World Language Teachers: 6 Ways Pinterest Helps Us
Looking for an amazing free resource for world language teachers to get ideas, lesson plans, classroom organization ideas, learn languages and find ways to relax? Check out 6 ways that Pinterest helps world language teachers.
Pinterest is a search engine. While we all think about sharing fun recipes, beautiful flower arrangements, and home décor and outfits, Pinterest is so much more than that. Just like Google, Pinterest is a search engine and since it’s a search engine, that means you can use keywords and find great resources for your classes. There’s so many teachers that blog, share their ideas, and use Pinterest simply as a way to manage all of their content.
Want some ideas on how to teach the subjunctive? Simply use keywords. Looking for ways to match your students up with native speakers? Again, easy. Looking for some fun activities online to learn verbs in French? Again, done with a few simple words.
Lesson planning. Just as you can find great ideas for individual lessons, Pinterest lends itself beautifully to organizing your larger units of study into easy places to find everything. I teach AP Spanish Language and Culture. We teach different units under the six themes. Pinterest has been a life saver for organizing my materials.
Looking to teach the family? save all your great ideas on Pinterest into one board. Teaching how to order food in Japanese? Again it’s an easy way to save great ideas from all over the web, to easily be found.
Collaboration. Remember all those great ideas that we posted on our Pinterest boards and that other language teachers have posted on their boards,? Since you’re now sharing your boards, what a great way to collaborate! People that you would never be able to come across in real life are there and ready to get creative and make fantastic engaging lessons with you on Pinterest. It’s a great way to reduce your workload, inspire you, and easily keep track of all the great resources that you’re finding.
Professional development. Just as we’re so lucky to be able to access and share so many different ideas, from blog posts, YouTube videos, Podcasts, and Instagram posts, we are also given the opportunity to take some courses and informal professional development from other teachers. I have a board where I save great finds.
Secret boards. A lot of these same teachers own and participate in group Pinterest boards, where they’re sharing all of these resources. A lot of world language teachers are in Teachers Pay teachers. They’re sharing on Pinterest, collaborating and developing professionally there.
Secret boards. Your boards can be secret or not so secret. I love to use secret boards to do student projects. We know we need to protect students identity online and many of our school districts have specific rules and parameters within which we need to do this. For example, my school has email address conventions that don’t identify the student. Students can make their own Pinterest accounts and they can all collaborate on secret boards.
This is great fun. For example, if you teach French, your French class can collaborate on boards planning a trip, virtual or real to France. They can find restaurants and stores and hotels and transportation. More advanced French students can use French keywords, all of your students can be required to comment on everyone else’s Pins in the target language.
Not planning a trip with your class? The secret boards could be used for any theme that you’re teaching- the house, food in the target language, it’s great fun. We once did a project on our dream home. I had a small advanced class who all created their own group, their own dream homes and organized the décor that they wanted, by room, and they all commented on one another’s rooms and resources in the target language.
Self care and fun.
If you’ve been a teacher, you know how hard we work. We work so hard on all of the administrative tasks in our classroom. We do grades, we answer emails, we attend faculty meetings, we take care of our classrooms, we take care of lots and lots of people. We also spend a great deal of time making learning these new languages engaging, fun, and effective. We are game creators, authors, referees, P.E. teachers, coaches, we do a lot. For us to continue to be able to do it, we’ve got to take care of ourselves.
Pinterest can be a great resource for anything that feeds you and inspires you, and restores you. For example, my secret boards, I have yoga, I have crystals, I have dream destinations, I have my favorite audiobooks, I have clothes and wardrobe ideas, jewelry ideas, flower arrangements, essential oils, those are things that I enjoy reading about and that make my life happier and make me feel re-energized and recharged where I can come back to my classroom and do this everyday. Whatever your definition of self-care, whatever that looks like to you, Pinterest is a great resource to find all kinds of ways to recharge and restore.
Here is a link to my boards: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/reallifelang/boards/
Do you use Pinterest in your teaching?
Looking for more resources? Click the link here: http://reallifelanguage.com/reallifelanguageblog/2015/02/22/the-audition/