Pinterest as a Personalized Learning Network

I decided to explore Pinterest as a professional. I created an education board
 and searched for “high school education” posts. From there, I looked through 
the posts that came up, clicked on links to bring me to informational websites, 
and saved the pins that I found to be particularly interesting or potentially 
useful to me as I look forward to a teaching career.

As I first began searching for posts, I realized that there was a ton of different 
things that came up in my search. There were some general education posts, 
some secondary education posts, some posts specific to different subjects, and 
even posts meant for homeschoolers. There were some posts from experienced 
professionals and some that seemed like a random person wrote it based on 
what they think teaching entails. There were posts with specific lesson plan and 
activity ideas, posts about decorating classrooms, posts suggesting materials to 
cover, posts about disciplinary plans, and advice posts (especially for first-year 
teachers). Some posts offered free materials and others made you pay for materials.

With all of this variety comes both negatives and positives of this particular PLN 
(Personalized Learning Network). As I mentioned, some links required you to pay 
for any help they would provide. Also, there were plenty of posts by people who 
didn’t seem to know anything about education, or people who recommended 
teaching tactics that go against everything I am learning about creating an inclusive 
learning environment. On the other hand, using Pinterest in this way would be useful 
because it would allow me to see what some other teachers are doing. Also, it would 
spark some creativity and give me ideas for lesson plans. Even for some of the posts 
that required you to pay in order to access the materials, I was able to take a sneak 
peak at those materials enough that it sparked some ideas on how to run similar 
lessons that I would create and customize on my own.

As an emerging professional educator, I think the pros of using Pinterest definitely 
outweigh the cons. As is with every resource, I feel that anyone using this tool has to 
take everything with a grain of salt and realize that some things will be useful while 
others will not. I think that if I were to keep an eye out for poor advice and information, 
Pinterest could be a great way to harvest new ideas and stay tuned with those who have 
been gaining experience and knowledge about this profession for a lot longer than I have.