Thursday, March 1, 2012

Pinning to my Web 2.0 board - Pinterest

In an effort to test the educational application of Pinterest, I created a pin board for this project.

The main issue that I found was that pages without large images could not be pinned to the board. This was an unfortunate problem, but one that I was able to get around by looking for more meaningful Web sites instead of just links to resources.  For example, I wasn't able to link sites like blogger.com, facebook.com, or twitter.com.  I was able to link news articles, posts from whitehouse.gov, and a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  I was also able to add links to YouTube videos!

I see many possible applications for this tool.  Students will be able to use it much like a social bookmarking site, except it uses multimedia instead of plain text links.  Students can post a 500 character description of the link, and then peers can post comments.  I think this would be an awesome tool for a classroom or telecollaborative project.  Students could work together to create a group pin board on a specific topic.  Pin boards are engaging and interactive.  I see my students using them on their own all the time, so why shouldn't we tap into the educational possibilities?

As of right now, Pinterest is only available by invitation.  I was able to request an invitation and received mine within 48 hours.  I can now invite my students to join.  If anyone would like an invitation to join Pinterest, please send me a message with your e-mail address and I'll see to it that you get one.


2 comments:

  1. Just a heads up about posting your email like that - evil spam bots troll the internets looking to harvest emails.

    You might want to encode it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I posted it as a picture so that spam bots couldn't harvest my e-mail. Thanks for looking out for me, though!

      Delete