Teaching with Pinterest!

As an extremely new teacher, it’s sometimes difficult to come up with cassroom ideas, especially as I don’t have a draw full of back-up ideas or past teaching plans. I began reading books, teacher’s blogs, articles on how to become a better teacher, how to lesson plan more efficiently, but none of them prepared me for questions that I didn’t have an answer to! My only option was to start learning as much as possible, as quickly as possible!

That’s when I realised, I can use Pinterest – my favourite social media platform.

“Isn’t it just like Facebook?” Many people have asked me. The answer is no, it isn’t.

Pinterest is far less personal and much more beneficial for business, products and learning, especially learning languages.

It’s perfect. Once you’ve made an account via Facebook, Google or your email, you start off with a blank canvas. Essentially you have a pin board and you can stick whatever you like on it. You can create separate pin boards for different topics.

I created a separate Pinterest account specifically for my teaching – and my boards contain the headings: Phrasal verbs, comparatives and superlatives, IELTS writing, English slang, Passive tense… to name a few.

Benefits of using Pinterest in general

1. When you see an image you like, you save it to a board (or under your chosen heading) and you can refer back to it whenever you like. You can also download an image to your phone or computer, you can share it via Facebook, Whatsapp or email.
2. There is a vast amount of ideas for all situations
3. People are not sharing their breakfast photos or updating about their latest break up – AND you can tailor what you want to see, keeping your homepage entirely relevant to you and your interests.

 

Benefits of using Pinterest for teaching

1. You can connect with other teachers and their pin boards
2. You can create pin boards for separate lessons, levels, topics
3. You can share these pin boards with your class, whether that’s in class or allowing them to access the board at home via their phones or computer
4. You can keep your board completely relevant to your classes, no images of avocados or work-out plans!
5. It’s PG! There’s no spam or unwanted images that you have to worry about, unlike many of the social networking sites
6. It’s brilliant for brainstorming – whatever age or level you teach, wherever your students come from or whatever their reason for studying.

Believe me when I say there’s something for everyone on Pinterest!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑