A new social media site launched in February allows
users to collect educational materials on pinboards. If the concept sounds
familiar, Pindex bills
itself as a “Pinterest for education.”
“I started Pindex out of frustration with the dull, dry
material my 10-year-old daughter would bring home from school,” John Leaver,
one of the co-founders of the startup, told British newspaper The Telegraph.
“Making every topic engaging is a huge task—too much for any one person. Pindex
enables teachers and professors to share their best materials. Working together
like this is the only way to solve the problem.”
On the site, a bookmark button captures content from
the web and adds it to the users’ “boards.” Instructors can post quizzes on the
boards and visitors can earn grades on the tests, according to a report from Campus Technology. One of the co-founders of Pindex is British actor and
writer Stephen Fry, who narrates videos for the site.
Topics already on the site range from Fry’s video on
the Large Hadron Collider to drones, robots, and colonizing Mars. As the site
grows, the founders expect the Pindex library to collect more content from
educators and researchers.
“At
a time when it is easy to lose faith in an online world that seems to center
around trolling, bullying, hating, trivializing, and belittling, it is worth
remembering the incredible power of the Internet to inform and educate, lucidly
and entertainingly,” Fry said.
