Pinterest in Education: Undecided

As Pinterest has exploded as a social network, especially among females (about 70% of the users), many professors and innovators around the country are looking into how this social networking tool can be used to engage students. It’s actually one of the tools used as a primary part of the Week 2 discussion and exampled in my Teaching and Learning with Social Media Part 2 for Faculty Development at Valencia College. It has potential and it has some unique characteristics that have help it become a hit in a very short time. Below is my presentation from this semester session on Pinterest.

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As you can tell Pinterest has some very nice visual features that can entice users to spend time browsing, searching, and sharing. Browsing pins and boards can help spark creativity, ideas, and inspiration. It can be used as a social bookmarking tool, similar to Delicious, without the option of tagging. Pinterest ‘s search function is awful, with no current use of hashtags working properly.

It was good to see Pinterest develop “secret board” for private pinning, since everything else is totally public on their site. This would allow you to ask other’s to pin to those board through invitation too. It currently only allow up to 3 secret boards to be created, which would limit the way you could utilize secret boards in education.

Within the presentation above, you will find lots of basic on Pinterest and some of the links to examples and boards focused on education. It always great to see how innovators and educators are actually applying the tool and feedback from students in their course.

I’m still undecided on how much of a benefit Pinterest would have for the majority of educators but it might be because I’m not a frequent user (at least compare to my other networks). You are welcome to follow my pins or checkout what I’m sharing at http://pinterest.com/professorjosh/.  I spend the majority of my social media time visiting, reading, and socializing on site such as Twitter (@professorjosh), Facebook (http://facebook.com/professorjosh), Instagram (professorjosh),  and Google+( http://gplus.to/professorjosh).