A guest blog from Sarah Learmonth, who has been working on my Pinterest project for a little over a week now:
This week has seen the launch of the Pinterest project; combining video, images and other useful resources into an engaging student learning tool.
To achieve this, I have been researching and sourcing material (including videos, blog posts and newspaper articles) using the following criteria;
- The resource has to be directly related to course material which students could use as revision or read in addition to their notes.
Or
- The resource is interesting/thought-provoking and related to a particular subject.
For example this light hearted article from the Telegraph discusses whether Indiana Jones is a negative role model for Archaeology.
I’ve been searching google, academic blogs, museums, university research findings, tumblr, newspapers and then browsing/searching archives and recommended links. Once a resource is found that matches the criteria as described above; it has to be simple and straight forward to understand, not bogged down in jargon or overly complicated otherwise students won’t read it. The visual has to appealing and from a reliable independent source that is not biased (well as close to this as possible!)
The difficulties I’ve had are finding resources that match all the requirements. For example, I wanted to pin the following link, which includes a video and an article about the English language. It won’t allow me to do so. I can ‘share’ via the option already embedded on the website but it does not allow me to attach a visual therefore defeating the purpose of Pinterest. Other sites I’ve had problems pinning from are national geographic, history.com and the BBC learning zone.
Other problems encountered is that scholarly articles rarely contain visuals, PDFs cannot be pinned, or should a website contain an appropriate visual the surrounding content may not be reliable.
I have pinned a number of items that are visually appealing and linked to informative resources but would welcome any feedback, comments or suggestions.
