Tequipment: Blogging About SMART Boards, Resources, Lessons, Training, Games

Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? Two precocious young children are lost in the forest and the trail of breadcrumbs left to guide them has been eaten up by woodland creatures. Now, imagine that instead of small bits of food in the woods, they had left a trail of online annotations across a series of websites, guiding other users and provide information and commentary on their trail. The witch would never catch them and the story would never give small children nightmares.

This is the idea of Trailfire, which aims to help guide users to the best paths in the giant forest that is the Internet. Just like any good guides, they want you to avoid the riff-raff, boring wastes of time, rip-off artists, and man-eating mountain lions*. Describing it as a tour guide is a little misleading, however, as it is really a community of tour guides. Trailfire members create trails of websites that they find entertaining, relevant, and informative. They provide their throughts and suggestions. Trails are broken down into interests, and Trailfire suggests paths based on your preferences.

We like Trailfire. Educationally, we like the idea of students using it to show how they used the Internet to gather information for projects and essays. Students can explore and share information with their peers quickly and easily. Teachers can create trails for their students to follow. In general, we think it’s great for finding useful websites from trusted users and groups.

Check out Trailfire and let us know what you think. If anyone out there uses Trailfire, tell us your thoughts about it in the Comments section.

*We can’t prove there are man-eating mountain lions on the Internet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 5:16 am and is filed under Web Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.