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How Educators Are Using Learnist

By Jennifer Roland

In the weeks since Learnist launched, educators have been finding ways to put it to use.

Learnist, as many have already pointed out, works much like Pinterest — a way to catalog online resources on a topic and share them with the user’s social network. And like Pinterest, it looks like a digital bulletin board with pictures and messages, and connects with Facebook accounts. In fact, the site’s “learning boards” look quite a bit like Facebook’s timeline feature, and Facebook membership is required to use Learnist at this point.

In its current closed beta form, Learnist, launched by Grockit, is still very much in its infancy, but some curious teachers have already jumped on the wagon. Time will tell whether educators will stick with Pinterest, or migrate to Learnist because of its association with Grockit, which already has a large and loyal following as a social learning tool.

College physics instructor Leilah McCarthy created collections on subjects like electromagnetism, mechanics, and waves. High school English teacher Amy Gallagher Critchett posted lessons on grammar and writing. Also under the “Education” category are topics like Mythology, Analyzing Literature, Applying the Pythagorean Theorem, The Great Gatsby, and Common Core Math Standards.

Educators can also find some professional development, including information about flipped classrooms, technology integration, all about the collision between DIY and education, and a professional development summer camp.

Students can also use Learnist to share resources for group projects, to prepare notes to study for tests and write papers. The Facebook integration ensures that they can keep each other Continue reading

How Educators Use Pinterest for Curation

Jody Strauch

By A. Adam Glenn

The phenomenal growth of Pinterest has sparked interest among millions of users.

It’s also spread to journalism educators, who are increasingly experimenting with it in the classroom.

The social network launched two years ago, but in recent months has drawn red-hot excitement for its unique visual, topic-based curation approach. While its 10 million users, especially women, are drawn to it almost obsessively, brands, media firms and news organizations have also planted flags on the network.

Now journalism school faculty are increasingly in on the act.

FROM MOOD BOARDS TO SURVIVAL BOARDS

One early adopter was University of Southern California’s Andrew Lih, who last October, long before he and many others knew the site would become a blockbuster, introduced it to online students in an entrepreneurial class to gather what he called a “mood board” for a project on public art. Lih explained that the students took advantage of Pinterest’s easy-to-use clipping approach to create a densely packed visual scrapbook of public and street art to identify themes that would have easily been missed had they gathered individual photos in a folder.

Aggregating images to share with students is an increasingly common classroom use for the tool.

Jody Strauch at Northwest Missouri State University has used Pinterest to show good design work to her media design classes. Heather Starr Fielder uses Pinterest boards in her classes at Continue reading