Review of Historypin.org...B+

One of the major issues in the EFL context is a lack of opportunity to speak English outside of the English classroom. When students walk down the halls to their next class, or return home, normally the only option they have to communicate is their native tongue. Unless a student is actively engaged in an afterschool program, has English speaking friends, or some other activity compelling them to speak English, 999,999,999 times out of 1 billion they will use their native language to communicate. Why wouldn't they? This is where Historypin.org can help.

As an EFL professional, one way to address this lack of opportunity to practice using English is to help students, well... create them! Historypin.org is one resource, that if used creatively, can inspire students to find and/or create opportunities to speak English in their own neighborhoods that can then be shared with others, and continuously updated. For example, have your students start by locating the English speaking opportunities currently available in their neighborhood, pinpoint them, then describe and share them with others. Some examples might be movie theaters that show movies in English, a bakery run by an English speaking expat, tourist area/attractions where English guides and information are available, Kareoke clubs, museums, businesses that have experience interviewing potential English speaking candidates, so on and so forth.

Task your students with submitting short videos, pictures of specific people, or written explanations of what is available at each sight. If the opportunities don't exist? Challenge your students to petition the businesses, local officials, or community members to provide them! Perhaps a kareoke club will make Tuesday nights English night, or a movie theater will add a showtime for a popular movie to be shown in English.

Now let's see how Historypin.org can help.

PROS

According to Historypin.com, the website hosts 365,951 stories pinned across 27,844 projects and tours – across 2,600 cities. The collection of projects was built by a community of 80,000+ storytellers, archivists and citizen historians including more than 3000 cultural organizations which develop and maintain stories that describe and add representation, inclusion, and relevancy to communities around the world.

Cultural organizations, institutions, communities, councils, families and students can all benefit from the thousands of stories and experiences curated from around the world. Historypin has put together a product that brings people together around local history; this is must have for EFL/ESL teachers everywhere, social studies teachers, and anyone who loves history!

It's free to sign up; right away you can begin creating your own "story" by creating, gathering or adding other people’s "pins" to your profile. You can even invite others to contribute to yours.

A pin can be a photo, video clip, sound recording, or piece of text to describe a place. Collections of pins can be created by group them together for whatever your purpose is. Setting up a tour, a step-by-step journey through a collection of pins, is possible as well. One "map", year after year after year can be updated and used by students, as well as be a tool shared amongst different schools in one area.

Start by clicking on the Explore Historypin tab at the top of the homepage. You can search by topic, person name, collection name, author, or simply search a specific area to see what has already been "pinned". The map even allows you to specify the time period going back to 1000 A.D. Another cool feature of the map is that it displays landmarks in both English and the native language of the country you are viewing. For example, above is a close up of a city in Japan. You can see there are no pins in this area; only the brick and mortar establishments are listed like you would see in Google Maps.

Students can add video and audio commentary to other author's pins, provide written feedback, or add additional information to a pin; there’s even a discussion forum students can contribute to (for writing exercises).

CONS

The map is a little finnicky. Sometimes the zoom in/out feature works, and sometimes it doesn't. This can make searching a large area difficult. This is important, because when you search by topic, only the area of the map that is displayed will populate results; it's kind of like Airbnb's map functionality, without the complete functionality. For example, below is a partial view of Japan. You can see the pins for each area of the map, but this is as far as the map will currently zoom out. However, earlier today it would zoom all the way out to a view of the entire world.

Also, for history teachers and buffs, the timeline you can search only goes back to 1000 A.D., so don't use this for projects that require info on prehistoric man for example. This doesn't effect EFL or ESL teachers as much, it's just something to be aware of.

Lastly, when I sent the support team a couple of clarification questions, the responses were written in an informal manner and did not expound on the information I was requesting. I had to send several follow up questions to pull the information out of them. Just FYI.

OVERALL

Overall the potential for collaboration on assignments is tremendous, however teachers will still have to be creative with how they assign projects in order to make them relevant to their particular class. For EFL teachers in particular though, building a collection of pins that identify places within an EFL context where students can practice the four skills is relatively easy. Overall I give this site a B+. Improving the map functionality would make Historypin.org a solid A all around, but it's still VERY useful for any teacher with a little bit of creativity, and especially useful for EFL teachers trying to identify opportunity for their students to use English!