Learnist, Pinterest for Education, Makes Learning Fun and Engaging

Learnist is an organized collection of crowd-sourced knowledge boards that are dedicated to making learning a “fun and engaging social activity.” Learnist is like Pinterest in a sense that the users act as content curators, however, instead of just pinning pretty pictures, they are developing educational boards on a topic that they specialize in. Boards typically consist of bite size, easy to absorb bits of interesting information and can contain a variety of different media such as images, videos, blogs, documents, or books to help clarify concepts.

Users can create a variety of different boards and follow the boards other users, with a wide variety of categories ranging from business to sports to entertainment. While the majority of the content available on Learnist is free, the website also offers premium content that is created by contributors that are handpicked by the Learnist team. For 99 cents, you can purchase access to Kari Byron’s board “11 Science Experiments You Can Do With Kids” or a list of “Badass Women Fighting For Justice” compiled by Olivia Wilde. Content can be saved to a reading list to be accessed later or can be shared with friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Learnist recently launched a new iPad app to complement its already available iPhone and Android apps. Teachers have begun to adopt Learnist in the classroom to provide lessons and improve student engagement. The user interface is similar to Pinterest and is super easy to navigate, so it’s not hard to get lost in the library of interesting content for an hour or two.