Inspiration for Education: I LOVE Pinterest

I was just sitting here at my computer pinning away on Pinterest. I was taking the time to reorganize my boards and had posted a few things when I realized that I LOVE LOVE LOVE watching that little red number pop up telling me how many people have re-pinned my pins. Its such an amazing way to reach out and connect with random people all over the world. I love watching to see which of my pins get re-pinned the most. What are other people most interested in? Even as I sit here typing I keep popping over to my Pinterest window to see how many people are re-pinning my pins.

You can see it's up to 61 more re-pins since last time.

WHAT IS PINTEREST?

For those of you who haven't been bitten by the Pinterest bug yet, let me explain. Pinterest is like an online bulletin board. You know how your grandma used to cut out newspaper clippings and stick them in a scrap book to refer back to later? Well Pinterest is grandma's scrap book. Ever have that moment when you're surfing the web and you come across a great website. You think wow, this is a great idea! The only problem is it's 11:00 at night and I can't actually do this great thing right now. How am I going to remember it? You could email yourself the link, take a screen shot of the web page, download the web page ..... OR.... you could PIN it. Pinterest allows you to save your favorite websites all in one well organized place. You create a folder for each topic that you're interested in and save those interesting websites to that folder.

Here's a screen shot of six of my folders from my Pinterest home page. You can choose to make your folders public, allowing others to see what you've pinned or private, just for yourself. Click on the picture above to be taken to my Pinterest home page.

PINTEREST AS A RESOURCE

The other side of Pinterest is that it can be really helpful when you're looking for great web ideas. Looking for some fresh bedroom decor ideas? So were about a million other people. Let's see what they liked.

THE DOWNSIDE

Unfortunately, John Q Public is not the only one to discover Pinterest's benefits. Advertising America has found it too and some days it feels like it's being taken over by advertisements. The biggest offender in my little world seems to be Teachers Pay Teachers. Now don't get me wrong, I AM a TpT seller and I have DEFINITELY used Pinterest to spread the word about my new products. But, I try to spread my advertisements out and pin lots of other websites that I think are just great resources. When I'm on Pinterest as a browser I DON'T want to see nothing but TpT product covers like this screen.

If I land on a screen with nothing but product covers I am quick to move on to a new screen. I've really been on the lookout recently for educational Pinterest boards that try to strike a balance between freely given ideas and paid products. So I thought I'd take a moment to give a shout out to a few people who are trying to keep Pinterest a positive viewing experience for teachers.