Introducting Pinterest

I choose to study the tool of pinterest this week. Lately, I cannot seem to remove myself from “pinning” things onto my online bulletin board, which is what pinterest essentially is. Pinterest is a website, that you can join for free that, like I said is just like a bulletin board except its online. Once you have signed up for pinterest, you are able to create how boards you would like to pin to and then name them. Example, I have a wedding board, where I will pin wedding ideas to and I have an education board, so when I find things I would like to use in my classroom I pin them there. When you sign up for pinterest as well, on the website you can find endless amount of photos under topics that you are interested in, example being education. When you go to look under education it has thousands of pictures which someone else has already pinned. When you click on a picture that catches your eye that you like, you can click on it, it then takes you to a different page to explain what is happening in the picture. If you like the pin you opened, you are able to re-pin it on your own board. Recently, while I was looking under education I found a great way to help teachers organize materials in their classroom, so I repined that to my education bulletin board.

One affordance of this is that it can be used by a teacher because it provides endless amounts of new ideas to incorporate into the classroom. Once the teacher as started to use pinterest and is actively pinning their educational ideas to their education board, that information is then easily accessible to have and implement into their classroom. For example, now that I have pinned that organization link to my education board, once I have my own classroom and need to organize it, I can just log onto my pinterest, refresh my memory on how they recommend it and then go about doing it. Pinterest also allows for teachers to always have something new to use, implement, or show off in their classroom.  Therefore, schools would never have to worry about boring and repetitious lessons in their classroom because people are actually able to pin ideas onto eachother’s board. Therefore, teachers in all the same grade level could exchange ideas through one pin board. A constraint of pinterest is that it can be easily distracting for the wrong reasons. Education is not the only thing that can be looked up, and therefore teachers maybe pinning about their soon to be wedding themes instead of useful educational tools. Another constraint is that some things that are pinned on pinterest are of no use. Therefore, it could be hard for teachers so see what is important and not important. Teachers could become frustrated with this concept of pinterest.

I believe that pinterest could really only be best used by the teachers in schools and not the students. But maybe older students, such as high school students would be able to find new and creative projects to submit as students. In order for the older students to learn how to use this, they would have to be able to navigate themselves around the site. I do believe that most students would be able to do so without an issue, but if you find your students could not, then I would spend a class period doing so. Since teachers are all use to actively working online, you would not have to teach them how to use pinterest. Teachers would not have to adapt their classroom to using pinterest with the student’s one on one, but teachers would have to be open to using the ideas in their classroom that they found on pinterest.

There are also lots of great websites out there discussing the popular site pinterest and its advantages. One I found was composed by the USA Today. In this article they describe what pinterest is in great detail and how to use it in great detail. Therefore, this could be a great site for teachers or students to learn how to use it before signing up. Another link I found is actually from Pearson, which is a well known name in education. In this link, Pearson the company discusses four ways to use pinterest in the classroom. The four ways they discuss are finding useful lesson plans, sharing ideas with other teachers, finding organization tools for the classroom, and lastly student use. This website alone shows you how useful this common popular website could be inside the classroom.

1. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-17/how-to-pinterest-mark-smith/52615856/1

2. http://www.pearsonschoolsystems.com/blog/?p=424