Trailfire Vs. PowerPoint

It's not the way I thought things would turn out, but it happened that way.

Trailfire is a relatively new entry to the Web2.0 realm and came out towards the end of the spring semester, but its potential was to great to ignore. My students were assigned a large and lengthy web based research project at the beginning of May in my Globalization class. Generally speaking, my students can be classified as "at risk" or as "struggling" students. They are all aged above their grade levels and have transferred from one high school to another more than once and their writing and reading skills are often lacking too.

I've been using Google Documents with students since it was Writely. In the last two years I've been working hard at doing on-line, live conferencing with my classes, making comments and creating dialogue within students' documents hoping to improve student writing. While there has been some improvements, doing research projects with my students has remained a challenge. Many students have gotten on over teachers who are completely unfamiliar with the web and who have been willing to accept anything that is typed and submitted on time. Turning in MS Word documents that are merely copy and paste jobs from Wikipedia is so much of a norm that some students will fiercely defend this type of work as their own!

On the other hand it has been my hope that tools like del.icio.us, Google Notebook and Trailfire can bridge these gaps between students' skills and research writing by making them accountable for the information they gather and by making the process meaningful.

For our Globalization research projects, I asked students to create profiles of various 'developing' world nations and in the process they had to leave Trailfire markers on the web pages where they gathered information. At first I asked students to write draft paragraphs in their markers but something very different happened in the process; each student used their markers differently than the next - - very differently!

Once I recognized that different things were happening all over the classroom I decided to surrender and go with the flow. The students were given a date in which they would 'present' their Trailfire trails - - their set of markers to the rest of the class. Each student was given the chance to give a short presentation explaining how they used their markers.

It was a great experience for me as I was able to see how each student built their research project from the ground up. One student used their markers to create an outline for their research paper, a few tried to draft paragraphs, another used their markers like a photocopying machine, dumping large bits of text into each marker and then viewed them together as he wrote his essay. Surprisingly, most students wrote brief reflections about what they thought about what they were reading on each web page they visited. In a sense, viewing my students' presentations was seeing a book about literacy come alive. It was a fantastic experience.