Trailfire

Trailfire presentation by April Chamberlain

Trailfire is a guide to help locate the path taken as we search the internet. This is the first that I have heard of this tool and see many applications for its use. Without having experimented with it very much it still seems somewhat cumbersome. In my opinion many colleagues of mine will welcome this to use in their own professional development, with a webquest with their students or to enhance the curriculum taught.

Being that this resource can be either public or private will allow for staff development or personal development to experiment with the internet and its wonderful resources world wide and choose whether to share what has been found. It also allow for teacher created curriculum to be “controlled” for that classroom.

Trailfire enables the trail creator to add virtual marks to any website using the same trail name. The beauty of Trailfire is that there are two ways to locate a trail. The first is to search for that topic of choice from the Trailfire website or a person can receive a link by the trail creator. Again this system is conducive to those that prefer their privacy and others that are out there to gather as much information as possible.

I’m hoping to use Trailfire as a resouce for literature appreciation and book elements such as background, character development, elements of the story and illustration styles. Within this presentation there are multiple resources to delve into that discuss storytelling.

Once a person locates a trail they would like to visit, select and add this to ones favorites using the box in the upper right hand corner. There are several “trails” listed that I will be spending more time exploring. These appear to have many more articles, blogs, lesson plan and ideas to develop a network of Trailfire uses.

Great job and nice trails to explore. I will be taking a much closer look at this tool. Thanks for the presentation.