I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one another. The prerequisite course to this course includes an activity where students create a Twitter account and think about its possible uses in education. I would like to build on that foundation and use Twitter to promote a virtual community for sharing EdTech-related resources and trends, as well as ideas (or even logistics) about the course and course material.

I started by creating a new Twitter account that will be for professional/teaching purposes only,@EdTechEJS (so no Rachael Ray retweets on this one). I then started following a few Educational Technology–related users and groups, including some folks who run the program for which I teach.

Next I decided that to facilitate students’ access to the Twitter feed, I should embed it on our course site. When discussing this with a colleague, she suggested that instead of just embedding the @EdTechEJS feed, I create a hashtag for everyone in the course to use and display a feed of tweets containing that hashtag. With this method I am not the only person contributing to the feed; it is a collaborative effort, which is more in line with how Twitter is meant to work. The hope is that students will tweet questions or comments about the course material, share useful resources they find, and benefit from reading classmates’ tweets.

While searching for “create twitter feed from hashtag,” I came across this fantastic free tool called TweetBlender. TweetBlender creates an embeddable Twitter feed widget, and you can specify which “sources” will be displayed in the feed (usernames, hashtags, keywords). With this tool, I was able to create a feed that will display all of my tweets, as well as any tweet containing the course hashtag and the program hashtag. As I become more familiar with Twitter and what type of information I’d like to appear in the feed, I will add more sources. It may even make sense to add weekly topics as keywords for the feed as the topics come up in the course.

I am excited to see how this Twitter experiment goes. I really hope it makes the course site more dynamic and student driven. One challenge with using a Learning Management System is that most of the content must be posted by the instructor. Students have the discussion boards, but that is usually their only forum for contributing. The Twitter feed allows students to add content to the course site instantly and in a highly visible way. This endeavor should also force me to become more familiar with using Twitter effectively and better able to consult with faculty who would like to incorporate Twitter into their own course.