World History teacher Erin Towns recently received a grant from the United States Department of Cultural Affairs that allows her to participate in the Teachers for Global Classrooms Project. The grant includes an eight week course on globalization and also funds travel to another country for almost 80 teachers. In the spring, Towns, alongside several of the other teachers, will get the opportunity to study the education system and culture in Kazakhstan in hopes of gaining insight to be utilized back home in her classroom.

    As part of the 8-week course, Towns was required to create a Pinterest board filled with a collection of different ideas and resources off of the internet about how teachers could incorporate global ideology in their classrooms. When she initially received the assignment, Towns wasn’t quite convinced. “I thought to myself, ‘Pinterest is for baby clothes, recipes, and dumb bunnies,’” she said. She quickly realized, however, that teachers around the globe were utilizing the website to meet the needs of “21st century learners,” and has since been successful in implementing it as a tool for learning in her classroom.

    Pinterest is an image-based program that allows users to connect with other people who are interested in similar things. Members each have boards, to which they can “pin” media from the web, or “repin” relevant media from other users. Towns explained it as essentially “a sophisticated bookmarking system,” allowing her students to make use of various ways of learning. There were three main ways by which Towns aimed to accomplish this. The first was by asking how she could reach her students using the website as a tool; how she could make use of something that was relevant to them in her classroom. The second question was how she could reach her peers– other teachers– in creating a virtual community of sorts in which they could share their ideas. And lastly, it was (naturally, for anyone who knows Towns) a competition, as there are prizes involved for the best Pinterest boards.

    The website is incorporated in the classroom as a tool for enhancing or furthering students’ learning in a way that individually makes sense to them. For instance, students “outline the notes with all of the important people and things like that, but then they have to use that and they have to go all around the Internet and they have to use maps, movies, images– whatever– and they have to pin them to the board and make captions instead of just taking it straight out of the notes,” she explains. Thus, if a student understands information more completely by watching videos on a topic, they may choose to pin more videos than anything else.

    Towns knew that Pinterest was really working for her students after she gave an assignment with ten essays, and asked that students complete six of their choosing. She was shocked when the students asked whether they could complete all of the essays for credit. “Book outlining works really well for some kids. Other kids need visuals. I’ve found that the combination between the two has just been incredible,” she said. She couldn’t believe how well they retained the material, she said.