Pinterest: why I use it, how I use it and why it's great.

When Pinterest first started I was very dispinterested... see what I did there... There was no evidence to suggest it would be useful to me, or that it would stay around long. Nothing worse than putting a whole lot of effort into something only to have it disappear into obsolescence (I'm looking at you, MySpace). Every time I logged in, something would have changed, and frankly I had nothing to pin. I don't care for wall furnishings and I'm not a collector of anything.

It really wasn't until a couple of months ago that I really got it. It all started because I was given a class one day and had to teach them art in the afternoon. Now as a TRT, you never know what's going to come up, but art was a new one because all my prac schools had actual art teachers. Lucky for me I'd done a truckload of preparation while waiting for my SA teaching registration to come through and had a whole lot of quick lesson plan cards made up. I had the kids collect leaves, do rubbings of them and turn them into characters from the stories they were writing. A few days later I had another class for art so I wheeled out the nature rubbings activity again. It dawned on me that if I had these particular classes again, I was going to become a one-trick pony very quickly.

So I started looking online for some art lessons. I got very frustrated very quickly because it's painfully obvious that most classroom art lesson websites are designed by people who either own art supply shops or have enormous classroom budgets. Anything I used had to use little to no supplies (nothing worse than the TRT using up all the coloured cardboard you were saving for a special project) and had to be completed in one session. I'm not even sure what led me to Pinterest to be honest, it may have been a link from Google. But link I did, and all of a sudden it all fell into place.

See, what happens with Pinterest is that people "pin" (link) pictures from their articles onto a board, write a little caption and selects a category. You can search for keywords or you can just click on a category such as Education. That's all lovely and pretty but you're still not seeing why this is beneficial are you - neither did I! Until I stumbled across a picture of some birds that a class made using bits of torn coloured paper. They looked really cute, took a bit of effort, and you could tie it into whatever you were studying. I created a board called "Art Projects" and I re-pinned the image to my own board, retaining the original link to the website it came from.


As soon as I'd pinned it, Pinterest did a VistaPrint. (Have you ever ordered anything from VistaPrint? It's one of the websites I most admire for customer engagement. As soon as you create something and click order, it comes up with a page: "have you considered this matching notepad/bag/coffee mug/magnet etc. for a special introductory price of only xx". You could spend days ordering from VistaPrint). Pinterest suddenly popped up with a little message confirming my re-pin... and brought up another board it had been pinned to. The board was named something like "Classroom art", so I clicked on it. Up came a huge range of pins! I scanned through and opened up the ones I liked in new tabs (Cmd-click on a Mac, Ctrl-click on a PC, this command is your friend!). I re-pinned these and each time I was given another board full of useful things. I ended up spending hours sifting through about 50 pins, opening new tabs all the time. The result was a pinboard teeming with projects that I could do with a TRT class using just the materials in the classroom (for the most part).

I liked it so much that I went out and bought paints, crayons, pencils, textas and coloured paper, and a little A5 visual diary. I've started making a little examples book so that next time I have to teach art, I can flip to a page, show them what a finished product looks like, and run through the steps. You may ask why I don't just open up the pinboard on the interactive whiteboard? While that would be an excellent choice, I don't do this for two reasons:

1) As a TRT I can never rely on the technology working, or having access to it.
2) Sometimes I think a tangible product is nice. It says "a normal person can do that project" rather than a faceless individual on the internet. Also, it's really fun :)

While I was looking through the art project pins I came across a ton of resources for classroom organisation, maths games, writing ideas and science experiments. I've made a board for each of these, and now I have them all in one place. It's a resource that I keep adding to all the time and that is shared with the world. Why not give it a go now? Here's a link to my Art Projects board, and you can connect with me on Pinterest by clicking the button in the right-hand column of this blog.