Pinterest for Spanish Community Service Learning

by Ann Abbott 


I have been aware of Pinterest for a while, but it didn´t seem like a tool that I could use for my professional interests. 


Recently, however, I decided to really dig in and start exploring. I looked at the "education" category, but everything I saw there was about elementary education. Teachers were sharing classroom activities, bulletin boards and classroom organizational solutions. 


At first glance, that has nothing to do with me: I teach at the university; I specialize in Spanish community service learning and social entrepreneurship; and I don't have a classroom of my own. However:

1. I write activities and lesson plans that I like to share with others. They are on my blog, but you have to know about my blog to find them.
2. I do in fact have a bulletin board outside my office. It is there to promote the Spanish community service learning opportunities for students, but I rarely update it. I should!
3. More and more, I see my classroom as existing "in the cloud." We meet in a classroom in the basement of the Foreign Languages Building this semester, but much of our time together is spent exploring content on-line and responding to it there. And although I don't need cute bins and containers to organize my students' crayons, I do need to organize the web sources I find and want to use later on.

I decided that Pinterest could work for me. Please visit me at http://pinterest.com/AbbottBarbieri. I have created boards for my two courses for this semester: 

• "Spanish & Social Entrepreneurship"
• "Spanish Service Learning"

If you'd like to follow me, I will follow you, too. Let's see where Pinterest leads.