Pinterest is hot…kind of. I was addicted for a few days. But, not being an avid home decorator or cook, it is easy for me to lose steam looking at “boards” unless like minded individuals are posting interesting quotes, exotic places, and useful tips in my stream.
I just found this list of 25 Best Pinterest Boards for Teachers while I was migrating around on Twitter this evening. I heard that the Army had a Pinterest account and just found it at http://pinterest.com/usarmy/. I’ve even started a few of my own for instructional designers, entrepreneurs and one just to “pin” everything I like.
Pinterest is making its way into business, government, and education.
So, why are we not leveraging this platform more?
It makes it easy to post to Facebook, Twitter, embed the code, and email a friend. See – I’ve even embedded something shared from Flickr on Pinterest below using the embed function Pinterest provided and WordPress allows.
Source: flickr.com via U.S. on Pinterest
As I’ve looked through a few of these I can’t help but wonder if this might be leveraged as a toolkit for our learning and development team. We always talk about having a space where we can share examples of good and bad design, inspiration for future projects, and even process and standards documents. So, here are my initial thoughts about where to pin from mixed in with a little what:
- Lessons Learned – Set up a blog where we post lessons learned and pin them to different boards in our account, perhaps dividing up by systems, processes, instructional strategies, etc.
- Instructional Strategies and related ideas – Pull in pins from other education and training sites.
- Innovation – Create boards specifically for innovative organizations and gurus in areas of interest – government agencies, mobile learning gurus, etc.
- Training and Performance Support Resources – pin training opportunities, performance support resources, forums, and other knowledge expanding opportunities that the team may be able to leverage for personal development.
- Encourage Connecting to Team and Individuals Boards – individuals can create their own personal professional Pinterest boards and pin and share amongst each other. The central source account can be managed by one or two people, but others can re-pin from the main account and vice versa.
Just think of the power of this resource! Instead of logging in to find a list of documents, users can navigate a public (and now the option for some private boards) space driven by photos and small explanations while re-pinning items that meet their personal needs to their own accounts. Or, can share through social networks to other interested friends and professional connections.
And, the great thing is that even if we are late to the game, we can catch up quickly!
Guess I’d better log off and get to it!
