"Pin"-a-holic

Hi, I’m Haley, and I’m a “Pin”-a-holic.  That’s right, I have over 2K pins on Pinterest, 38 public boards, and 6 private boards.  I’m slightly obsessed, if you haven’t noticed.  It is one of my favorite online organizational tools.  You have no idea how pumped I was when I looked at this week’s Pinterest assignment!  Last week the teachers in my building had a collaborative day.  One of the main goals of this day was to share online tools that both teachers and students could use.  Prior to the meeting I set up several new, school-related boards on Pinterest, then I invited my colleagues to join the boards so they could contribute to them.  I set up 9 different boards: iPads, Art, PE, Math, Social Studies, Science, SPED, Language Arts, and Classroom Management.  There are times when I am searching the web and find an awesome lesson that I know one of my colleagues would love, but I don’t want to take the time to pull up my school email account, attach the link and send the idea via email.  With Pinterest, I can just quickly pin the link to the appropriate board and all teachers in my building can look at the boards to use the resources and materials pinned.
 

I would really like to start using Pinterest in the classroom as a collaborative tool for students.  I’m not exactly sure how I want to execute that in order to guarantee students are using the site as a tool and not becoming distracted with it.  I just found this great link: A Teacher's Guide to Pinterest.

Another great topic from this week was the use of social media in the classroom.  I’m still pretty leery about having my students use Facebook or Twitter for classroom purposes, but I can definitely see the appeal and benefit of using social networking in schools to increase student collaboration, participation, and engagement.  My main concerns are that it will be a distraction to learning, and it could be used inappropriately and cause issues I do not want to have to deal with.  Below is a video of a teacher who uses Twitter in his classroom and it has been a success.

Finally, why the heck is this the first time I’ve ever heard about the magical “Research” button!?  Holy guacamole, talk about life changing!  I am really excited to introduce this to my students.  The majority of the kids I teach have this serious problem of highlighting information from the Web, copying it, and then pasting it into a document without any form of sourcing or citations.  They really don't fully understand plagiarism and the potential consequences of "stealing" someone else's work without giving due credit.  Below is a video introducing the Google Research tool.  I found it very helpful and I hope you do too!