However, as you are all here to read about the educational technology aspects of my career in education I'll focus on what I did after the trips that I'm a little proud of. The main technology present on the Catalina trip were cameras, and the students spent a lot of time and effort happily clicking away at everything from inane rocks to memorable shots of breeding sharks and group photos. But since everyone was using their own (sometimes two of their own, camera and phone) I was a little bummed that people might be in awesome pictures that they would never see and that in general I wished everyone had access to everyone else's photos from the trip to help us all remember the awesome time we had.
My solution was to make a group image hosting page for all of our students, myself, the other teachers, and even some of the employees who had taken pictures to upload all of the pictures to. Some of the students had first suggested a Facebook page, but that had several issues with it: it's public*, it often downgrades the quality of the original pictures, some students might not use Facebook, and I and the other teachers did not want students finding us on the site. So instead I used http://imgur.com/ to make a private uploading site for everyone to put the pictures on. It's worked out quite well, there are several hundred pictures and counting on our page.
I picked imgur because of how easy it is to use. The process for making the group page was simple, create a new account that uses a username and password for the group, set the account to private, and then email the username and password to everyone you want to have the ability to upload pictures. It's not perfect however, since everyone has the username and password they have all the abilities to create mischief which that entails, but for this group of students it worked out well.
