Investigating the Interest in Pinterest

I first learned about Pinterest in May or June of last year when a colleague of mine showed me the photography she was bookmarking on Pinterest. I didn't think much of it at the time because what I saw didn't interest me. Fast forward six months and Pinterest is a very rapidly-growing social bookmarking service. So after reading Larry Ferlazzo's list of guides to Pinterest, I spent some time exploring the site.

Pinterest is still only accessible through invitation. I signed up and received my invitation in a day or two. Incidentally, that was much quicker than I got into Google+.

The first thing that you'll notice about Pinterest is that it is a very visual format. There are images attached to everything that a person "pins" (Pinterest's term for bookmarking) to a "board." A Pinterest board is the place to which you pin your discoveries on the web. You can create multiple boards to represent your various interests. For example, I created a board for pictures of Maine and a board for things about sports.

You can browse Pinterest to look at other people's boards. You can browse boards by category. And just like on any good social network, on Pinterest you can follow people with whom you have common interests. I spent some time exploring the Education boards on Pinterest and have listed below a few of the better ones I found. If you're interested in discovering education content on Pinterest, these might be a good place to start.
Tech
Classroom Ideas
100th Day Activities
Technology to Support Education
Literacy

Free 2012 Calendar Templates

At schools and offices all over the world there are network printers surrounded by wasted misprinted papers. Rather than just throwing those papers in the recycling bin, use Reprint Me to turn those papers into weekly or monthly planning calendars. Reprint Me offers PDF templates for weekly and monthly calendars. Run that paper through the printer again, printing on the blank backside to create a calendar with a Reprint Me template. New calendar templates are released each quarter so that you can print a couple of months in advance. Right now you can get calendars for the first quarter of 2012.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

The first week of 2012 is under our belts now. I hope that everyone who returned to school this week had a good first school week of 2012. As I do every Saturday morning, I've compiled a list of this week's most popular posts.

These were the most popular posts of the week:
1. 10 Useful Chrome Web Apps and Extensions for Teachers and Students
2. A Planetarium for Your Browser
3. Year in Review - My Favorite Posts
4. Calkoo - An Excellent Set of Online Calculators
5. Three Ways To Mark-up Webpages and Share Them
6. Create Comic Adventures on Comic Master
7. One More Year-in-review - 2011 in Tweets

As I mentioned last month, I've started a second blog titled Android 4 Schools. As the name implies it's all about Android apps for students and educators. In the future, I plan to add reviews of hardware.

Please visit the official advertisers and marketing partners that help keep this blog going.
LearnBoost provides a free online gradebook service for teachers.
MasteryConnect provides a network for teachers to share and discover Common Core assessments.
The Worth Ave Group offers insurance plans for school technology.
Edublogs provides blog hosting for teachers and students.
ABCya.com is a provider of free educational games for K-5.
Lesley University offers quality online graduate programs for teachers.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers. In February I will be holding a free public webinar through UMBC.
Ed Tech Teacher offers professional development services for schools. I will be speaking at their winter conference on March 3.

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Image Credit: Sarah Sutter

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