I teach HS classes but treat my students more like freshmen college students because I'm trying to prepare them for that next step. Also, to be honest I choose this route because it is less work for me and this style usually works because the majority of my students are responsible and self-motivated. Although, what about that small minority group that needs someone to check up on them in detail?

Projects are the biggest weight and work load in my classes and I usually give them at least a few weeks to work on them but what about that minority group that still does not know how to manage their time and allocate attention to their projects? I prefer a self accountability approach to help these student learn to be responsible. To help with accountability, I have my students setup and use Posterous pages. Posterous is a very simple single web page that students create and manage and they leave posts, similar to a wall on Facebook.  Students are required to daily post a summary of homework they worked on at home and even publish their work to prove they completed it. Now this task seems very tedious and time consuming because we all know we don't like to daily login to a web editor, format a new article, add multimedia content, and then publish it. So to simplify the process, with Posterous all students need to do after they sign up for a free account is email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and the subject will be their heading and the body of text will be the article's content. Although the best part is that they can attache a group of pictures and Posterous will automatically create a simple and neat photo album on their web page. They can also attach docs, pdfs, videos, and even music that can be played directly from their site. Let's say they uploaded their video project to YouTube; they simply need to email the link and Posterous will automatically embed the video into their page.

Additional features of Posterous includes the ability to leave comments on each post for helpful student feedback and the ability to easily subscribe to their RSS feed so that you can closely monitor the progress of certain students you want to keep an eye on. Here is a very simple sample page.

Simple, easy, and best of all...fast.