Who knew my new found love for Pinterest would turn out to be so beneficial for my role as an educator. For those that are not familiar with Pinterest, this social network allows anyone to "pin" a website, similarly how we would have earmarked a favorite page in a magazine. You are pinning topics of interest onto a virtual corkboard and then organizing them by topic.With Pinterest, teacher collaboration has become more visual. I can search for bulletin board ideas, for lesson ideas specific to my content area, for good technology resources, etc. based on a picture from the original source's web page. It is much easier for me to sort through pins that pertain to my needs then to scroll through the results of a web search. While I do not use Pinterest as my only outlet for collaborating with other educators, the large population of users makes it a valuable tool. I have found myself using ideas from my Pinterest board more frequently over the last year and a half and I see that continuing to be a trend as its popularity continues to grow.
Through my Connected Educator course, I have also discovered that Pinterest can be used in the classroom by the students. They could search for a specific topic to help them brainstorm for a project or paper and they could work on a project together by sharing pins/resources that group members could benefit from while researching. When the students aren't using it for the classroom, they can also explore their own interests, books, organizational tools, sports, colleges, etc. The extensive span of resources and options make this a valuable social media tool.
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