Annotate and Create Web Tours with Trailfire
Trailfire lets you leave "marks" for other visitors to read on web pages that you visit. You can join a series of marks together into a trail and share them via sending email or publishing it on the Trailfire site. You can also add a link to a trail on your web page or blog or even to a particular "mark" on the trail.
Here's my first trail:
Anyone can see marks and trails provided they have IE (Version 6 or later) and Firefox (Version 1.5 and later) installed.
Creating a trail is quick and easy.
There's lots of ways librarians could use this tool as well as teachers and students:
- Tour of how to find journal articles on a library site
- If you liked this book, you might like ...
- Essential reading on .... with commentary
- Student assignment to leave comments on the sticky notes on the page creating a group commentary or conversation
- Tour of library resources for a particular assignment
- Ask students construct a tour (bibliography) of resources with annotations
- Create a tour of a new virtual collection highlighting interesting items and features
- Extreme Googling or Yahoo! or extreme searching brought to you by your library search wizards
- New research sites
- New databases tour
- Staff picks - best music, best reads
- A day in the life of a librarian
What do you think would make a good trail?
Leave a comment.
How do you create trails?
Creating a trail is easy. Sign up at Trailfire. Download the extension for Firefox or the IE7 add-on Watch the screencast that shows you how to drag the sticky note bubble from the toolbar to the page where you'd like to leave a mark.
Trails may be private or public.
Trailfire is just one of the new breed of social browsing tools but it has some very useful features for libraries, teachers and students.
Thanks to Lee at LGR Blog for pointing out Trailfire.
Tags: cool tools | firefox extension | information literacy | library | library tours | screencast | trailfire
