..Online Photo Albums & Slideshows

This week has been rough for me.  There was a loss in the family, which truly caught me off guard and unexpectedly.  Due to the loss in my family this past week has been full of kayos.  For that reason, I did not get a chance to post until today.  While all of this "tough stuff" I call it was going on, I began to notice how much more reliant we are on technology to do things.  

In the past, I have attended various funerals, however, none of them were anything like the one I attended yesterday.  The funeral service, aside from the speeches was accompanied by a slideshow, which was shown on two large projection screens.  In the past a tribute was given verbally or shown through pictures in frames or photo albums, from what I had seen.  This whole concept of using technology at a funeral service, to me, was a phenomenal idea.  It saved the family  a lot of time as all we had to do was gather photos which we liked of my grandfather and produce a online photo album.  This album was then emailed to the funeral director who made sure that it was played at the funeral.  This process, was quite simple and the website that we used really make it easy to upload photos and create an album.  If we had made the photo-album by hand, it would  not have been completed as quick nor had the same effect that the slide-show of the photo album did.  In addition, the bonus was that instead of having to worry about producing more albums, the convenience of technology allows us to burn more copies for the entire family at the click of a button.  

How does this related to technology? Well, I was thinking in high school, more specifically, planning 10 we were asked to create a portfolio of our life-long journey thus far as learners.  During that time we were asked to compile pictures, past assignments, and objects that were meaningful to us.  We would create these portfolios simply by going to our local Staples, purchasing poster-boards, markers and construction paper.  Not only was this process costly but I think in this day and age with the amount of technology present we would turn an assignment like this into a technological assignment.  Instead, students could use online photo-albums, where they could upload personal photos of themselves, online images, graphics, scanned assignments, the list of possibilities are endless.  To present their journeys, students could work with the technology to demonstrate to the class how far they have come along.  This interaction between the student and the technology to complete a more creative assignment would be very beneficial.