Discovering Pinterest and Evernote

My teenage children introduced me to Pinterest approximately a year ago and my Pinterest consists of pins pertaining to fashion, recipes, and home ideas.  Pinterest is like customizing your very own personal electronic magazine.  I have tried recipes on Pinterest and have also taken fashion ideas from it as well.  I have never even considered using Pinterest in education, expect for cute organization suggestions, but after reading the articles and viewing the Lynda.com video I have come up with some fun ideas for a journalism classroom.   Since I will be incorporating technology into the classroom, internet safety is a major issue.  I will have students create a board about cyber safety, which will include various pins about cyber bullying, netiquette, internet safety, and other topics pertaining to being a safe and responsible internet user.  While they are creating their cyber safety board they will become aware of the rules, dangers, and issues surrounding internet safety.  I will also have students use a Pinterest board when deciding which photograph to use for an article.  Students will pin all the pictures in consideration to a board and view them all together to decide which picture or photograph best complements their article.  Journalism students can also create a digital yearbook which displays each week’s activities.  For example, a Pinterest account can be created for the high school and individual boards can be created for various activities such as sports and academic clubs and organizations.  Students will be responsible for taking and posting pictures and photographs to their corresponding boards, which will be able to be viewed by the high school’s students, faculty, staff, and community.

Before last week, I did not even know what Evernote was, I had never even heard the name.  I am sold on Evernote for my personal use and for my future journalism classroom.  First of all, journalism students can keep all their notes and photographs in one place when writing an article so students can access information easily because Evernote is convenient and can be accessed from anywhere.  When interviewing individuals for news stories, students can install Evernote on Smartphones and iPads to make interviewing easy and simple.  Students can use Evernote Hello to keep track of each individual interviewed along with the day, time, place, and notations about the person being interviewed.  Students can also take notes using Evernote by creating a notebook.  All notes pertaining to a specific subject can be stored in individual notebooks.  If students prefer to write notes instead of typing them, they can use Penultimate to write notes in notebooks and store them.  Also, if students are collaborating to write an article, Evernote notes and notebooks can be shared in order to make teamwork easier.  When students write articles they are often required to conduct research.  Using Evernote Clearly can make research faster and easier by deleting all ads and information not relevant to the material needed for research.  Students can access websites and use Evernote Clearly to remove all unnecessary website clutter and only leave the information pertinent to the research.  Evernote is ideal for journalists and I cannot wait to implement these ideas with my students when I have my own classroom one day.