Emily 0:37

Hey there, thanks for joining us today. Today we're starting off our summer tradition of sharing a bonus tip with you each week.

Emily 0:46

This week, we are sharing ideas for organizing your Pinterest boards, and revisiting the highlights from Episode 56, where we give five tips for finding quality teaching resources online.

Heidi 0:57

If you have been teaching for fewer than 10 years, I don't think it's possible to understand how much Pinterest changed education. It was kind of like the building of the Transcontinental Railroad of educational resources.

Speaker 1 1:15

Teacher blogging really took off in the mid 2000s. And we started the second story window blog way back in 2008. But as a resource blogs have a lot of limitations.

Heidi 1:25

Right. If you were happened to be online, and you saw a good idea on someone's blog, you had to remember where it was. And it was really hard to search a bunch of blogs for specific resources. If you needed something like you know, a fun science activity, it was a real trick to find what you needed.

Speaker 1 1:43

Yeah, if you wanted a fun idea for teaching verbs, you were basically searching with a hope and a prayer that something useful would turn up.

Speaker 2 1:49

But in 2010, Pinterest launched, and suddenly there was an easy way to connect and search for exactly what you needed. It was almost like someone had made a magic tool just to help teachers find and save ideas.

Speaker 1 2:04

And we were very early adopters. I believe Heidi coined the term pin insomnia for I mean, you've been scrolling Pinterest so long that you stay up all night. And that little pin on Pinterest went viral. So we're the early fans of Pinterest.

Speaker 2 2:21

The Pinterest influencers you had no idea existed.

Emily 2:25

But Pinterest really was made for teachers. That's probably why there's something like 500,000 education related pins saved to Pinterest every day. That's like a staggering number of resources right at your fingertips.

Heidi 2:39

And because there's so much out there it makes organization so important. Our tip today is to keep your Pinterest boards clearly labeled and organized.

Emily 2:49

This might be my favorite type of organization because I can do it on my phone while still I'm watching a juicy documentary on Netflix, documentary and quote unquote, air quotes. No need to go into my classroom at all to get this organization done.

Speaker 2 3:06

That is definitely the perk of digital materials. And Pinterest makes it so easy to create boards and subsections for every topic you might teach. I organize all my Pinterest boards alphabetically. But I also want similarly themed boards grouped together. So each of my educational board titles, starts with Teach:, and then I add a heading after that. So teach: back to school, teach: math, teach: classroom management, all that fun stuff.

Speaker 1 3:33

The important thing is to organize your boards in a way that makes sense for you. You may want general boards for each subject area like language arts, social studies, Genius Hour, and everything else you teach. Then you create specific sections inside of your general boards.

Heidi 3:49

So on your math board, you might have a section for each unit like unit one place value unit two, graphing. Or maybe a more general section for math games, math, worksheets, etc.

Emily 4:00

If you're really on top of it, you can create sub sections for your sections.

Heidi 4:05

Mind blowing.

Emily 4:06

I know so if my main board is math, and then I have a section for unit one place value, I might have a sub section for place value games and a subsection for place value worksheets, and a subsection for lesson ideas. You get the idea.

Heidi 4:19

it really niching down your boards will make it quicker to find what you're looking for. When you remember a fun idea you said two months ago and now you need to find the details for it.

Emily 4:28

Another tool for making Pinterest useful is to add a note to self on each pin. If you're pinning something because you want to use it for a review activity the day you come back from winter break, put that note in now because you will quickly forget why you saved that pin.

Heidi 4:29

Oh, I've had that happen so many times. Instead of blogs these days so many teachers are posting their ideas on Instagram and Tiktok so it can make it tricky to save a fun idea that you come across on social media. Unfortunately, there is not a direct connection between Instagram and Pinterest. But it is not too hard to make it work.

Emily 5:06

Go to the Instagram posts you'd like to pin, click the little paper airplane icon in the bottom and select Copy Link.

Heidi 5:13

Then next you just open the Pinterest app, open the board where you want to save your new pin, and on the bottom menu of that page, click the plus sign that says Add. Then you have to select Create pin. Then when you after you click that there's like a little icon on the bottom that looks like a globe. So you click that and then you paste the URL that you saved from Instagram right in that box.

Emily 5:34

It actually sounds complicated, but we promise it's not. Try it once and you'll see it's pretty simple. And the steps to pin something from TikTok are pretty similar.

Heidi 5:44

Once you've got all your new content pinned, if you look back at old pins that seem pointless now just go ahead and delete them. If you don't remember why you save them, they're really just creating clutter.

Speaker 1 5:54

Thankfully, it's easy to delete and unwanted pin. But the best way to avoid having to declutter your Pinterest boards is to make sure you're only saving quality pins in the first place.

Speaker 2 6:03

But with those hundreds of 1000s of education related pins, it's tricky to know which of those pins are worth your time.

Heidi 6:10

So keep listening because we've got five handy Pinterest tips to help you out from Episode 56.

Emily 6:11

Today we're talking about how to find quality digital teaching resources online, which can sometimes feel like an overwhelming task. When I started teaching, you're basically limited to the box curriculum your school provided. If that didn't align with your teaching style, or you wanted to add some flair to your lessons, there were not many options.

Kristen 6:38

You know, there were maybe a few teacher bloggers, but they weren't really providing any resources. So if you liked what they did, you were stuck having to recreate it. The other option was idea books from publishers like Scholastic or Carson Tolosa. If you've been around a while you probably have some of these tucked away. I remember just dropping 15 bucks on a wing and a prayer and hoping that this book actually had something I could use.

Speaker 1 7:03

Yep, I still remember going to the teacher store near us, Utah Idaho Supply rip to hunt through the idea of books, they had their they have this kind of big section of like tourney bookshelves that you could look at. And I wasted so much money on idea books that I was never able to use, or maybe had like one usable page.

Speaker 2 7:23

Or there were also books from more academic serious publishers. I have a small library of math books from Marilyn Burns, because she was really the only one in the game at the time. But those books weren't written as like lesson ideas. They were more like little essays about a teacher implementing a problem solving lesson on a topic like even in odd numbers.

Heidi 7:46

So if I wanted to do that same thing with my class, I had to like read through all of this and then extrapolate the steps from the lesson and then recreate anything I wanted in Microsoft Word.

Emily 7:57

Oh yeah, great use of time. Yeah. So the advent of Teachers Pay Teachers combined with social media, like Pinterest was a bit like the invention of the light bulb coming to education.

Heidi 8:07

It really did change everything. And there are so many impressive benefits to digital teaching resources. First, I think is the vast number of ideas readily available at the push of a button, you can find examples of incredible teaching ideas that you might never consider. Yes.

Heidi 8:27

Plus, you have a whole network of similar educators looking to share what worked for their students. This just wasn't possible before. And now when teachers success can end up benefiting 1000s of students.

Emily 8:41

It's so amazing to consider. But the large scale of digital resources creates some special headaches. The biggest one is probably the low barrier to entry. Anyone, even if they don't have any experience as an educator can post something online and convince teachers that it's an absolute must have for their classrooms. And that may be true, but it also might just be something cute with no educational merit.

Heidi 9:05

And even when you do find resources from actual educators, you can't assume that the information that they are providing is accurate. So we can all use some guidelines for how to recognize quality resources. We recently came across an article called Pinning and Planning: Five Tips for Using Pinterest to Teach Science. And we thought this article is really useful.

Speaker 1 9:29

The article comes from a couple of science methods professors whose undergrad students were using Pinterest to find Lesson Materials. They decided that instead of banning Pinterest, it would be more worthwhile to teach their students how to use it effectively, which I think is so brilliant, we all need to have skills to help us vet the many resources we encounter online.

Speaker 2 9:50

Their team spent several months analyzing 1600 pins on two elementary science topics, adaptations and force in motion. And I think their findings were pretty illuminating. Of the pins they looked at 16% of them contained inaccuracies. Yikes.

But a pin is just a little teaser to take you to a more informative post. So when the researchers click through to the sites linked to the pins, they found inaccurate information on 41% of the posts. Oh my gosh, that is not good. No, that is that is worrying.

Speaker 1 10:29

A couple other problems the study highlighted was that the activities often didn't encourage students to investigate or use higher level thinking. Three fourths of the lessons focused on simple memorizing. Plus these lessons were presented as one time activities instead of as a part of a more coherent unit.

Speaker 2 10:48

The authors of the article did conclude that Pinterest could be a valuable tool, but it requires some work from teachers. With that goal in mind, they generated five tips to help teachers make better use of Pinterest.

Speaker 1 11:03

And so although this article focuses on Pinterest and science lessons, we thought the takeaways could easily extend to include lessons on any topic from any digital platform. If you are a teacher who uses the internet to find ideas and materials, these tips are for you.

The first three tips are things to do before searching. The fourth is what to do while searching. And then the last is what to do once you have found what you're searching for. So Emily, kick us off with tip number one.

Tip number one is understand the concepts yourself first.

So Pinterest and TPT and Instagram and probably TikTok but we are too old to know.

It's downloaded on my phone. And I don't even understand how to find anything out there, so.

So those are great places to find teaching ideas, but they are often not great places to help you understand the concepts that you teach.

That's because a lot of the people publishing content might not understand the concepts themselves, even if they think they do. And if you don't have a solid understanding of what you're meant to be teaching, you can't separate the quality material from the bad.

Now, you might think that this just applies to upper grade teachers who have heavy duty content to cover. But early concepts still require sophisticated understanding.

Just today, I saw a post on Facebook from a kindergarten teacher. And she was complaining about a resource from TPT that was meant to teach two dimensional shapes. But it was using three dimensional pictures as example.

Oh no. As preschool teachers, we ran into that all the time, not just in resources, but also in shape books. You can't read a book that says this box is a square. And then next week, start your 3d shape unit where you say this box is a cube. or heaven forbid, if a rhombus is described as a diamond.

No, I lose my mind. And recently, one of the top results of my search for Easter egg fractions showed a worksheet with nine little eggs on it. And each of the eggs is partitioned in different ways. And the kids are supposed to color 1/4 Blue color 1/4 Pink, you know, make cute little easter eggs.

Speaker 1 13:19

But what is the number one rule of fractions? That is that partitions have to be equal size. So how did they do that with eggs?

Like mathematically, you can have different size partitions if they have equal area, but we're second and first graders so for them, the partitions really do need to be equal sized.

On that page, half of the eggs are partitioned incorrectly, oh my god, they're not even close to having equal size or area. And this resource has 28 five star reviews with comments like a fun and creative way to work on fractions. And this was a fun resource to use for confirmation of student understanding.

Speaker 1 14:03

Oh mercy. That is so cringy I wonder what that teacher thinks her students are understanding about fractions if this activity was giving her good information.

That is a mystery. I did some more digging on this seller because I was curious. And I found that this teacher sells these poorly partitioned eggs as clipart. So if you want, you can make your own inaccurate worksheets.

Speaker 1 14:14

Oh, yay. Well, this is the perfect example to remind you that you really need to understand what you're teaching before other people try to tell you how to teach it. And to be clear, there are plenty of excellent resources on TPT. But the goal here is to help you learn how to recognize which resources are worth your hard earned money. So how do you what's the second tip?

Speaker 2 14:47

The second tip for making better use of digital resources is to decide what you want your students to learn.

Speaker 1 14:54

Yeah, there is just so much content available and if you don't have a clear objective for exactly what you want your students to learn, you're looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles. How will you know if you found what you need if you don't even know what you're looking for?

Speaker 2 15:11

As someone who suffers from analysis paralysis, this tip is vital. I have to narrow the field before I start searching.

The best place to start for this is to look at the standards. What are students expected to do for this standard? And then once you know that, you have to unpack it a little. What do students need to know to be able to do those things? So Heidi, can you give us an example?

Speaker 2 15:36

So let's look at the only standard for second grade that is about money. The standard says solve word problems involving dollar bills, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies, using the dollar and cents symbols appropriately. If that's all you knew about second graders and money, you might just jump into word problems.

But kids can't start solving word problems about money unless they know how to count money. And they can't count money unless they can recognize coins. And they can't get coins unless they can skip count by fives and 10s. So my search for money lessons is going to start with a search for skip counting ideas.

But none of that is in the standard about money, you have to take some time to unpack the concepts embedded in the standards, and then break those concepts into manageable pieces. Now let's hear the third tip Emily.

Speaker 1 16:28

The third tip for finding the right digital resources is to identify common misconceptions about the topic. If you've taught this topic before, you might know a lot of the common misconceptions about it.

Speaker 2 16:40

Yeah, take for example, my earlier rant about Easter eggs. I could identify the problems with that page because I have spent years trying to get second graders to stop partitioning circles and fourths by drawing those like three vertical lines.

Yep, that works with a square but not in a circle. And conversely, they trained you where you partition a circle into thirds with like that piece sign the trend do the same thing with squares it doesn't work.

Speaker 1 17:06

If you're not aware of any misconceptions on your own, a good way to identify them is to search for them. Before hunting for resources, try a quick search for the topic plus terms like misconception or confusion. Not only will this help you weed out the useless resources from the quality ones, it will help you know what to teach.

Speaker 2 17:26

So let's say you are teaching about seasons, and you know that people often think that summer means that the earth is closer to the sun. Because you are aware of that misconception, you can look for materials that will help you address that with your students.

Speaker 1 17:42

So to recap, the first three tips for finding the right digital teaching resources are understand the concepts yourself, decide what you want your students to learn, and identify common misconceptions about the topic.

Those are the things to do before you even begin your search. The fourth tip is what you do while you're searching. And that is check the author's expertise.

So on TPT, you can check out the sellers My Profile tab in their store, it may or may not have much information, but it can give you some place to start. On their own website, sellers might have a more detailed list of their background experience and education.

This might seem unimportant, but the researchers in this article found that when teacher authors provided claims of their training and expertise, the quality of their resources was better.

Now, that's not to say that someone has to be the foremost expert in their field. But what we're looking for is a content provider who has some experience in that area who has some credentials, and maybe a degree or a certification in that area. And someone who has some classroom experience.

Checking a teacher's credentials on social media can be tricky. If I'm on Instagram or another site where that information isn't readily available, I find it helpful to look at the other teaching content they've posted.

If my overall assessment of their content is that they know what they're talking about, I'm willing to move forward with their resource. But if I'm scanning their Instagram profile and seeing things that don't align with what I consider good teaching, then I don't look at their products, I don't follow their pages.

There's just so much great content waiting to be found. We do not have time to mess around with anything mediocre, even if it's cute.

And that brings us to our last tip fit the pieces together.

Unless you are buying a full curriculum you will need to connect the ideas you find into a cohesive plan. We want students to develop rich conceptual understandings of everything we teach. And that can't happen if we are jumping from fun activity to fun activity without building the connections between them.

Speaker 1 19:52

Education looks so different today than it did back when we were starting out. That is due in a large part to the way teachers are now able to share ideas online. On our podcast, we want to help teachers elevate what matters and simplify the rest. That's exactly what digital resources enable you to do if you're savvy.

So when it's time to select material for your class, remember these five tips. One, understand the concepts yourself. Two decide what you want your students to learn. Three identify common misconceptions about the topic. Four check the author's expertise, and five fit the pieces together.

Speaker 1 20:31

If you would like to read the full pinning and planning article where these tips originated, it was published in the January 2021, Science and Shildren Journal, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

We would love to hear your thoughts on how you find quality digital teaching materials online. Come join the conversation in our Teacher Approved Facebook group.

That's it for this week's bonus episode. Take some time to organize your Pinterest boards while you're lounging by the pool or watching something on Netflix. Then try creating specific boards for each subject area and create sections inside your boards to keep all of those pins organized.

And don't forget the five guidelines when it's time to find some new pins. And you can find our latest pins on Pinterest at pinterest.com/secondstorywindow.

If you enjoyed this episode, we would love if you shared it with a teacher friend who might enjoy it as well. It's the best way to help our show reach new listeners. And be sure to check out our show notes for links to anything we mentioned in this episode.