48 Great Ways Homeschoolers are Using Pinterest

Cross posted from Onlinecollege.org
Pinterest has proven itself to be a valuable tool for so many people: photographers, designers, craft artists, wedding planners, moms, and more. It's a great place to discover interesting ideas, organize your thoughts, and pin down resources that otherwise might get lost in the shuffle. Homeschooling parents make up another group that benefits greatly from Pinterest, as they share unit studies, school room inspiration, and fun classroom project ideas. Read on to learn more about how homeschoolers are finding value in Pinterest, and some of the interesting ways they're putting the site to work in the home classroom.

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Social

Whether you're connecting with a homeschool family at your church down the street or through Pinterest in another state, social interaction and sharing is a fun way to enrich homeschooling. These are a few of the ways Pinterest makes that easier.

Join homeschool groups: Homeschool communities are coming together to create collaborative boards with writing activities, classroom ideas, books, things to order and more, all put on Pinterest to share with the group and anyone else who wants to follow along.
Laugh about homeschooling: Connect with other homeschoolers on Pinterest to find humorous pins that will keep you going with a smile on your face.
Get feedback: Share ideas and resources from your homeschool classroom, curriculum, and more to find out what other homeschoolers think about what you're doing, and maybe even find ways to improve it.
Connect with similar homeschoolers: Stay on Pinterest long enough, and you're bound to run into others with similar ideas for homeschooling that you can collaborate and connect with.
Swap lesson plans: Have a lesson plan you loved? Put it on Pinterest, and look for great lesson plans from others.
See what homeschool looks like at someone else's home: Satisfy your curiosity for finding out what kind of homeschool experience other families are enjoying.
Find encouragement: Search for homeschool resources on Pinterest, and you're certain to find small pieces of encouragement to remind you why your job as a homeschooler is so important.

Resources

Spend any amount of time on Pinterest and you're bound to be flabbergasted by the sheer amount of inspiration and valuable resources you can find on the site. These are great ways homeschoolers can gather resources through Pinterest.

School room decor inspiration: Pinterest is full of great ideas for decor, including kids' rooms and even classrooms.
Create digital news clippings: Find news clippings that are relevant for your kids to check out and pin them to a rotating board that they use to start their school day, learning about current events and issues that are relevant to their curriculum.
Find homeschool planners: Pinners love to share their homeschool plans, so you can use the site to check out what other families are doing that week.
Discover great books: Use Pinterest to find the best homeschooling books and great books you can put to work in lessons.
Find studying cheat sheets: Use Pinterest to discover great sheets of information on lots of different subjects.
Resource gathering for presentations: Kids can use Pinterest to find ideas and photos to use in presentations.
Discovering lessons: At some point, the question of what to teach can be a problem for homeschoolers, but Pinterest offers endless ideas for lessons that you can try with your kids.
Get your kids out of the house: Use Pinterest to find outdoor nature ideas to use on a nice day, and burn off some energy in the backyard or park.
Find educational videos: Check out Pinterest to easily locate great videos that you can use in your home classroom.
Find the best photos for your lessons: Quickly and easily locate high-quality and inspiring photos to use in homeschooling lessons through Pinterest.
Gather free resources: Find homeschool freebies, free learning resources, printables, and much more on Pinterest.
Track homeschool-friendly activities: Find out about your city's activities at the zoo, special events, find classes at the history and science museum, and more.
Create study boards: Pinterest is a great place to add activities that suit specific study units, and then go back and browse them with the kids.
Highlighting great art: Find and pin fine art to study as part of a unit, or pin great photos and art ideas that you can try out yourself.
Develop hands-on learning: Check out Pinterest to find great ideas for hands-on learning projects, especially seasonal crafts.
Locating printables: Printable games, work projects, and more are coming out in droves on Pinterest, and you can quickly find and organize them with the site.
Discover experiments: Find great ideas for science experiments you can try at home on Pinterest, and bring your science lessons to life.
Kitchen chemistry inspiration: Pinterest is full of mouth-watering and fun recipes to try out, usually with plenty of photos and easy-to-follow steps that make them perfect for trying out with kids for a regular lesson in kitchen chemistry.
Finding homeschool blogs: Homeschool blogs are a great place to find ideas, and the selections you can find on Pinterest are just the tip of the iceberg. Using Pinterest to find great ideas can also help you find excellent homeschool blogs with even more great ideas.

Organization

As a visual bookmarking site, Pinterest is an organizer's dream. Here are just a few of the ways homeschoolers can get organized with Pinterest.

Create a wishlist: Build a wishlist and shopping list to keep track of all of the items you'd like to have for your classroom.
Taming the magazine pile: If you have homeschool and craft magazines clogging up your classroom, you can photograph and pin your favorite ideas to save and organize them, and then dispose of the magazines without guilt or anxiety.
Avoiding distraction: Distracted mama brain can leave you paralyzed, but with Pinterest, you can just pin resources that you come across and check it out later.
Save holiday activities for the future: If you're months away from Christmas, but found some really great ornament crafts to try out in the classroom, you can pin them to a holiday-specific board, and they'll be right there waiting for you when the holiday comes around again.
Organized resources: The Internet is full of worksheets, craft ideas, educational games, and more, and with Pinterest, you can keep them all in neat and highly visual organized bookmarks.
Inventory your books: Save your library to Pinterest, and your kids can visually browse all of the books you have whether they're near the bookcase or not. They can even add comments to the pin and repin them to boards for units or favorite novels.
Easy access to bookmarks: Homeschooling parents who once had thousands upon thousands of text bookmarks can now use Pinterest instead, browsing them in a fun and visual way.
Streamlining weekly lesson planning: Planning lessons can take a lot of time each week, but homeschool parents who have used Pinterest to pin to theme boards have been able to cut out hours of planning time.
Find new ways to make your classroom more organized: Pinterest has seemingly endless ideas for organizing spaces, and you can find great resources for corralling the mess of papers and projects that your classroom accumulates through Pinterest.
Remember your favorite lessons: If you loved it, remember it, and save it in a special board to revisit later with younger children or share with homeschool friends.
Create seasonal boards: Highlight ideas for winter, spring, summer, or fall, and go back to reference them when the time is right.
Create themed weeks: Follow and share calendars on Pinterest to create and participate in themed weeks with other homeschoolers.

Assignments

Pinterest isn't just a great tool for teaching parents; it's perfect for students as well. See how students can take on Pinterest assignments.

Showcase outstanding work: If your child has done some particularly impressive schoolwork, pin it to a special board to let them know you really appreciate their effort and hard work.
Create collages: As a kid, you probably made collages from magazine pages and mod podged them to a poster board, but your kids can create collages on Pinterest instead.
Lapbooks: Kids can create lapbooks on Pinterest, collecting great resources on a single subject to supplement their curriculum.
A lesson in pinning: Have students use Pinterest to collect and pin items that all have certain criteria in common.
Create photo journals from family vacations: Enjoy your vacation, and when you get back, give the kids an assignment to pin photos that best tell the story of your adventure.
Create a virtual field trip: Even if you can't travel to the Smithsonian, you can go to their website and pin your favorite exhibits and collections as a virtual field trip.
Put together creative writing vision boards: For kids who are working on creative writing assignments, they can put together themes and vision boards on Pinterest.
Family challenges: Lots of Pinterest users gather, gather, and gather some more, but never actually put all of the great ideas they've found to work. You can make it a homeschool challenge for each child (and you) to take on at least one great idea from Pinterest each week.
Save your sanity on a rainy day: If you can't make it outside, but the natives are getting restless, turn to your pins for fun and educational ideas, or quickly browse to find new ideas to put to work right away.
Turn kids into curators: Pinterest is so easy, even younger kids can use it. Help students create Pinterest boards for their favorite things, like animals or even paper dolls.

60 Inspiring Examples of Twitter in the Classroom

These are some of the examples of using Twitter as teaching tools in the Classrooms for student achievement.
(cross posted from Online Universities.com)
Social media offers some great opportunities for learning in the classroom, bringing together the ability to collaborate, access worldwide resources, and find new and interesting ways to communicate in one easily accessible place. Teachers around the world have found innovative ways to use Twitter as a teaching tool, and we’ve shared many of these great ideas here with you. Read on, and we’ll explore 60 inspiring ways that teachers and students can put Twitter to work in the classroom.
Communication
Twitter makes staying in touch and sharing announcements super simple and even fun. These ideas offer a great way to put the tool to good use.
Twitter as a bulletin board: Jim Newman at Northern Illinois University uses Twitter as a bulletin board for his class, letting students know about last minute news like canceled classes.
Ambient office hours: With Twitter, Howard Rheingold at Berkeley uses Twitter for group contact, which he calls "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."
Keep students in the loop: Using hashtags on Twitter, students who were not able to make it to class can follow along and stay on top of the conversation.
Assignment coordination: Instead of emailing each other or waiting to meet in class, students can collaborate on projects and keep track of changes by using a Twitter hashtag.
Silencing blurters: For students who have trouble with disruptive blurting, allow them to instantly tweet their blurts silently instead of out loud.
Student engagement in large lectures: In large lecture classes where student participation can be intimidating and logistically problematic, Twitter can make it easy for students to engage and discuss during class time.
Parent communication: Parents can sign up to receive tweets from teachers, learning about activities, tests, projects, and more.
Instant feedback: Twitter makes it easy to get instant approval and disapproval of discussions, issues, and more right in the classroom.
Attendance reminders: For students who have trouble making it to class on time, send reminders before school to get them in the door earlier.
Digital faculty lounge: At Kent State University, college of education teacher William Kist uses Twitter as a "digital faculty lounge" for networking with other professors.
Stay on top of the learning process: Ask students to tweet and reply about what they’re learning, difficulties they’ve faced, tips, resources, and more as an online logbook.
Classroom notepad: Using a Twitter hashtag, it’s easy to organize inspiration, reading, ideas, and more for the classroom to share.
Completed assignments: Students can let teachers know when they’ve finished their work by alerting them on Twitter.
Teaching bite-sized info: Share medical terminology, Shakespeare quotes, kindergarten activities, and more on Twitter.
Twitter pop quiz: Send out quick quizzes on Twitter, and have them count for bonus points in the classroom.
Organization
Twitter’s hashtags and other tools share a great way to organize information for your classroom.
Twitter recaps: At the end of the day, teachers can summarize what has been learned in the classroom, encouraging reflection and discussion between students.
Classroom connections: Classrooms around the world can collaborate using Twitter as a communication tool.
Collating classroom views: Students can share their opinions on issues or any open questions, and they can be organized using Twitter.
Corraling comments in class: Monica Rankin at the University of Texas at Dallas uses weekly hashtags to organize comments, questions and feedback that students have used in class, while also projecting live tweets in class for discussion.
Resources
Use these ideas to take advantage of the vast resources that Twitter has to offer.
Finding great resources: Teachers can ask for recommended books, teaching tools, and ideas for lessons, crowdsourcing resources for the classroom.
Following historical figures: There are many Twitter accounts set up that share the lives and personalities of historical figures, and students can follow them for fun and learning.
Building a brand: Long after school is over, a personal brand will live on for students. Using Twitter in the classroom to build a brand is a valuable exercise for students.
Partner with local organizations: Discuss cultural and educational events in the area on Twitter.
Talk to career experts: High school students exploring their career options can talk to professions in the paths they’re considering on Twitter.
Conversations are a public study tool: Long after the conversation in class is over, students can look back on the lecture discussion to find important points when it’s time to take exams or write essays.
Source evaluation: Students can share resources and discuss whether it’s a good or bad source of information, encouraging comments.
Foreign language news stream: Students in a foreign language class can build their reading skills and stay on top of the news with a foreign language news stream.
Gather real-world data: The classroom can ask Twitter for data from their network, like temperatures, opinions, locations, and interesting facts.
Following the government: Often, local and national political figures have Twitter feeds, and students in the classroom can track their progress.
Ask for help or advice: Using Twitter, teachers can find out if anyone has advice about teaching issues, like when certificates expire or how to handle classroom management.
Communicating with experts: Find authors, scientists, or historians on Twitter and get connected; a great resource for the classroom.
Writing Skills
These are just a few of the great opportunities that Twitter offers for building reading and writing skills.
Vocabulary building: Students can tweet sentences using a particular word to build vocabulary learning.
Twitter can improve writing and punctuation: As long as students are held accountable for their grammar, using Twitter offers a great opportunity for improving writing and punctuation.
Daily word games: Ask students to unscramble anagrams, contribute synonyms, or give vocabulary definitions on Twitter.
Grammar review: Students can tweet past tense, run on sentences, compound sentences, and more.
An exercise in learning to be concise: At the College of the Holy Cross, assistant professor Daniel Klinghard uses Twitter to teach students to be concise, summarizing major political texts without going over Twitter-imposed character limits.
Twitter Exercises
From scavenger hunts to Twitter stories, these exercises offer great ways to use Twitter as a teaching tool.
Inspirational quotes of the day: Allow students to become more familiar with Twitter, and exercise reading and writing skills by having a student post an inspirational quote tweet each day, preferably relating to course content.
Conversations can continue outside of class: When students participate in Twitter discussions in class, there’s a great opportunity for conversations to continue to develop even after the lecture is over.
School trip tracking: Whether it’s a field trip or a long journey, students can log and track their progress on a school trip using Twitter.
Bringing characters to life: At California State University-San Marcos, students in a literature course use Twitter to bring Twilight characters to life, choosing characters from the series to personify on Twitter.
Class newspaper: The entire class can come together to create a newspaper, contributing to sections using hashtags.
Conference following: Students can follow professionals and industry conferences to see what’s going on in that particular realm.
Bonus assignments: Give students optional bonus work to do at home, assigned via Twitter.
Meme tracking: Students can study communication and sociology through the tracking of ideas and ads that spread through Twitter.
Reading assignment summaries: Students can build 140-character summaries based on reading assignments, forcing a focus on quality.
Link sharing: With Twitter, students can share websites with class, making relevant link finding and sharing a classroom assignment.
Trend mapping: Using Twittermap, students can track what people are talking about where.
Researching locations: The class can send out a tweet, asking people to give them their location, and then research that particular location.
Twitter puzzles: Tweet a puzzle each week, giving a prize to the first student who shares the correct answer.
Language learning: Teachers can send foreign language students tweets in a different language, and have students continue the conversation in the same language.
Twitter poetry: Create a collaborative poem where each student contributes one line.
Twitter book club: Within the classroom, willing participants can engage in a Twitter book club for extra credit.
Word tracking: Using Twitter, students can track a word, staying on top of any posts that contain a particular word, like a movie title or store name.
A Twitter story: Students can take turns tweeting stories together, using a hashtag to keep it all together as each student takes a turn to tweet the next line.
Sharing microreviews: Using Twitter, students can write a short review of movies, books, and music that they’ve enjoyed (or not).
Twitter haiku: Using Twitter, students can share short poems to express how they feel about a subject.
Twitter art show: Students can curate their own art shows, using Twitter to share what they think belongs in a particular exhibit.
Collaborative event watching: Students can "watch" presidential debates, political speeches, and other important events together outside of class time, and then continue the discussion back at school.
Current events: By Twitter stalking, students can stay on top of current events through users, such as @BarackObama during the presidential elections.
Find foreign pen pals: Students can use Twitter to communicate with students in a different country, learning about their hobbies, home, school, and more.