Ramblings from the Father of Twins

New Tools are always fun to work with and to discovery.

Imagine this – You’ve Googled, Asked Jeeves and eventually you’ve come across some much information that you’re lost, lost in the never-ending landscape called the Internet.  Along the way you realize, you forgot to stop at www.wonderbread.com for scrap pieces of bread that will lead you back to the original question you started with.

April Chamberlain’s post of the details of Trailfire is just another method for sharing resources. But Hansel and Gretel would be proud to use this tool – it provides a way to mark your path.

This podcast was relatively short and required some actual hands on time in order to understand the product. After reading the basic information and intended purposes from the Trailfire webpage, this application provides another opportunity to share resources. I use the Firefox plugin (and IE configuration when I use IE) for Delicious tags and try to encourage others to load it and start working with it. Trailfire follows what Delicious (and other sites like Diigo, Clipmarks and StumbleUpon) have developed for creating new communities of web users. Trailfire allows you to create a custom tag for a page and then extend this information to other sites you (and your network “Can you hear me now”) have visited.

Many of the social bookmarking sites are becoming commonplace as web tools. In each case though, small components are being added to expand basic concepts used in the past. Annotations, creating bibliographies, end notes – traditional functions that have been tweaked and expanded for our up-to-date needs.  Another excellent resource to consider in the classroom.

See you on the Trail soon – I’ll bring the bread.