Putting the Pinterest in Education

I recently started using Pinterest (www.pinterest.com/dermotdonnelly/) and think it could have some great educational uses.  Pinterest basically allows you to create boards on which you can stick pins (pictures, videos, etc.).  You can create a range of different boards depending on what type of things you want to pin.  There are a range of categories, e.g., education, social media, sport, humour, science jokes (one of my favourites, but all the good ones argon!), movies, etc., that you can either search or create yourself, and organise your pins under.  In essense, I would describe Pinterest as dynamic and engaging photo/video albums to share amongst friends, work colleagues, the world!

In terms of education, I can see a student studying a particular topic, say for example the topic of light in science, and finding a range of useful pictures/videos on the internet that are helpful to their understanding of the material.  Even better still, a student could take their own pictures/videos of experiments they do in the class and create a board for these experiments.  As a user of Pinterest, you can allow certain people to add pins to particular boards that you create.  Therefore, a teacher could create a board related to a particular experiment and give students the assignment of finding or creating useful images that relate to that experiment.  I think it would be really cool for students after a year's work to have a multitude of boards specific to particular content that they can view anytime or anywhere they want to.  Also, how great would it be for students' confidence and self-esteem if they found other users from around the world showing a Pinterest in their pictures?

I would not consider myself great at using Twitter, but combining it with Pinterest I can see myself using Twitter much more now, as they combine seamlessly.  Pinterest would also work nicely alongside blogging if someone wanted to do more showing than telling in their blogpost.  What might be some other interesting ways to use Pinterest to engage students' learning or indeed share our own learning?  I am sure there will be some Pinteresting examples in many classrooms in the future.