iSean

i don’t think i’ll typically talk about a Firefox extension, but i’ve found one that i particularly like and that i think has a nice role to play in education. the extension is called Firedoodle and it can turn any webpage into a virtual whiteboard. and, if you create an account with the firedoodle site, you can save any webpage you’ve marked so that your “doodles” are there the next time you visit. this is nice by itself, but this isn’t all. you can also mark your place on long pages. so, if i am reading an interesting article on one of the many online journals now in existence but i know i won’t finish, i can use firedoodle to mark my place and then easily return and continue some time in the future. not only that, but i could add markers in many places throughout an article — e.g., important segments of text that i want to revisit, etc.

as i explore how best to present an online textbook (e.g., wiki-based, drupal, etc.) i have been troubled that students in the online world can’t highlight text and make notations like those students who have a paper-based textbook. this plugin appears to bridge this gap. i know i can’t require students to use Firefox browsers or to have this plugin installed, but i can certainly encourage it and promote it, which i think i’ll do.

my big concern with Firedoodle is that they save your information to their servers. i am leery of web 2.0 startups as i don’t trust them to be around in the long term and i’d fear losing all of my highlighted and manipulated text, etc. hmmm.

i also have Zotero plugin installed. Zotero is really made for educators and helps educators with citation of information found on webpages. it also allows the user to store PDFs, files, images, links, and webpages, but it doesn’t turn the pages/files into whiteboards; rather, any notes the user adds are external to the page/file. i think the reason i haven’t really started using this is that i am scared that a bunch of PDFs and other files being stored in the Firefox infrastructure would bog the browser down. perhaps someone who has played with it more can comment on whether it’s at all disabling.

in any regard, both tools are now free and they both provide little demonstration videos on their sites.

Technorati Tags: plugins, firefox, zotero, students, teachers, firedoodle, web 2.0