Using email to blog to support learning

I had a fruitful session with a placement manager at Sheffield College yesterday - we discussed what she wanted the learners to be able to do:
1. Easily upload pictures and videos that they had taken with the XDA Flints or their own phones to one place so they could view them in class or in their own time.
2. Comment on each other's pictures and videos
3. Rate them

I was going to use FriendFeed but this only allows you to upload from your own email address, rather than providing you with a generic email address that everyone can use, so we decided to go with Vox.com which has a generous upload limit.

I discovered another great thing about Vox - you can generate additional email addresses to send stuff to. With each email address that you generate, you can add specific tags, so learners could email to one address and have their pictures automatically tagged with certain key words. This will become very useful if you want pictures to be searchable by assignment for instance.

Of course learners can also go online and add additional tags to the photos and videos, as well as the comments.

One thing we haven't yet worked out is the best way to socially share PowerPoint. Slideshare took its time and I wonder if anyone can point me to another good PowerPoint sharing site?

The downside to Vox is that I couldn't update it through an RSS feed. Only certain other blogs are supported.

I guess the one ultimate site that we want to use hasn't yet been invented!

Great social use of blog sites

I'd suggested to a tutor that they set up a blog site and give out the email to blog address to the learners so they could all add photos and reflections on one blog site. We're going to try this from Sept with a group so I'll update my blog later in the year with the outcomes of this.
I was chatting to some friends in a kitchen today and people are already using this function in their everyday lives: after a wedding, the bride and groom have given out a blog/photo site email address so that everyone can upload their photos of the event to one site for everyone else to look at. That's a great idea! And the fact that this is becoming everyday practice is all the more reason for us teachers to be adopting it in teaching, don't you think?