Writing Project Practices Using TrailFire And Google Documents

The weather in New York City has been a bit off this year. Snow in April followed by heavy thunder and lightning two weeks later have had an effect on the telephone lines that run through the backyards of my brownstone neighborhood in central Brooklyn. It was during last night's storm that i attempted to try outTrailFire but lost my Internet connection so many times that I just gave up.

The next morning in school I thought to test what I wanted to do on my own with my students. I have a class of about 24 in a social studies class called Globalization And The Developing World and the students in the class have been assigned the task of creating an in-depth profile of different so-called third world nations. In the past I have directed students to a large webquest assignment of my own design. While this assignment has yielded quality results, thewebquest is difficult to maintain; changing web addresses, current events, etc.

There has also been the issue of trying to make students accountable for their research:
What have they read?
When did they read it?
What are they getting out of what they have read?
Figuring out what is okay to copy from a given reading
Learning how to cite sources

It's a huge task for me considering that by and large my students are
struggling readers and writers. Collectively they represent a cross section of above-aged highschoolers who have been asked and/or ordered to leave other high schools in New York City. Sometimes seemingly simple instructions can provide for some trying times in my classroom and it during this reaffirmation of this that I had a brainstorm during my morning class.

Some of my objectives this morning was to have my students create an account at TrailFire (http://trailfire.com) and download and install the extension to make it work on their browsers. After making me a Trailfire contact I wanted to go to the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) and create a TrailFire note on the page representing the country they've been assigned. It was here where I thought that it might be better to do something else.

What if students wrote draft paragraphs in their TrailFire post its instead of answering the reflective type questions I had been thinking about doing?
What if the web addresses of these post-it notes made their way in to a Google Document?
Will become easier for students to manage multiple sources when writing an essay?

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Comment by Jeff VanDrimmelen on May 3, 2007 at 7:46am: Ken,

When I first ran across Trailfire I thought of something just like this. As academics we are constantly citing sources and expounding on what we are seeing. Why not have a paper that travels through the web and comments on all the stuff they find. I think it is brilliant. If you want to see my original post it is here.

http://www.edutechie.com/2007/02/trailfire-created-guided-internet-tours/

Keep up the great work!!

Jeff

Comment by Ken Stein on May 3, 2007 at 3:03pm: I'm beginning to see that we can put labels on what is actually happening when we're ask students to write using TrailFire:

- Write To Learn
- Text On Text Learning
- Double and Triple Entry Journal Entry
- Close Reading

So far after two days of using TrailFire with students, things seem to be going very well. Although my basic instruction was to "try to write draft paragraphs", some students have taken it all a step further and have begun to be more reflective in their writing. It's quite possible that TrailFire has opened up another avenue for 'small/low stakes writing.

Comment by John OHalloran on May 3, 2007 at 3:50pm: Hi. I'm the CEO of Trailfire. I'm delighted to see you are using Trailfire for education. I have a nine year old who is in elementary school. I use Trailfire to guide him to web pages that have more information about subjects that we discuss each day. Recently, we heard in the news that scientists had discovered a planet that might be in the 'habital' zone near its star. I sent my son a trail about their findings.

I am curious to know how you would use Trailfire in the classroom. And, what features you think we need to add to it to make it more effective for education.