Social+Bookmarking

EdTech Activity 4
//Developing a WebQuest and Trailfire//.

Students will develop interactive WebQuests related to the topic of "Ethics in Teaching or Coaching" that integrates the use of social bookmarking tools and Trailfire, annotated pages can also be shared with others. The intent is to incorporate the use of Web 2.0 tools into an assignment that is often seen as a Web 1.0 application.

WebQuests are great teaching tools that foster active student learning. Students work together (collaborative learning) and develop critical thinking skills by tackling questions related to the topic of the quest. Students are asked to develop resources and to undertake tasks that step through the process of understanding a concept. For more information on why WebQuests are useful teaching tools, please read Tom March's article: [|Why WebQuests].

Step 1
Building Your WebQuest.

Please consult the VISTA Tutorial module for additional information on creating webquests. Your WebQuest should follow the format of the [|WebQuest Template] and include the following sections:

Overview Introduction Quest(ions) Process Resources Evaluation Conclusion

A [|WebQuest] is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. The model was developed by [|Bernie Dodge] at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow [|Tom March,]the [|Educational Technology] staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the [|Teach the Teachers Consortium].

Courtesy of SpartanBurg County School District in South Carolina, USA.

To give you a better sense of what a WebQuest is all about, please take a look at this sample WebQuest entitled: [|A WebQuest About WebQuests.] For additional resources on WebQuests, please take a good look at Bernie Dodge's [|WebQuest Resources] List.

Evaluation Tools for Your WebQuest
[|WebQuest Evaluation Form]

Step 2
Integrating Your Book Marks Select a bookmarking tool and create an account. Look for bookmarks related to your WebQuest topic area and complete the instructions for writing a descriptive statement about the bookmark and then include tags to identify the content of the web site that would be useful to researchers.

Social Bookmarking is simply a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks. Sometimes referred to as [|folksonomies] it is basically collaborative tagging of websites and web content. Websites such as [|del.icio.us], [|Diigo], and [|StumbleUpon] quickly became popular. Please take a look at these instructions for using [|Del.icio.us in Education]. Joshua Schacter, Founder of [|del.icio.us] talks about the tool at the MIT Conference on Emerging Technologies

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Step 3 Trailfire
Building Your [|Trailfire] Finally we reach trailfire. Trailfire rewires the web. The basic building block of Trailfire is the trail - a collection of web pages on a subject or concept, hand built and annotated by a trail creator or guides, on each page.

To use trailfire, download and install the extension (available for Firefox and IE). This will add two buttons and a menu bar item. Use the buttons to open and close the Trailfire sidebar, and to mark a page. (All explained at www.Trailfire.com . When a page is marked, a popup appears where you enter a trail name, a title and a description. When you mark other pages using the same “trail name”, they are grouped together. marks can be set to public or private, and users can choose to view just their own, or everyone’s, annotations on a website. Trailfire's roadmap also permits for the addition of social networking features like adding friends or in our case students and having the ability to set group-based viewing permissions.

Of course, [|here] is one I prepared earlier. To see the popups and to physically take the trail you will of course have to download and install the extension.


 * As always you final task is to reflect on where and how you will use this tool in the discussion forum.**