Monday, October 4, 2010

Posterous as a Collaboration Tool

I was assigned this year to one of our Critical Action Teams at school. CATs are committees that serve to provide feedback and recommendation to the board and administration of the school. I'm a part of the CAT that is tasked with examining one of our School-wide Learning Results or SLRs and reporting how well we are achieving the result and how we could do it better. The particular SLR for my team has to do with collaboration. Essentially, the goal is producing students who are good collaborators.
Owing to my coaching responsibilities, I will end up missing a lot of the meetings so I was looking for a way for the team to interact online in a simple way. Recognizing my own inexperience with most web 2.0 tools, I wanted something both easy to use and easy to explain. My choice was to use Posterous. Everyone on the team is familiar with and uses email, so Posterous seemed a logical choice. I could create a shared page which team members which they could post articles and ideas to. Other team members could read and comment on posts. The page can also serve as a record of the process the team goes through to arrive at some recommendations. I envision uploading meeting minutes as well as any conclusions we arrive at. The page could be shared with the school administration both during and after the process. Check out the page here.
I have invited the other 5 members of the team to be contributors to the page. After reading the invite email sent out by Posterous, I thought some further instruction might be needed. I created the following tutorial using Jing and iMovie. I uploaded it to YouTube and sent the link to the team members. Now, I wait to see if anyone other than me actually posts.

This was my first attempt at both tutorials and screencasts. I have already noticed several areas for improvement. Eventually I would like to start creating these for my students, so I welcome you comments and suggestions, both on the screencast and the idea of using Posterous for collaboration.

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