Lots of Interest in Pinterest

Pinterest is fastly becoming a favourite tool of primary school teachers in Ireland with a number of great profiles offering great links to educational websites on various boards. The first time I saw Pinterest being used for education was a special school in Donegal, called Little Angels based near Letterkenny. On this Pinterest page, there are links to all sorts of educational links such as the use of Kinect in Education, Autism-related resources and most of the curriculum subjects.

Since then, I have spotted a few other teachers using Pinterest to share their links. For example, Seomra Ranga has his own Pinterest page with lots of resources to download. Other well-known edTech people such as Ban Ryan, Joanne Gilmartin and Nigel Lane also have Pinterest accounts. However, it seems like it’s teachers that we don’t normally see on the usual edTech web sites and mailing lists using Pinterest, gathering ideas and sharing them with each other. In my school alone, I know of two teachers using Pinterest to gather resources and there’s probably more that I haven’t come across yet. For example, there’s a teacher called Brenda Molloy in Donegal who gathers everything from hair ideas to food. However, she has a great board about education. She follows lots of “Pinners” such as Scholastic, Classroom Ideas, Lakeshore Learning as well as some other Irish teachers such as Claire Harkin. From a two minute browse of who people follow and who are following others, I was able to find dozens of Irish teachers. This leads me to thinking that maybe Pinterest is the way to go for sharing educational resources. If teachers all over the country are already doing it, then let’s find them! I decided to set up a Pinterest account called Irish Primary Teachers on Pinterest. Within less than 5 minutes, I have found over 50 Irish primary school teachers. As I’m not really that familiar with Pinterest, I’m not sure if Irish teachers can add themselves to this board but I know they can follow it. Therefore, if you are a primary school teacher in Ireland, how about following the page and we’ll see how many of us there are. This could be a great way to find resources for lesson plans, great links to educational web sites and videos of interest to primary school kids. If nothing else, we’ll find decent hairstyling tips!