Social Media in the Classroom: Using Pinterest

Using Pinterest in the Classroom

Pinterest is an online social media site where you can go on and research different things and pin them to a board.  Many people use it to create a board for recipes, home decorating ideas, vacation spots, etc.  Pinterest has about any topic or idea you could ever think of.  How can a site like Pinterest possibly be an effective tool for the classroom?

Teachers can set up a classroom account or they can have their students sign up for a free Pinterest account.  When students are doing research on different topics they can go in and create a board and then start pinning ideas and information to that board about their topic.  This creates a platform and one spot where students can put their research and go back and look in that one place to write their papers or do any assignment.

Pinterest has so many different ways to bring this type of media into the classroom.  There are pictures, facts, ideas, information, etc that you can find while exploring Pinterest and the students can help teachers with any idea for the classroom.  Let me give you an example of how Pinterest can be used in the classroom.  I am teaching a 3rd grade classroom and we are talking about the Rocky Mountains and I ask my students to find information about the Rockies from pictures, to places around them, animals that live there and weather.  They can go onto Pinterest and create a Rocky Mountain board.  They then will search the different things about the Rocky Mountains that I asked them about.  Everything they find that they find intriguing or important they pin that to their Rocky Mountain board.

After they have done their research I ask them to go back and write a paper on what they learned about the Rocky Mountains including pictures.  I want them to include many details that I will feel like I am standing in the Rocky Mountains while reading and viewing it.  This allows students to sign into Pinterest and going to their board and taking pictures and all the information they need in one place.  This will help students with time management and not have to go find a bunch of different sources in the library and throughout different websites.

Pinterest is a great tool that teachers can use in their classrooms in many different ways.  This brings a whole new meaning to research and sharing of information within the classroom.

References:

 Fulginiti, J. (2012). Pinterest in Education at Lockerman Middle School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_YN1Ql92hM

Social Media in the Classroom: Using Twitter in the Classroom

The use of social media is becoming greater in the classrooms and one of the tools that teacher are starting to use is Twitter.  Twitter can be used in the classroom in many different ways.  One way that it can be used is to communicate with the class.  Twitter is composed of short descriptions and tagged using a hashtag.  As a teacher you can give the students an assignment to do on Twitter and by giving them the hashtag they need to use allows the teacher to go online and search for that hashtag and they can look at what the students wrote.  Along with this the teacher is able to do a quick assessment of the students to see if they are fully understanding and doing the assignment correctly.

My favorite thing about Twitter is that it makes students use higher order of thinking skills in order to use Twitter and to get their point across.  Twitter messages are limited to 150 characters which makes the students really think about what they are going to write and answer in their work so that the people reading it will fully understand what they are trying to say.  For example, if you had a student read a certain book and they had 150 characters to give everyone the main idea or point of a book it would make them truly have to sit down and think of the write things to say in order for everyone to get the point.  This takes true higher order of thinking for students.

Another way teachers have used Twitter in the classroom is to have students act as if they are a character in a book and all of their Tweets are about their character helping other students to be able to fully understand what the character is doing and experiencing.  Twitter is a great tool for the classroom and there are so many ways that teachers can incorporate it into their classrooms.  I encourage you to try it today!

References:

Inman Middle Media Technology. Why Use Twitter in the Classroom.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOlS69JUoE4.

Sewickley Academy. 9 Ways to Use Social Media in the Classroom. http://blog.sewickley.org/9-ways-to-use-social-media-in-your-classroom