Thursday, August 16, 2012

Differentiation With Pinterest: Promote Personalized Reading Plans

Pinterest.com has emerged on the social media scene with a million and one uses, but one of the best ways to take advantage of this tech tool is for differentiation to build students' reading confidence and interest. When we face the challenge of having unskilled or reluctant readers in our classrooms, Pinterest.com can help us organize reading selections for individual students. Unlike other bookmarking tools, Pinterest.com is more visual.  Imagine, a virtual cork board and the ability to have as many cork boards as you want. A teacher using Pinterest.com can create various virtual bulletin boards for as many topics as he/she would like, e.g.  a board showcasing vocabulary definitions and examples, a board with links to pieces of literature, a board with non fiction selections or showing examples of grammar in context...you get the idea. After adding the Pinterest.com bookmarklet to your browser, as you browse the web and find content you like, you can "pin" the content to the Pinterest.com cork board of your choice.  

For teachers, this means as you search for high interest content for reluctant readers, you can organize the content by category or even create personalized boards for each student adding content catered specifically for the student's specific learning needs.

What's even better about this site is the ability for users to "repin" content, which means that if a student enjoys a particular pin the teacher recommended, using his/her own Pinterest account, he/she will then be able to add it to his/her own pinboard. "Repinning" becomes a sort of virtual recommendation of content, and we all know students will listen to their peers' recommendations any day over ours. The trick is to find interesting content to catch students' attention so that then they will repin and promote the content to their classmates.

I have started a Pinterest.com Board for Vocabulary to teach Literary Terms, and a Common Core Reading Selections Board for Grades K-12. I have started pins linked to the high interest content for all grade level readers recommended by the ELA K-12 Common Core Standards. Anyone is welcomed to "repin" the content! Pinterest requires an invitation only sign up, but invites are sent promptly. Hope you'll follow me on Pinterest.com  and begin pinning with your students!
http://pinterest.com/fearlesstech/


Also check out Edutopia's Five-Minute Film Festival on a million more uses for Pinterest!
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/film-festival-pinterest-teaching-learning

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