A Pinterest Tip for Teachers and a HUGE Giveaway -

I think it is awesome when teachers support each other. That is one thing that makes our jobs so much easier! For Teacher Appreciation Week I’ve teamed up with some amazing teachers to share tips that work in our classrooms, along with incredible prizes for very deserving teachers – YOU!

Check out my tips, and make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the prizes and enter to win!

I use Pinterest all the time, and the vast majority of ideas that I pin are for school. When I first started using Pinterest for school (a few years ago!) I had one board for preschool ideas. After a year of pinning to that one board it got a little hard to find what I was looking for, even though I knew I had pinned it.

This is my tip for you – create Pinterest boards for each subject or domain that you teach (that’s the tip, stick with me until the end of the post for a suprise giveaway). This makes it so much easier to find what you’re looking for, and it helps when you’re out of ideas. Lesson planning is so much easier now because I open the pin board I need, scroll until I find the idea I want, and fill it in on my lesson plan.

This has also helped when I see great ideas that I don’t need at the moment, but want to remember for the future. I have a place to put all of these ideas where I will be able to find them right away.

I completely understand that doing this means that you’ll have to move the pins you currently have to a new board, and this sounds like it will take a ridiculous amount of time. It will, I won’t lie – when I moved all of my pins to new boards I actually got kicked off Pinterest for the rest of the day because it though I was spamming my own boards, I wasn’t, I just had that many to move! This is a great summer project because it takes a long time, but not a ton of energy. You can do it on your iPad while you sit by the pool if you want, or during a lazy movie marathon. Don’t think of it as a waste of time, think of it as an investment in organization!

Last summer I took my Pin Boards a step further and gave them all covers so it is really easy to find the board that I’m looking for. I’m going to show you how to do this on your own boards, but first, here’s what mine look like:

You’ll want to start by designing your covers – use some free papers, frames, and fonts (you can get them all on TPT! Once your cover looks like you want it to make sure to save it as a photo. Create a cover for each of your boards. This is the part that takes the longest, especially if you’re like me and you have 50+ Boards!

Once you have all of your covers made, it’s time to upload them to Pinterest. Start by logging in and navigating to the page that shows all of your Pin Boards. Down in the lower right corner there are two little buttons, click on the one that looks like a plus sign.

Select the option that says “Upload a pin.” This will open a box that lets you select the photo of the cover that you’ve saved to your computer. Once the photo has uploaded you can choose which board to pin it to. It also gives you the option to include a link that the photo will go to when someone else opens the pin, here you want to copy and paste the url for the Pin Board. This way, whenever someone opens the pin of your cover, it will take them to your board.

Finally, find the board that you just pinned the cover to. Select the “Edit” box underneath the board.

This will open a box to edit the board, halfway down the box there is a button that says change cover. Click this button to select the pin that you want to use for the cover of the board (the cover you just uploaded). If you feel the need to be SUPER-organized , then this is a great way to take control of your Pinterest boards!

Ok, you’ve stuck with me this long (I know, that was a long post), but I have something awesome to share with you – How would you like to win a Teacher Appreciation gift bundle valued at over $475! I’ve teamed up with some amazing teacher bloggers – led by the awesome Lisa from Pawsitively Teaching and Marissa from the Inspired Owl to make sure you feel appreciated. Use the Rafflecopter below to sign up for your chance to win (more entries = more chances at an awesome prize)!