The wonderful, ever faster pace of technological change does have its downsides, especially for already busy educators. No wonder a US department of commerce study into the takeup of ICT among 55 industries found Education was – last… At times when I’m feeling overwhelmed by just how my addiction to learning seems to manifest itself as exciting but demanding new tasks and responsibilities, I’m thankful that I have taken the time to incorporate various tools into my life that make me more productive. Number 1 on my list of these over the last year has been Evernote. Here’s a great post by a fellow teacher (@shanetechteach) into how he uses it to prioritise tasks. I use it to create and store notes from wherever, whenever, and to keep everything I’d ever need (images, PDFs, text, even video files) in sync between work and home. It also allows me to share what I’ve stored in it online with others.

This post however is about what has fast become my number 2 tool for keeping above water: Posterous.com . Why is it so good? Having several online ‘faces’ as one does these days (Facebook, twitter, Youtube, Flickr, a blog etc) it can be a darned hard job to keep them all updated. Post a video to Youtube. Then logon to Facebook to tell your friends on there. Then send a tweet. Then compose and post a blog about it. What if instead, all you had to do was send ONE email? You wouldn’t even have to go thru the upload process to Youtube originally. Am I crazy? Am I on the take from Posterous?

No. But I am a fan of ubiquitous productivity. Not only does posterous do all these things, but it hosts all your files, gives them a short url if necessary, and keeps them ordered as their own dated blog. You can see my fairly random one here. So again fellow educators in need of less to do: Posterous lets you auto-update multiple services using just email. Therefore, wherever I have access to email (home, webmail or mobile), I can do multiple updates of text, video or images to just about anywhere. Ok, enough of the hype-talk.

Posted via email from Jonathan’s posterous

My next step after setting up the graphical elements of my presentation is to gather all my resources in one place and make them available as a resource for the day. I do this with evernote.com, which allows me to put every piece of relevant info I find, be it web pages, pdf files, even handwritten notes into a notebook that I can search and access from the web, my desktop or my phone. This is a great example of the power of cloud computing. Imagine having a joint class notebook where students could post almost any kind of content from any kind of device?!

For the purposes of the workshop, once I’ve used these resources to construct my workshop, I can use evernote to publish the notebook to a web address so they are all accessible for workshop attendees also! I can’t rate evernote highly enough in this regard. Attendees can even rss/bookmark the site so that when I add new resources to the notebook, they are notified.