Pinterest Dedicates Special Project to Teachers

It’s no secret: Teachers are wild about social media. Maybe it’s because teachers generally have a generous and sharing nature, but Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are chock-full of instructors at all levels sharing insights, lesson plans and day-to-day musings of life and work.

The data backs up educators’ high levels of participation in social media as well. A 2012 survey by MMS Education found that 82 percent of educators surveyed said they are members of a social network.

Among the established social media platforms — including Facebook and Twitter — Pinterest is the relatively new kid on the block. Founded in 2010, the visually focused platform allows users to pin interesting images to boards that they can create and categorize. Users can amass followers through their boards.

Teachers, who are often hungry for fresh perspectives, have flocked to the platform, creating boards that they rely on for classroom ideas. According to an official blog post from the company, “more than 500,000 education-related ideas are pinned each day.”

In recognition of this fledgling community, Pinterest is partnering with Edutopia to offer more targeted resources to teachers. First up: a new educator-specific hub called Teachers on Pinterest.

The hub curates and assembles educator-related posts on Pinterest that might be of interest to teachers. It slices and dices the pins by grade level and subject matter, which makes it much easier to navigate, as Pinterest isn’t the easiest social media platform for search and content discovery.

The current focus is on elementary school teachers, but Pinterest plans to expand the project to middle and high school teachers as well as it grows in size. Since launching on Aug. 13, Teachers on Pinterest has already amassed 38,316 followers, indicating that there are plenty of “pinners” in the K–12 crowd. So the wait for middle and high school teachers might not be very long.