Yesterday, I had an opportunity to watch a recording of an Association of Talent Development (ATD, formerly ASTD) presentation given by Jane Bozarth on Pinterest. Pinterest is a tool that has been getting more and more attention as a learning tool. It was a topic at the National Extension Conference as well as a discussion item in an Extension email conversation. I watched this presentation because I was interested in new ideas for leveraging Pinterest.
Bozarth spoke about the benefits of Pinterest such as social bookmarking, imagery, commenting, and public sharing. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool. Throughout the presentation, she showed examples of Pinterest boards and explained the purpose behind them. She shares those boards here: https://www.diigo.com/user/jbo27712/pinterest
She gave a great piece of advice regarding showing others about new tools. She recommends encouraging them to get past how the tool looks, get past how others are using it, and figure out how you can leverage it in support of your program.
According to to Pinterest, you are allowed the following per account:
- Boards: 500
- Pins: 200,000
- Likes: 100,000
Here are some ideas I walked away with that I can benefit from:
- Post favorite books – Create boards that focus on different parts of your book collection. Give reasons for including each book. It can result in more discussion. Here is a Pinterest Board of my book reviews. You can also create a reading list for a course, expaining why each book was chosen.
- Capture workshop timelinea – Photo document a workshop you are giving. You are able to show how the workshop develops over time. You can also display work by participants.
- Create a field trip – Walk someone through a process. Bozarth provided an example of onboarding a new employee.
- Distribute handouts – Are you giving a workshop, class, or course, you can collect and distribute all of you handouts through Pinterest. You can also collect examples that you would be using as part of the course. You then need to hand out only one URL.
- Host a Pinterest Appy Hour – Invite participants to share favorite app, book, travel app, productivity app, etc. Naturally, the board has to allow for pinning by others.
Bozarth shared a number of other ideas as well as rules for successful pinning. For 30 minutes, I found this to be another enjoyable, idea filled presentation by Jane Bozarth.
How are you using Pinterest to support learning?
