The bulletin board has always been a classic staple of any classroom from kindergarten all the way up to high school, but in today’s modern, technological society, it is not surprising to learn that the art of online bulletin boarding has become something incredibly popular that teachers should recognize and begin to incorporate in to their teaching style. The most popular of these online bulletin boarding facilities is a website called Pinterest, and though it is used for many things other than education, it’s properties are perfect for introducing in to the classroom. If you are a teacher and have never heard of Pinterest, feat not! Here is out definitive guide to mastering the site, getting the most out of it and making it an important part of your everyday classroom activities.
Getting Started
Pinterest has the same registering process as all other social media, you make an account by simply entering you email address and inventing a password at the home page.
Setting Up Boards
Once your account is active, you will be able to click on the ‘Create A Board’ tab. There are many options, including choosing whether to make your board private to just you or public to everyone on Pinterest, and you can also add a category and description of the type of pictures that you are going to be including in this board. Think of a ‘board’ as the file within which you are going to store all your contents. You can also add other Pinterest users as being able to add to the board that you created, which is perfect for class projects.
Finding Inspiration
To find things to add to your board, you simply begin to use the search bar on the Pinterest site. For example, if you are looking to make a board full of interesting sea shells, then you simply type in sea shells in the search bar and wait to see what comes up. Alternatively, you can also choose to ‘follow’ other users, which will show you all of the things they too have been pinning.
Start Pinning
To ‘pin’ something means to add it to the board that you have created, so when you find a picture of a particular sea shell that you want to keep, all you have to do is click the ‘pin’ button and it will automatically be saved to your virtual photo album. If you have created more than one board for your home page, then every time you pin something, you will always be asked which board you want to add to, therefore avoiding confusion and messy boards.
Uses For Teachers
Pinterest can be a wonderful tool for the classroom, and can help to do many things including:
- Lesson Planning – If you find something on Pinterest that you think would be beneficial for a future lesson, then all you have to do is pin it and save it for later so that you don’t forget.
- Project Help – You can create multiple boards for your students that can act as places of collected knowledge for different projects across the year. A board dedicated to the Civil War, for example, can be a student’s first port of call when they are doing their homework away from school and need to find the necessary bits of information.
- Collaborative Tasks – Pinterest makes it much easier for a teacher to assign students group projects. Using the boards that they create as the center of all shared information, the struggle of arranging meet ups to discuss and work on the project will become something from the past.
- Reading Lists – Pinterest is the perfect place to put together reading lists for your students, as not only can you pin photographs to your boards but you can also pin link to websites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble so that they know exactly which versions and editions they need. Outside of the curriculum, Pinterest can also be a fun place for teachers and students to pin and share reading lists for the summer holidays.
- Share Ideas – An idea just for all of the teachers on Pinterest, the sight can be a wonderful place to find educational resources and lesson place ideas that you might want to save and utilize at a later time. Browsing through Pinterest, it is possible to get ideas and inspirations for a whole term’s worth of lessons!