Easy Does It

“Blogging is one way of linking writing, reading, and connecting information and learning together. It seems the perfect venue to introduce elementary school students to the online world world of networked learning. They need to get acquainted to reading and writing hyperlinked text.”
Silvia Tolisano

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while know about Alatfaal Express. For those of you who are new, Alatfaal Express is a collaborative writing blog which I have launched in order to provide a place for our children where they can write for authentic audience and comment on each others work.

It’s a very new project and still in a trial and error phase. I received a very positive feedback on this project but I noticed that after initial appreciation people didn’t join in. I think the cause is that there were a few problems. First problem is that blogger does not allow me to invite people to contribute to this blog who do not have a Blogger/Gmail account. And though registering for an account with Blogger/Gmail is free yet it complicates the process. Secondly many people who would love to have their kids’ work published still feel intimidated by all the technicality like using a blogging platform.

I have been trying to overcome these challenges and Alhamdulillah I have found a solution in the form of Posterous blogging platform. Everyone is familiar with email and how to use it and Posterous makes use of this. So from now on whoever wants to get their kids’ work published on Alatfaal Express has to simply write the post, include any pictures/videos or other media in it and email it to post@alatfaalexpress.posterous.com So now participating to Alatfaal Express is about as easy as it can ever be. No registration required, no authentication, simply write away a post and email and it would be automatically published on the blog (after moderation). Posting comments does not require any registration either, but all comments would be moderated so it is still safe for the kids to read them.

Visit the new Alatfaal Express blog, but don’t worry Aamoo, Chirya and Silver! Your posts are shifted to the new address. In addition to this all the posts would be auto posted to the old Alatfaal Express blog so that blog is not going to die. All posts would be auto posted to twitter as well so our kids’ work can be read by a bigger number of people.

I have tried to make it as easy as I could and I hope that those of you who didn’t want to participate before will give it a try now. Let me know if you face any problem in posting. Also if you can suggest further ways to make this project easier and worthier, please leave a comment.