Using Pinterest to create PLNs

The web is full of so many great ideas, tools and resources. As teachers it is easy to become overwhelmed by all the choice, all the possibilities. Those of us who grew up without the Internet had to learn how to find the information we needed from books. Today's learners don't need to learn how to do this, they have search engines, and neither do we as teachers struggle with this but how do we remember where all these great resources are when we need them? The answer is Personal Learning  Networks.

In this post I'd like to tell you about one of my favourite tools for keeping the 'stuff' I come across, Pinterest (www.pinterest.com), and how you might use this social networking site in your professional (and personal) life.

I feel I may have a Pinterest "problem"! It could easily occupy me for days on end... Pinterest is an online pinboard for things you come across on the Internet. It pins images onto boards which you create to collect pins under particular headings. For example, I have a board called Classroom Ideas and another called Learning Technology. I have a couple of others too - ideas for decorating a future home, crafty ideas for rainy days (ok, Dubai days when it is too hot to go outside) and things I think my mother should knit. I follow friends on Facebook, colleagues and other random people and repin their pins and get some off the categories in Pinterest which collate pins according to topic. Occasionally I will pin something off the web. Pinning an image makes a link back to the site it came from so the image acts as link or reference to the information you need. I use mine from my tablet in an app but it works through a browser too.

Obviously Pinterest is a great tool for teachers to use to better organise their online finds, but how could we use this tool with our students? The following infographic from Pearsoned shows some of the things Pinterest might be useful for:

• It is possible to create a board which can be edited by more than one person. You could create a shared board for a class to gather ideas for a topic.
• Students doing investigations for a design project might create a board of all the ideas they have come across which inform their design choices.
• Create boards as stimulus for a creative writing project.
• Use a board as a more engaging way of creating a list of resources for a research project.

Note that as Pinterest is a social networking site, and their Terms of Use prohibit children under the age of 13, you are limited in your audience to older students only.