You've Peaked my Pinterest...

One of my goals has been to explore the use of Pinterest in nursing education. When I wrote my paper on social media use in nursing education, I was unable to find any articles on the topic for nursing. However, I was able to find articles regarding the use of Pinterest in higher education. I wanted to try building a Pinterest account that faculty and students could add pins to as a central repository for information. Currently, we use our class Facebook page, but this requires scrolling through endless posts to find the study guide someone posted last week. I think that using Pinterest will be fun and provide a more organized framework to collect nursing information. Millennials enjoy collaborative learning activities, which fits in with the community Pinterest account to which both faculty and students can contribute.

Today I was able to find a Prezi that addresses using Pinterest in nursing education: Pinterest Prezi.

I also found an article by Shellenbarger and Robb (2013) that I did not see before. The article, Pinstructive Ideas: Using a Social Networking Bulletin Board for Nursing Education, advocated for the use of Pinterest in nursing education - Just what I was looking for! The authors stressed that Millennials expect interactive, collaborative learning opportunities (Shellenbarger & Robb, 2013). The authors further assert that Pinterest has great potential for creating effective learning environments based on constuctivism as long as educators have a "clear, instructional intent" (Shellenbarger & Robb, 2013, p. 206). Shellenbarger and Robb (2013) provided other resources and advice regarding following social networking policies. Here's a video with helpful information about using Pinterest in education, including the "nuts and bolts":

The authors suggested that faculty create some sample boards, becoming familiar with Pinterest, before opening the account to students. I was pleased that they suggested the plan I devised myself. Here's what I have so far:

I have been building my Nursing Pinterest page for some time. I have 16 boards and over 750 pins to date. Initially, it was under my name, but I wanted to create a community board. Today I did some research and consulted the Pinterest Help Desk to find out how to make it into a community board. I was originally going to email the students invitations, but that would have been time consuming. So, since we already had a Facebook group, I just posted the name of the account (CCGA Nursing) and a brief explanation of the goal for the group Pinterest account and cautions about inappropriate postings. I had to create a new Gmail account so that the students were not using my school email account. So far 15 people have seen the Facebook post, 10 have liked it, and 8 have started following CCGA Nursing. Out of 40 students in the class, I think this is a good response, especially for a Saturday afternoon! I will follow up with an announcement in D2L and in class on Monday. I have also started researching and following others with nursing related Pinterest accounts, including professional organizations, former students, and other nurse educators. Hopefully, they will follow us in return. Of course, I will have to monitor the account for any inappropriate content, but I am hoping not to have many issues with that. I'm excited to see where this takes us!

Here's the link to the live page: www.pinterest.com/sandberg05  

Happy pinning!
Maryanne