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Tweets for Teachers - Course Section Hashtags

On Tuesday, July 21, the @One organization graciously allowed me to present a webinar titled "All aTwitter about Tweets for Teaching". This series highlights their questions, and my humble attempt at answering their concerns.

Q. What about separate tweets for each course? Is there any way to do that on one account?

A. Absolutely! You can do this easily with custom hashtags. You don't have to create a second (or fifteenth) account, or create a shortened URL to a blog or web page, or know any html at all for this. To create an instant hashtag, all you have to do is put the pound sign - # - in front of a word in your tweet (such as #hashtag), and when you post your word will appear in your tweet as a hyperlink. When the reader clicks the hashtag hyperlink, the word is entered into Twitter's search engine and the results appear. Simple!

The trick is to create a unique hashtag for each course. For instance, if you teach Art History 1A and there are three sections, you might use #Art1A1, #Art1A2, and #Art1A3 for your designated hashtags for the classes. Students don't have to know there are three sections with hashtags - they will be searching for their own section, and the other sections will not show up in the search results.

To further filter your tweets, give your students a search widget with your hashtag or keyword already loaded up! There's a great widget from Tweetgrid which will filter your hashtag for you, so you can easily post the search results on a course web page. Your students don't even have to remember the tag! For an example of the widget set to filter on the keyword "matriculation", view this example.

Great quote from Dan at Butte: "For classroom use, you can let students know how to get to your Twitter page, but not all students will want to check in. But the beauty of the system is that those who want to know where the grading process is can find out, and those who aren't don't get bombarded with email updates. Choice is good."

Thoughts? Additional ideas? Please comment!
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