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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

A Cool New Tool for Collarboration

Trailfire a nice little free tool
I have not fully explored this but I like what I see and I can already think of lots of ways to use it... Make sure to click through to the wiki entry so you can see examples of this in action....the concept is simple but hard to explain.. it allows any collaborative group to use sticky notes look at resources and talk to each other about them... okay that was confusing...Just go take a look!
The excerpt below was from a comment left on my blog.

We did not originally envision Trailfire to be an application that would be used in education. We are, however, seeing a number of teachers beginning to use it for that purpose. I am looking for a few teachers who are interested in using technology in the classroom to take a look at our application and tell us what we can do to make it a more effective tool for teaching.

A complete explanation i and examples are found on this wiki

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5 comments:

Tal said...
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Tal said...

I agree that Trailfire is a great educational tool. I don't think this trail is on the wiki, but it gives one more great example of how useful trailfire is in both inside and outside the classroom: http://trailfire.com/ssaha/trailview/34475
I think this site can be used for so many great teaching and learning activities. This will be a great way to motivate a class to write and collaborate on assignments together. Trailfire really allows for so many activities which is really very exciting.

Barbara Barreda K-8 Administrator, Tech integration advocate, Going 1:1 with netbooks said...

Thanks for the link. I will take a look. Tommorrow I am off to the Google Academy.

kellywchris said...

Thanks for the link. I was looking for something like this. Will try it out and see if it fills the bill.

Larry Ferlazzo said...

I, too, think Trailfire is a good tool. One problem I see with it, though, is that in order to create trails you have to download it (unless I'm missing something), which makes it a little problematic for some schools (like ours) which make it a bureaucratic challenge to download applications into the computer lab.

I've had students create similar projects with online applications that allow them to annotate webpages and then send them to me to post on our website. It seems to work pretty well, and doesn't require any downloads.

Here are a couple of posts on the applications we use:


http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/05/26/fleck-2/

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/05/13/jumpknowledge/