remote posting options?

I am brand new to wordpress and am attempting to learn as much as I can about it, but am a complete newbie currently. I also have very little experience with coding, but understand the basic premise of it all. That said:

I’d like to investigate my options in tools to use for remote posting. Specifically, I am looking to set up a blog that my family can post articles without necessarily logging into the Dashboard. I’m very comfortable with using the dashboard to post. I see that their is the “press it” option for grabbing a web page link and that you can set up an email account and post from an email.

Are there any options to say, to take something you’ve written and saved on your hard drive and directly publish without logging into the dashboard? Also, any way to publish something to multiple blogs at the same time?

Hoping some one can point me in the right direction here.. Thanks