Using Pinterest for Educational Projects

Pinterest (pinterest.com) is a social networking site through which users share their favorite images of interests, hobbies, and activities.  It is estimated to be the fastest growing and third largest social media site, only behind only Facebook and Twitter, with over 48 million users as of April 2013. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 12% of online adults and nearly a fifth of online women (19%) use Pinterest. 

The user space is the equivalent of virtual bulletin boards, within which one can pin or collate images from all across the Internet. Users can have multiple boards for different topics or themes. Postings are called “pins” and users can either use Pinterest buttons embedded by owners in their web sites or a “Pin It” button in their web browser to create a pin. Each pin includes a caption, a short descriptions of the image, and links back to the site from which it originated. Other users can comment on pins and also repin items to their own boards.

While many hobbyists and retailers use pinterest to collate pictures of projects from the internet, pinterest can be used to support teaching and educational functions. Students can use it to collect resources for a project by pinning them to a board, adding captions and writing comments. These boards can be public or private. For a private board the only person who can see the board is the creator and individuals who are invited. Thus a student could collate a collection of pictures and resources that might only be available to a teacher or other students. Pinterest boards can also be group boards that allow all the members of a group to work together on a board that can either be public or private. Basic directions for setting up a pinterest boards can be found here.

All kinds of student projects can be supported by pinterest. For example, an earth science class might ask students to prepare presentations on different weather phenomenon and each student can create a board for their topic and share it with the class. Current events lend themselves easily to pinterest projects. Student assignments may want to include directions for a certain number of original pins rather than them simply repining from other boards. Students may be required to do in-class or online presentations using their pinterest boards.

In Purpose 5 Systems, MCNY Human Services students are required to develop a website for education, prevention and outreach. The development of a pinterest board can provide a preliminary step to this project and can be developed in an earlier purpose. For example, in Purpose 2 Systems, I  have my students develop and post to moodle fact sheets with internet images and resources based on their readings in Trattner's From Poor Law to Welfare State. This assignment could easily use pinterest boards. Students can provide captions that explain the images used and other class members may be required to comment. For additional ideas you might wish to look at  Using Pinterest in Education.

While learning management systems used in schools may be limited to use by students, faculty and staff, pinterest boards can be shared with others. A Constructive action project might include the development of a a board with community resources that could be linked to an agency's web site.
 
Faculty can use boards to to collect and share resources with others. For an example of these, check out my boards:

• Resources for Teaching with Technology

• Human Services Interest Board

• Documentary Films - Society and Human Services 

• Books Worth Reading 

The first board is clearly to collect resources for myself and share with other faculty. I often find myself going to my pinterest board to find to locate a resource. The last three are listed as resources for students on all my moodle shells and the last two boards were in response to students asking me about books to read or films to use in presentations or their agencies.

There are some limitations for using pinterest for projects. For example not all web sources have good quality items that can be pinned. I have sometimes been known to find a picture from one website and use a URL in the caption to go to another site. I often had to do this with the book and film boards since I wanted a picture of the book or film, which did not appear on the page with the review or article about the material. Also pins can not easily be rearranged on a board, so it requires planning and or sometimes removing and repining. Captions are limited to 500 characters so that students have to write clearly and succinctly, but it is significantly more characters than a twitter posting. Students will have to add a "Pin It" button to their web browser or use the "Pin It" app on their phones and tablets. Faculty will need to decide if they want to set up a class account that can have a board for each student or group. Faculty will own these boards, will need to add students as pinners using student email and can delete them these boards. If students are required to have individual accounts they can be asked to add faculty to their boards as editors and a method will need to be devised so that other members of the class can view the boards. If others are required to view the boards online, I suggest using a moodle forum to have students post the links to their project boards. And currently analytics are only available for business accounts.

Pinterest offers a tool for helping students and faculty to collate and share resources from across the web and is only limited by one's imagination. I would love to hear how others are using pinterest in their classes.

Resources for Teaching with Technology

Reposted from an email sent to all MCNY faculty on 5/8/12.

A couple of summers ago I developed a Faculty Development Workshop on creativity to help faculty incorporate online resources into their classes and Moodle shells. As we move forward with our Strategic Plan and our efforts to provide significant course content online, this becomes more important.

At that time I collected a list of web resources that could be used across the MCNY curriculum and placed them in a Moodle shell that was available to all the workshop participants. I still use many of these resources and have added others over the years. Of course some of them have morphed into something different than they were, totally disappeared, or been replaced. New ones have been developed. But I keep finding myself going back to that old Moodle shell to find something.

So I thought about updating this resource list to make it more accessible and since I wanted to try out my new Pinterest account (the fastest growing new social media network), I set up a Pinterest board on "Resources for Teaching with Technology". Piniterest boards are like bulletin boards where you can "pin" pictures from all over the web and add some descriptive text. When a visitor clicks on the picture, they are taken to the original source of the picture. I have also set up some other boards that can be used in my teaching ("Human Services Interest Board", "Documentary Films - Society and Human Services" and "Books Worth Reading"). The film and book boards are in response to questions that students often ask about seeing additional films or recommendations for books.

Please feel free to check out the Resources for Teaching with Technology board at: http://pinterest.com/draweiner/resources-for-teaching-with-technology/.

You can like items, "repin" them to your own boards, follow a board, or write comments. I would be interested in hearing about the creative ways you are using some of these resources. Please let me know about other resources you find useful. Unfortunately not every resource can be pined since some of the web sites do no have usable photographs, which is the main element of a pin. Groups can develop boards since the owner of a board can add others who also have the ability to pin to that board.

We can also talk about how to use Pinterest itself as a teaching tool. Happy pinning.

Using Social Media for Project Publication

I’m eager to share the success and hurdles I’ve experienced using technology in new ways this semester. I am experimenting with social media as a teaching tool in my Critical Thinking & Writing through Literature class. While launching this social media element was daunting to me, I was impressed with the successes reported from other institutions, as well as our own Lynn Sally. 

Most of my class readings and resources explore how great writers across time use literary devices and insight to speak out as critics of corrupted leadership and narrow thinking. That is a tall order for any student, and quite a new practice for many of our students. As this is a course I regularly teach, I am always keen to explore how the delivery of content and expectations for engagement radically shape the depth of critical inquiry around a topic or reading.  

This is best illustrated through our “Signature Assignment” (self-directed learning project), which focuses on social justice issues. In the past, these culminated in class discussion and PowerPoint presentations.

I have grown more and more frustrated with the “dead-end” feeling of this presentation format. For all of their great probing and creation of meaningful testimonies to individuals who are boldly “speaking truth to power,” the final product was limited to those in the room and a PowerPoint file… now collecting dust at the bottom of my desk drawer. This format fanned their inspirations only to become yet another project that died at the classroom door.

Enter Social Media. This spring term, for our Truth to Power projects, students

• chose one individual or small group that they think played a significant part in 2011/2012 in helping to “re-write” how we think about power, institutions of power and inequality

• used Bloom’s Taxonomy- Levels of Learner Knowledge to fuel their critical inquiry.

• were required to use Twitter to engage with class material outside of class and gradually to engage with their topic through Twitter.

The final for this project was a multimedia analysis of their projects distributed back into the world via another social media, i.e. YouTube, Blog, Storify, Tumblr, Prezi, Paper.li, etc.

Resistance was strong at the beginning, as students could not grasp the relevance of the social media component and/or were intimidated by the new online platforms. But truly, in week 4, when 15 students posted on Twitter their deep reflections to our Plato reading, my jaw dropped with a “holy shizzle, this works.” Of course, our next class session was totally radicalized by the dynamic on-line feed that proceeded our meeting.

The most incredible shift, however, came just this week, when students presented their published analysis of their topics to the class. Not only were we already invested in one another’s topics, but the testimonies were beautifully crafted, the writing was (mostly) very strong, and the class was amazingly empowered by becoming directly involved with a movement because of their online publication. (In fact, tears were shed.)

Here are links to two projects:

http://prezi.com/ypc6ia0tlwoe/the-april-6-youth-movement/

http://storify.com/BoogieManL/dying-to-be-pure

(This work was made accessible to general public by the students)

They got it. They got that the potential impact of their writing is powerful, that it creates ripple effects around the world and can influence someone (or a movement) without them even knowing. They are taking new-found responsibility for their writing. Never before in my teaching have I seen my students grasp the immediacy and far-reaching impact of their writing and language so well. 

Here is one success story of a course- students- being transformed by paying attention to relevance of course material, pushing comfort levels, bridging unforeseen connections and building peer community outside of the classroom. In an email today, a student wrote:

I found the Signature Assignment to be an eye opening experience. After I fully understood what the project was about, I realized how this assignment was truly innovative. Never did I think Twitter would be an integral part of my college studies. I especially enjoyed using social media at the completion of the project by sharing with the online community. It was interesting to research a group who was making a change in the world. During the time of the Arab Spring, I followed the coverage and thought I fully understood its purpose. Little did I know what was shown on television was a one-sided filtered agenda of what was happening. Your project exposed me to a grassroots revolution from the ground up. It brought to my awareness that true change can really happen if one is determined enough to speak up and speak out. And it is a sign of our times that social media can facilitate the mission statement of any cause. This class component enriched my learning experience and I'm sure it will do the same for future students.

I will be updating this assignment by

• giving more directed prompts for Twitter posts

•  giving more demonstrations for using Bloom’s for guiding critical inquiry

• assigning project benchmarks that link directly to in-class learning objectives

•  share examples of past student publications to help make a rather abstract assignment more concrete and inspiring

I’d love to hear any feedback and suggestions for moving forward!

Parker Pracjek, Academic Coordinator, Learning Enhancement Center

Using Social Media for Social Change

At the regional PCA/ACA this week, I presented a paper on my experiment with using Twitter in a Common Curriculum Course, Critical Thinking & Writing through Literature, and a BAUS first semester course, Self-Assessment through Writing and Technology.  I presented my paper, “Writing & Thinking in 140 Characters or Less:  Twitter as Purpose-Centered Education,” on a panel with a Carol Bernard who presented on a study she did using a Facebook teacher page and Lindsay Illich who presented on using Word Clouds to help teach composition. 

You can create a word cloud out of a text through the website www.wordle.net, and the image that is produced will show you the primary words used in a particular text.  This could be an interesting exercise for analyzing the differences between two political speeches, for example, and it made me think that Word Clouds would be a great inclusion in the Public Speaking common curriculum course which is currently being developed at my college.  It is exciting to see other educators’ use of technology to enhance the classroom experience, and I was interested in the ways that colleagues have thought so deeply about how to teach students to think and write through these technologies.  It also got me to thinking about whether I practice what I preach.

As MCNY promotes Purpose-Centered Education that fosters students to become socially engaged change agents, this seemed a logical extension to move towards using Twitter and social media more broadly for productive ends.  Social activism does not have to happen simply in the traditional “internship” model on which the college – in the past – has been based.  As a cursory glance at revolutions around the world indicate, social media has been central to many – if not most – of our modern movements for change. 

This semester, I assigned Twitter for the Critical Thinking Signature Assignment, and asked the students to create a project called “Using Social Media for Social Change.”  They were asked to research a topic that was either 1) connected to their Constructive Action or 2) of political or personal interest to them.  They were then asked to follow that topic through their involvement with Twitter, by following leaders and organizations, retweeting, and generally getting involved in a topic through social media sight.  As they researched, read, and got involved, at the end of the semester they are asked to use social media to sum up their findings, and to recirculate that through a social media sight such as YouTube, Tumblr, Prezi, or a host of other options.  The idea is that their research would then be recirculated through the social media that they did their project.

I realized, perhaps too late, that asking students to bring about some type of social change – despite the medium – is daunting.  It’s not that using Twitter or using Twitter for productive ends is beyond students, but rather that I don’t know if I succeeded in breaking that down – just like one would break down a research paper in a composition class – into steps.  Some of the questions that have arisen include:  how do we get students to use social media critically?  What type of additive assignments can be given to help students establish, research, and develop their topics? In short, how do we get students to “start a revolution” or movement online?

Here are some ideas of how I will update this assignment in the future:

1)       Suggest Topics.  Though it may seem limiting, I realized that giving students possible topics may be useful for some.  “If you could change the world, what would you change?” question is admittedly both daunting and seemingly impossible.  Suggesting topics will give options to those students who find difficulties coming up with their own.  It also allows us to connect to what is happening politically and socially both locally and globally, and to place our conversations in class in a larger context.  The topics can give students options, and can help them brainstorm their own take on the suggested topics.

2)      Show Examples.  I tried to model in class how I was using social media for productive ends by showing students who I was following, and what I had learned about current events or topics of interest to me through Twitter.  But a don’t know if this was entirely successful.  In hindsight, I think a list of concrete examples of others using social media for social change would have helped students understand the concept.  These concrete examples could include

a.       celebrities who use Twitter to support causes;

b.      individual or organization who use  their Twitter feeds for activism;

c.       examples of viral videos, etc. that have helped broadast social issues;

d.      online “boycotts” and “buycotts” as strategies for supporting issues important to students as consumers;  

e.      examples of revolutions and movements around the globe broadcast on social media 

This list could, in turn, be placed on a collaborative editing cloud such as Google Docs, so that students and instructors could contribute examples that they come across.

It may be the end of the semester, but it’s never too late to think about and implement changes in the classroom.  I will run this by students this week in class, and see what they think.  I am sure they will have suggestions that will improve the classroom for all.

Faculty Sharing Resources, Connecting to Social Media for Social Change

A colleague forwarded me a short article about an African Chief who is using Twitter to “to help solve problems and maintain order in his Kenyan village” (http://mashable.com/2012/02/19/african-twitter-peace/).  His Tweets have helped prevent crimes, offered practical resources such as job openings as well as “inspiring” messages to his community.  This came at an opportune moment as it serves as a practical example of what I am asking students to do in my Critical Thinking & Writing through Literature course.

I Retweeted the post (@CritThinkWrite), and reminded my students that they should begin following leaders, activities, and organizations either related to their Constructive Action projects or a topic of interest to them.  For this course, students are asked to maintain a Twitter account and for the first half of the semester, they are given prompts every week that relate to the course material, make connections between their courses, and/or apply what they are studying in their real world experiences. 

For the rest of the semester, they are asked to use Social Media for Social Change, and to track their progress through a Trending Topic: #socialmediasocialchange.  This includes researching initiatives and projects, communicating with leaders, and becoming involved onlines with communities.  For their final, they will create a presentation, report, or other mixed media project that is then distributed back through social media such as YouTube, Tumblr, Prezi, or any other user generated source.  This way they can distribute their findings back to the communities they have studied and worked with, while using social media to do so.

In the article, I was interested in the author’s suggestion that readers post “the most interesting or unexpected examples of social media use that you’ve heard of” in the comments section.  I am interested in this, too, and will show students this in our next class and ask them to share their projects with a larger community of interested readers by inviting them to post a comment to this article.  One reader who posted a comment mentioned she has seen cell phone usage increase even in remote areas, and that those with phones serve as “information multipliers” for the rest of the community.  While some would argue the technologic divide alienates, here is an example in which it unifies.

In this sense, social media is returning users to community-centered information exchange, and that that creation of community is something that is sorely lacking in our modern age.  In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam has (now famously) argued that social capital has declined in America since the 1960s, and continues to do so across a broad range and staggering number of categories.  While we may blame the insular nature of constantly being “plugged in” as a contributor to the decline in social capital, we can start to harness its potential for positive, real world effects.  I see others are doing this around the world, too.  Luckily, we can be friends on the World Wide Web.

Using Twitter to Help Students with Study Habits

A student sent a Tweet to me asking about effective study habits. I used that as a Twitter assignment for the week, and asked students to locate and Tweet at least 3 sources they found about effective study habits, as well as construct at least 3 original tweets about what study habits work for them.

The result? They shared resources, had conversations about what worked for them, and connected to a broader community about how to become more effective students.

Here’s examples of what they shared:

• “I set aside time specif. to study. If I leave study time vague, I am apt to push it until the evening when there are too many distractions.”

• “I need a clear head to study. This means I have eaten, am naturally awake/had coffee to keep me alert. Set my phone to silent.”