Twitter Integration for Course Management Systems

There are several posts out there on using twitter in the classroom and teachers using twitter for professional development.
Read a great post by Mrs. Laura Walker on Nine reasons why teachers should use twitter (for their own professional development) and 50 brief ideas for using twitter in the classroom.

Most course management systems have an announcement system. In some you may have the ability to update your announcements from a mobile device using an app for the course management system.

Another approach to this would be using twitter, here's how:
Create a twitter profile for your course or courses; the idea being you don't want all your personal or even other unrelated professional tweets showing up - just those related to your course.
In twitter on the Settings link for the account, you will have to "unprotect" the tweets and allow them to be public (otherwise students would have to log into a twitter account to view the tweets). Chances of your course tweets being found by someone you didn't give directions to follow are probably unlikely. I'm assuming what you post to your course students in 140 or less characters is not anything so private or confidential that it would matter if someone came across it.

Go to http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets and click the "My Website" link on the left.
Click "Profile Widget" and enter your course twitter username.
Click the Preferences, Appearance and Dimensions tabs on the left to customize the look of the twitter feed to match your course.

In this example, I'm using Blackboard. I can click the color boxes on the Appearance link to choose colors that match my course color scheme.
The Dimensions tab is probably the most important. I want to set a dimension size that allows the whole width of the twitter feed to show up in the frame of my course management system. I set the width to 525 and the height to 400, this appears to fit very well in the Blackboard 9 Basic Announcements page layout. You might have to experiment to get yours to fit correctly. Just keep following the steps and changing the dimensions then copying and pasting until you are happy with how it looks in your course.

You can click the "Test Settings" button at the bottom to view it (for some reason this doesn't reflect the new dimensions). Click the "Finish & Grab Code" button. Click inside the box to highlight all of the code and choose "Edit>Copy" from the browser (or Ctrl+C).

Log into your course management system and go to your announcements section. Click the "Create Announcement" button. In the subject enter a title like "EDU 101 Tweets" or "official Course Announcements" or whatever fits your course, just make sure student can easily identify it. In the message box below, click the "<>" html source button.


Paste the code you copied from the twitter profile widget into this box. In the options section of your Blackboard Announcement choose "Permanent" and click the "Submit" button. You should now see your live twitter feed in your course announcement, click it and drag it to the top of your announcements page so it will always be at the top.


You may want to add an additional permanent announcement below your twitter feed explaining what twitter is and a link to the twitter account. Make sure the non-twitter users know they can log in and see your most recent "tweets" or announcements live in the box anytime and let those who use twitter know they can follow the account directly and even connect with their mobile to get all the latest course "tweets."

The real advantage of integrating twitter is ease of posting announcements to your course(s) for the teacher and for the student getting real time announcements. Especially for your students that already use twitter and want to easily get course announcements on their mobile devices without logging into their course management system. You are also exposing students to a social media technology that is quickly becoming main stream in a way that's safe (through their course management environment) and only requires them to observe if that's all they are comfortable with.

Blackboard 9 mobile learn was released today: http://www.blackboard.com/Mobile/Mobile-Learn.aspx This will also accomplish the same task for those mobile users, but it does require accessing an app on the mobile device to use it. Beyond that I've not had an opportunity to work with it yet, so there could be more to post on it later.

A good way for the teacher to manage multiple twitter accounts is using an application called "TweetDeck" you can download this to your desktop, ipad or iphone (I hear there will be a droid app soon, no timeline given). TweetDeck will allow you to log into multiple twitter accounts at once, just be sure to identify which one you're posting to.

Happy course announcement tweeting!