Long a favorite among craft enthusiasts, the popular DIY site Pinterest, in which users “pin” online images to virtual pin boards for later reference, is gaining ground in education. Educators using Pinterest in the classroom have access to professional development resources, lesson plans, curriculum ideas, and more.
Locating online educational resources can put even more demands on teachers’ time, which is often already stretched to the limit. Pinterest lets users organize resources and ideas in one central location, as opposed to bookmarking sites and then visiting those sites multiple times in order to remember what each site contains.
Each “pin” is taken from an image on a website, so that teachers can immediately see what idea or resource each site contains. Users create different boards and pin items into various categories—for instance, a teacher may have one board for English, another for professional development, and a third for math tips.
(Next page: How a first grade teacher uses Pinterest)