1. Pinterest 101: Get Ideas and Inspiration
If you’ve been using Pinterest for a while, skip to number two—if you’re new to the platform, start here.
The most obvious way to use Pinterest as a teacher is to search for ideas and inspiration. Pinterest allows members to create their own boards for various topics and then “pin” images they like from websites or other Pinterest boards; kind of like a virtual corkboard.
If you need ideas for new art or fun ways to decorate and organize your classroom, start here. If you need tips for making subjects like math or science more interesting and accessible to your students, Pinterest is a great place to start too.
2. Use It for Visual Sharing
Pinterest is an excellent tool for sharing visual content. You can share your ideas and classroom hacks with other teachers or show students examples of what their projects should look like once completed. It’s especially useful for teaching creative subjects like arts and crafts, music or photography, but can be used for displaying or finding examples of science projects and math activities too.
3. Showcase Student Work
Pinterest is a great platform for showcasing student work. Share final projects here if you want to let parents see what their kids have been working on in class. Better yet, highlight student achievements so they can track their own progress over the course of the school year.
In fact, research shows that using online portfolios to showcase student work can increase student motivation and achievement. Online portfolios may also help students take more ownership over their work.
Create a class board and add students as collaborators or have each student create their own Pinterest board where they share photos of their work to peers, friends, and family.
4. Provide Feedback
If students are already using Pinterest to showcase their work, this platform can also be an excellent place to provide personalised feedback. With Pinterest, you can leave comments and can also create “secret boards,” which are only visible to users you have added. This allows you to share student work and your feedback with a select audience.
5. Find Ideas From Unique Educators
Use Pinterst to find teachers who are trying things that those in your local network are not. For teachers who want to push the boundaries, and step out of the box, this is the place to find your online network of like-minded educators.
6. Organize Resources and Studies
One of the great things about Pinterest is that it automatically links back to where you got an image from. This is an easy way organize learning resources or relevant studies. For example, if you’re researching a particular topic, and need an easy way to organize the information you’re gathering (without copy and pasting every link), create a new board.
7. Encourage Students to Create Inspiration Boards
Instead of assigning a collage, have students create them as boards instead. They can pin images or quotes, just like they normally would. Use this as a way to help students get to know one another.
They can also use their classroom boards to collect educational resources they find helpful, classroom decorations they want to make, or even topics they’re interested in learning more about. You can then discuss their Pinterest boards in the classroom and identify common themes that can be incorporated into their lessons.
8. Use Pinterest to Facilitate Peer Review
Another way to use Pinterest in the classroom is as a tool for peer review. Asking students to review and critique other students’ work can be hugely beneficial, as research shows that students often learn more from people at their own level of learning.
Peer-review can also help students develop the skills needed to work with constructive feedback. Not to mention, reviewing someone else’s work can help students improve their own work in the future.
9. Create Recommended Reading Lists
Pinterest can also be used to create your own recommended reading lists for different age groups and share them easily with students and parents. Better yet, have students curate their own reading lists that their peers can use when they’re looking for something new to read.
10. Use Pinterest for Group Projects
If you’re working on a group project, you can use collaborative boards that enable multiple users to pin ideas and resources in one place. This can be useful during the brainstorming process, but also makes it easy to keep track of all relevant information, like videos, images, and articles within the group.
Are you already using Pinterest in your lesson planning and teaching? If so, leave a comment to let us know about your favorite ways to use it and how it’s made your job easier.
