Teaching Potential
‘Students are too busy in today’s world to stop to look at announcement boards or read a newsletter. The majority of this generation gathers their information from online news sites and tweets and Facebook statuses”(Articles, 2012) students turn to the internet for almost everything. Schools are understanding and evolving knowing that the more information is online the more likely that students will see and respond to it. Social bookmarking using Pinterest is a perfect example of how to get students attention and educate them at the same time. Using methods involving social networking encourages collective contribution, not individual ownership, students learning and helping each other to reach a common goal. (Mason & Rennie, 2008, p.14). The case of collaborative learning is well documented in literature and can be traced back to Vygotsky and his ideas on the “Zone of Proximal Development”. Collaborative cooperative learning benefits students in ways of sharing and clarifying information and ideas, communicative skills and improved critical thinking (McConnell, 2000, p.26). This is easily applied to the use of Pinterest in the classroom through social bookmarking. The main benefit of social bookmarking is that it creates an environment where there is shared collaborative ownership of the learning resources, where a teacher or a student might share a resource, start a discussion or comment on something shared by someone else. All the group members are respected as participants in a learning community of which the teacher is just one participant (Curcher, 2011). Pinterest is meant to be a fun discovery tool, enjoying finding and pinning information. What has happened from the use of social media in the classroom is that it has moved outside the classroom environment. Students were found to be adding and sharing more information and also using it for their own interests.