Web 2.0 tutorial: Pinterest

Introduction:

This tutorial will show you how to use pinterest to create a great personalized board filled with

resource material for your students to use in addition to the instruction received in class. Pinterest is a

great Web 2.0 app because it allows users to create a free account and then share relevant information

about a wide variety of subjects, organized into boards, and available to be commented upon by

followers. In an educational setting, this will allow you to post lesson supplements and reference

material on a well-organized, easily accessible forum, and your students will be able to ask questions

and share insights directly to the board for everyone else to see. The public nature of these comments

allow all students to benefit from the questions and insights of others, rather than the typical private

question/answer dialog that would occur when a student normally posed a question outside of class.

Instructions:

1. Go to www.pinterest.com, click join pinterest:

2. Use your facebook or twitter account to sign up, or just use your e-mail address if you don’t

want pinterest associated with any other social media. If you use facebook or twitter, all

you have to do is log in with your credentials for that network and you are good to go.

Assuming you want to use just an e-mail, click on sign up with your e-mail address and

follow these steps, otherwise skip ahead.

3. Fill out the form and click create account:

4. Pick 5 boards to follow:

5. Then you should end up at your pinterest home page:

6. From here you can search for anything you want. Since this is a physics class, we’ll be search

for physics type things:

7. You will get a different amount of results depending on how specific your search is. In this

case we only have a few.

8. Find one you like and hover over it, an option menu will pop up and look something like this:

9. From here you can add it to you page, and a board of your choosing simply by clicking the

Pin/re-pin button, you may like this post on another’s page by clicking the like button, and

you may comment on it by pressing the comment button and typing in the box that comes

up.

10. If you click the Pin/re-pin button you will be able to choose which of your boards you wish

to add it to. You may also add a new board by typing the name into the field and pressing

create, but once you have chosen a board from the drop down menu as shown below,

simply click the pin it button.

11. Once it has been repined, it will show up where you told it to go.

Use in Education:

As just illustrated, pinterest can be used to store useful links, relevant to the subject you are

teaching. For my unit plan, a board for vector addition has been created and contains additional

support material for that unit. Each pinned item will allow students to ask questions and offer insights

to each other and to me as the instructor.

Pros and Cons:

Other than the fact that it isn’t quite as popular as other social media, pinterest really doesn’t

have any cons. It is simply an excellent method for organizing links. Pinterest is not specifically an

educational tool and as such other material is available, this could be bad depending on what your

students decided to search for and what the parents consider to me questionable material. I will not

force students to join pintererst, I will only make this information available to everyone and allow them

to use it at their own, and their parents, discretion. Finding everything easily is the great upside to this

site.