Assignment 7 - Pinterest in the Classroom

To be honest, I was leery of this week's assignment; I have a small amount of experience with Pinterest, and in general I find the interface kind of clunky. I'm also not fond of the way pictures are given more weight than words, although I can admit that's a personal preference - words started as pictures, after all. Despite all this, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. There's something addictive about scrolling through thousands of images targeted specifically to me, even if the algorithm that curates them sometimes spits up something strange. (See: the badly-designed infographic on Harry Potter actors or the link to the article "Ten Foods to Reduce Constipation in Children.)

I did get some clever ideas from Pinterest. I love this painting activity and this ADHD infographic. Some of the resources I found are the sorts of things I hope to implement in a classroom someday. However, I'm not comfortable with the lack of transparency. From the dashboard, I have no idea of the qualifications of the people who pin each pin, and I have to click through each link to see where they come from. For better or worse, I'm going to look at the same activity differently if it comes from an expert on the ELDS than if it's pinned by a homeschooling parent who doesn't seem to have a grasp on child development. A staggering number of "preschool activities" I saw on Pinterest required literacy or numeracy skills I couldn't reasonably expect of a second grader.

So: on the other side of this assignment, will I use Pinterest again? Probably not the way I used it for this assignment. I'd use it as an idea generator, or a way to find education blogs, or a way of sorting links I've found myself. I don't think I'll use it again as a substitute search engine or a social media platform. I think I could also find a way to utilize that picture-heaviness that irks me so much: some authors (like Susan Dennard) use Pinterest to generate moodboards for their novels, and I think something similar could probably work with classroom layouts or creative activities. The biggest thing I'd change about Pinterest is to create some form of distinguishing pins that stand alone as images - like this infographic - from pins that link to articles on another website - like this post about centers in preschool classrooms. Both types of pins are useful and important, and I think I'd enjoy Pinterest much more if I could tell at a glance which is which.