I'm pinning on Pinterest

I signed up for a Pinterest account a couple of days ago. I've been intrigued by Pinterest for a number of months, but not having a Facebook account was holding me back. Now that I've signed up for Facebook, it was easy to sign up for Pinterest. Thanks for the invitation, Lisa!

It was easy to follow the steps to sign up. I signed in with my Facebook ID and then followed the tutorial to follow some people on Pinterest. I later went back and removed these people, because I didn't necessarily want to follow them. I've set up a few boards, some for professional interests and some for personal interests. Because Pinterest is linked in with Facebook (and Twitter) you can search your Facebook friends to see who is on Pinterest and then follow them if you choose. I guess that this would make sense because often friends have similar interests. I noticed that a couple of my friends on Facebook have their Pinterest boards linked to their Facebook accounts. I need to figure out if new "pins" are transmitted to all Facebook friends when this link is set up or if it is only when the person chooses to share certain "pins" that this actually happens. For me, right now, this option is turned off.

Here is a quick video about how to sign up for Pinterest and start pinning.

How To Pinterest from Braid Creative on Vimeo.

I love how the "bookmarks" are set up on virtual bulletin boards. It makes for a very visually appealing presentation. I can see how people can spend a lot of time perusing the millions of boards in Pinterest and  I can see that a lot of "repinning" (where people see a pin on someone else's board and pin it to one of theirs) is happening. It has recently come to my attention via an artist that I follow that not everything is properly attributed on Pinterest. This artist's concern started a lively discussion on her blog, here. Pinterest does have a system in place where the pins are linked to the original site, but this can break down in the repinning process. They have written up a page of pin etiquette that outlines the rules or guidelines that ethical pinners should follow. This idea of ownership and attribution is important and especially so for teacher-librarians.

I am going to spend the next few days adding to my boards and finding some people to follow on Pinterest. I would also like to investigate the educational applications of Pinterest and will be reading this blog post written by Stephen Abram. I do fear, however, that I will be sidetracked a number of times on my quest to use Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, just as Lenora talked about here. This being said, that is what happened this morning and I ended up learning about some photo editing sites from Joyce on the UBC Vista website and also discovered a gem of an animated film on this blog post (nominated for an Oscar this year) that I will share here. ETA: I see that the video is now private, but I will share the trailer for the iPad app. Teacher-librarians will love this bookish video.


The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore iPad App Trailer from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.