Thinking About Pinterest

Last spring my former colleague Abbie Morrison (who does some great photography) introduced me to Pinterest. At the time I didn't think much of it. But recently I've seen it pop-up more and more frequently in my personal sharing network. This afternoon I spent some time exploring Pinterest and realized that there are some possible uses for it in education.

Pinterest is a service for visually sharing your interesting finds on the web. With a Pinterest account you can visually bookmark the things you want to share with others. You can create multiple "boards" or categories to which you pin your finds. You can share links to your Pinterest boards. Take a look at the public Pinterest boards in the education category to get a sense of what it's all about.

Applications for Education
Pinterest is still in a closed beta (you can register, but you'll have to wait for an invitation to start using it) but you can still explore the public Pinterest boards to see what current users are sharing. If you get an invitation to the service you could use Pinterest to create a set of visual bookmarks to share with your students or colleagues. My colleague Abbie showed me Pinterest because she had found a set of visual bookmarks linking back to Free Technology for Teachers blog posts.