. You may need to have written parental permission to post a photograph of a student in your class.)
• Locate and engage content experts who would be willing to respond to children’s posted work, providing real world cases of where the content really matters.

Students could…..

• Use individual student blogs as the collection point for portfolio entries. Have the child post his work and include the personal reflection of progress. Use the reply functions to offer praise and suggestions.
• Have lab partners capture (photograph, video) and post key stages of science experiments, together with the lab notes. (May even make the spiral notebook obsolete!)
• Follow what identified experts are saying about the material you are studying. Ask them questions and hang around for their answers.

Consider…

• Take advantage of the multi-media aspects of online blogging tools.
• Use extra care (spell checking!) before hitting the post button!
• Privacy and student protection features. Check your acceptable use policy for guidelines on referring to children by name and posting photographs of them. (Consider written parental consent.)
• To keep blog management simple, use group blogs in classroom setting instead of maintaining individual blogs for each student (from comment on Tom Barrett’s post)
• Think about your district policy on children using email in school.
• Have a separate email account for your “teacher” world.

Additional resources
History of Posterous: Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan launched the company in June 2008, with seed capital from Y Combinator.

• Chris Ullrich interviews Sachin Agarwal about the origin of the species. Sachin says, “Posterous is the dead simple way to publish online. You simply create an email message and attach photos, video, audio, or documents. We'll take it all in, host it, convert it to the most web friendly format, and publish it online in seconds.).” Part of the motivation for building the tool was the desire to have a really easy way to ship photographs to the web and have them come out in an organized album. Agarwal also uses the term “micro-blogging”….so seems that’s a good descriptor for this family of tools.

History of Tumblr: Created by David Karp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr) in 2007. Some of its current venture capitalists also fund Twitter. See also

• Sketch of Karp’s creation of Tumblr
  
• As Chris Dannen says, “In one sentence, Tumblr is a blogging platform that makes it easier to post video, audio, words, social bookmarks, photos, and even other people's blog posts into your blog, and share it with other people.Instead of having to upload things to YouTube, Delicious or Flickr, or create your own WordPress database before posting things, you can put your media directly into Tumblr from your computer or mobile phone. It's blogging, the way blogging was meant to be.” http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/what-hell-tumblr-and-other-worthwhile-questions
1. This discussion notes that traditional (!) blogs follow a title-paragraph-paragraph sequence. While reading a sea of grey may be boring, the presence of media enriches the tumblelogger’s online presence. Dannen observes that following someone’s Tumblr is like following the person’s tweets.
2. Dannen also notes that Tumblr does not use comment boxes to elicit feedback from readers; you can “like” the site; “reblog” it (place a link to it in your own blog). Dannen marks this feature as part of the “virality” of the Internet (fast spreading).

• Paul Boutin, in the New York Times (March 13, 2009) comments on the “blissful” simplicity of the product (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/tumblr-makes-blogging-blissfully-easy/)

Extended Learning

• Deng, L., & Yuen, A. H. K. (2009). Blogs in higher education: implementation and issues. TechTrends, (53), 3, 95-98. Although the title of this relates to higher education, the points are equally appropriate in K12 education… Notable points:

1. Blogs are “reflective devices,” akin to their paper forebears, the journal.
2. The comment/feedback features add important interactivity, often missing in traditional paper-based compositions that children prepare for school.
3. Requiring students to blog can have unintended consequences, such as forced and cursory composition.
4. Teachers are advised to incorporate some level of structure in their assigned use of blogs; rubrics are recommended.

• Ray, B. B., & Hocutt, M. M. (2006). Teacher-created, teacher-centered weblogs: Perceptions and practices. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, (23), 1. 11-18.
  
• Sanchez, J. (2006). Teaching with blogs. Educause, available online
• What blogging does for students