Are You a Team Player or a Personal Pinner? Situating Pinterest as Part of Teachers’ Online and Offline Professional Learning Networks

Pinterest, a popular social networking site, is used as a resource by educators across all grade levels. We take the perspective that Pinterest acts as a professional learning network (PLN) and interrogate the ways that teachers share resources within online/offline PLNs. Eighty-eight teachers responded to a survey that asked about their social media use as well as their sharing of Pinterest resources with their professional colleagues. Building from the media use typology, we developed the Peer-to-Peer Pinterest Sharing Typology to describe types of sharing, finding that most respondents indicated that they did not share resources, others shared if forced to, and some shared as a way to enhance collegial collaboration. This research expands limited empirical work on both Pinterest as a PLN and on how learning and resources from online PLNs cross into school-based ones. This work will be of interest to those who seek to understand how social media sites play a role in teacher professional learning.