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Alice Keeler

Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet

Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet

Students Tweet students twitter

I have had several teachers how they can have their students tweet without having a Twitter account. I highly encourage teachers to have a class twitter account and a class hashtag. Here is how to use the class Twitter account.

Tweet Pictures

Provide a window into your classroom by posting pictures of your class and class activities. Blur out the faces of students whose parents do not want their child’s pictures on social media. I recommend posting at least 5 pictures throughout the day.

Tweet Questions

When your students ask questions, post those to the class Twitter account. Use the class hashtag.

Follow

One thing that is great about Twitter is that the stream of tweets you see is only the people you follow (plus some ads). If you’re judicious about who your class Twitter account follows, it would be safe to project the class Twitter stream. I recommend following @USGS which tweets some great pictures and news facts that are appropriate for schools. Also find other classes that are in your same grade level to follow.

Additionally here are some people on Twitter who you should probably NOT follow since their tweets are not aimed at school-aged children, but who are experts in their field. They might be good to ask questions of or invite to Google Hangout to answer student questions.  http://tinyurl.com/tweetexperts Please add people to the list who you know might be good for students to tweet questions to.

Students Twitter

Most likely you are not going to have your students create Twitter accounts to tweet from class. Instead, use the class Twitter account to allow students to tweet. Do NOT give the students the class Twitter account password. Instead, I created this spreadsheet to facilitate tweeting.

http://tinyurl.com/tweetmyclass

Create a copy of the spreadsheet above. Replace cell D2 with the class hashtag.
Spreadsheet to Tweet

Change the sharing to allow your students to edit. Link to the spreadsheet within your LMS or in the “About” tab in Google Classroom.

Students would add their tweets to the collaborative spreadsheet into column A. The number of characters (Tweets have a 140 character limit) and a link to create the tweet. The hashtag is automagically attached to the tweet.
Teacher clicks on the blue link

Using the spreadsheet allows the students to actually compose the tweet. However, you approve the tweet before it is sent out.

Be Logged Into Class Twitter Account

Make sure you are logged into the class Twitter account when you click on the blue link.

18 thoughts on “Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet

  1. Love this! So much so that I made a Form so kids can submit their tweets and lab group #’s from their phones. Then I found that Form+ (formpl.us), which works with Drive and Sheets, allows form submission of files (docs, picts, videos). Since I teach science, we are always taking picts. So…I copied your Sheets code into the Sheet that Form+ made on my Drive and adjusted for the columns. Works great – except it won’t tweet the pict and I don’t know how to script. Do you have any suggestions or can you please point me in the right direction? Thank you so much!

  2. LOVE this template! Thank you so much for sharing. Pure genius. Ok so I am not nerdy at all, so I apologize for the silly question but is there any way for students to insert pictures into the template and it will tweet out the pic?

  3. I love this idea and template! I am confused, however, as to what I am to have students enter in the classhashtag column. Do they enter the same hashtag in the “hashtag” column (where you have #classhashtag on the template), and in the column labeled “class hashtag”? Does it need the twitter class handle somewhere? Thanks for helping a Twitter fairly newbie!

  4. I am considering using this feature. How do I protect the tweet link so that the students can’t approve their tweet prior to me seeing it?

  5. But if they are using a collaborative spreadsheet, can’t they all see what each person wants to tweet? And if they can do that, what’s the point of Tweeting that text?

  6. This is so great! Thanks for the awesome idea. Any way for images to be included in tweet? I tried posting an image in the tweet cell, but that doesn’t work. Worth a shot. 😉

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