Integration of Pinterest

I found the world of Pinterest a few months ago and have been addicted ever since. If you haven't been hooked on this site you should check it out. Members of Pinterest each have as many "boards" as they please that they can "pin" interesting things to all online and accessed everywhere- just like if you have a cork board and real push pins pinning little scraps of paper with cool ideas or informational pieces to it. You can pin other people's pins from their boards or you can even make your own pins when you find an interesting site, picture or bit of information elsewhere online with a few easy steps. You can follow certain people's boards or their entire Pinterest profile to stay up to date and connected. This blog post on Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog explains how to use Pinterest step by step.

A look into my Pinterest profile:

I have eight boards each with over 50 pins. My boards are called:
Bucket List
Teaching Ideas
Sweet Nothings- for quotes I like
Organizing!
Delicious - for recipes I want to try
Dream Home
I love these - random things I find that don't fit on any other board
Craft Ideas

Till recently I only thought my "Teaching Ideas" board would be the one piece of Pinterest I could use in my career. However, with the topic of this weeks' SUITE meeting at ISU and a blog I read I realized Pinterest has many uses in a classroom.

I was unable to make it to the SUITE meeting this week as I had to go to another meeting at the same time but I was still interested in the topic so I started reading some blog posts. The first blog I came across was Joy Cevalenza's Never Ending Search blog. She had posted about a Pinterest Challenge that Syracuse University was taking part in to express their idea of libraries and librarianship. I thought this was such a great idea and continued to think deeper into how I could incorporate this type of challenge into my classroom.

What if we had projects where students were to have a topic that they would find and pin things about on Pinterest? They could be given a topic and they could go find things on Pinterest boards already, on other sites other than Pinterest and even take pictures and pin them on Pinterest that way. There is a spot for a caption/description of the pin where they could explain their thoughts on the pin and how it pertains to the topic. Once everyone had their boards ready they could follow other classmates boards and repin their pins making a mix of information. We could review the boards at the end of the project in class and discuss the creation of a collaborative board that we could use as our tool to study the topic.

With a little creative thinking and some enthusiasm I really think this could be a great project within a classroom. Comment and let me know what you think!




Here's the button for the Pinterst Challenge site! Pretty cool!-->