Creating Inspiration Boards on Pinterest

Last Friday I attended the Tech & Learning Live conference in Newton, Massachusetts, to be inspired by a plethora of other technology-minded educators. One of the hot topics was revolving around maker spaces and 3D printing. With the middle school purchasing at least 1, if not 2, printers for next year, both have been ongoing thoughts for me as well.

But sometimes keeping track of the various ideas and thoughts that you find online can be daunting to say the least. For many of you, you likely have spent time on Pinterest or, if you are smart, have heard that you should avoid it like the plague because it has a way of zapping hours from your day. As I started researching ways to include 3D printing in every academic field and ideas for creating maker spaces, I turned to Pinterest to keep track of what I was finding. Although I have several platforms I seem to be juggling for gathering my various research topics, Pinterest was my choice for this particular one because it is so visually based and would allow me to show what the ideas were easily versus needing to describe it or rely on clicking on a link to see it.

As we move towards a system of proficiency-based, you are likely looking to gather exemplars for the different units and artifacts. If your artifacts are visual, you might find that creating Pinterest boards for them could be helpful. If nothing else, you can also use Pinterest to search for ideas related to the concepts you are teaching without needing to have an account. It is easy to spend lots of time on it and sometimes the search tools can be a bit funky, but it has proven to be an easy place for me to gather ideas as I prepare to support our 3D printers and ponder Maker Spaces.