Thoughts on the Reading from This Week

While I love Pinterest, I have found myself moving away from using it as a resource for teaching. These days I find myself migrating to Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Social media use within classrooms is growing as the years go on and I think that it’s important for teachers to utilize tools that are out there, within reason. Making sure that the tools are appropriate for the age group is so important. I wouldn’t expect my elementary school-aged kids to do the same thing with social media as I would high school-aged kids.

As mentioned in the reading this week, Pinterest has become a place for linking to outside sites, like TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). TPT is a great place to find resources and I think that it has usurped Pinterest for the landing place that teachers go to find inspiration. Using it as a social media tool is interesting though because you have the ability to follow your favorite creators on there and you can leave comments on the products that you purchase. This very much takes us into produsage territory because the producer is also using the platform to reach out to their followers.


I think that TPT is a great place for supplemental resources, but it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for the curriculum that is already in place. Having extra things is something that every teacher needs to be equipped with, but making sure those extras are more helpful than not is important.  

Comments

  1. Rachel WellmanJuly 10, 2022 at 4:12 PM

    In my beginning years of teaching, I was on Pinterest a lot, curating collections of classroom decorations and organization systems, but I rarely found myself on there trying to supplement my curriculum skills. I have a hard time with TPT because anyone can slap anything on there, and I hate to say it, but when I was the instructional coach, I had a handful of teachers who would just print stuff off and roll with it even though it wasn't aligned to any objectives. >.<

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