•one board, teachers will find how they can teach kids to find the square area of their name.
The Center Grove schools professional development Pinterest board also has ideas on how teachers can teach math, use iPads in the classroom or renew a teaching license.
While Pinterest has long been a tool for individuals to organize and get ideas for crafts, food, decorating and baking, at least one school district is making the website part of their teachers’ continuing training.
Center Grove has a district Pinterest page where people put ideas for everything education, such as how to organize a classroom and how to teach students to get along.
Individual schools have embraced the concept and developed pages.
Pinterest is a website that allows users to upload photos and ideas of what they are doing. Those ideas are than “pinned” by their website followers, who save the ideas.
Sharing ideas among teachers and educators isn’t new, but Pinterest puts those ideas in one organized place that allows teachers to literally be on the same page in their lessons, said Jessica Hyde, assistant principal at Pleasant Grove Elementary School.
“It’s one space where (educators) can go and see topics and what we talked about,” she said.
Pleasant Grove Elementary School has its own page in addition to the district page.
Pinterest organizes the ideas and gives teachers one place to go for ideas, Hyde said.
For example, when classes are on early release on Wednesdays, teachers have professional development, she said.
Some of that development happens on Pinterest. Teachers are encouraged to bring their computer tablets to meetings so they can be on the website when ideas are discussed, Hyde said.
“The purpose of a school district-created page is professional development,” she said. “(Teachers) would have resources that they would pull from there.”
Pinterest debuted in March 2010. But Center Grove decided to start its own page in an effort to use social media in education, said Kathy Sagorsky, professional development coordinator for the school district.
“It’s resources for (teachers) that they can use in the classroom,” she said.
Schools have had Facebook and Twitter accounts and a school website for parents to check out school news for years.
“We talked about how we could best use social media to help the teachers,” she said.
In the past year or so, Pinterest has become more organized, which has made the website easier to use for schools, said Carrie Dilley, a fifth-grade teacher at Maple Grove Elementary School.
Dilley has had a Pinterest profile since the beginning and during the summer teaches classes on how to use the website.
When she started her Pinterest profile, she simply had a board called “education.” Now, there are ideas for specific issues, such as teaching math or teaching techniques for an autistic child.
The more organized appeal has caught on and made it easier for a larger organization, such as a school district, to maintain its own page, Dilley said.
“It has just been in the last year or so that corporations are using it. It is growing and changing,” she said.
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The Center Grove Pinterest site can be accessed at pinterest.com/centergrovepd/.
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