Free blogging platform Posterous started out offering no more than a simple way for people to quickly start blogging. Over the last year Posterous has slowly added some great enhancements including themes and multimedia posts. Today, Posterous added the option for users to create static stand-alone pages as a part of their blogs. Now you can add an about page, a page for your favorite links, a contact page, or any other type of page that you desire. Links to your static pages will appear on your blog’s homepage. Adding pages is just as easy as creating a new post in your Posterous web editor. To add a page, click the “pages” tab then select “create new page.”

Applications for Education
Now that Posterous has added the option for static pages, it has become a good tool that students could use to create an online portfolio. Students can maintain a chronological blog while also adding pages to highlight particular works they create throughout a course. For example, in the Civics course that I’ll teach next fall I could have students maintain a chronological blog about the November elections while also having them create pages to display their capstone projects at the end of each unit.

For more ideas on using blogs as digital portfolios, I recommend reading Jeff Utecht’s Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios.