Description

You have developed an activity and your students are sharing their projects or media via Twitter, maybe even with a unique hash tag. The tweets are coming in almost every day, and you can find them when you search twitter.

Is there a more efficient way to organize the tweets in order to show them in context and which may better explain the activity to a visitor? Maybe there is a better organizing unit that chronology? Perhaps there is a way to analyze the tweets as data? Or maybe you would like a way to highlight the more significant tweets?

In this studio you can explore a number of tools (all of them put to use in the UdGAgora), for curating or organizing your student’s Twitter actions.

To Hashtag or Not?

The twitter hashtag emerged not from the company that offers the service but from a suggestion by early twitter user Chris Messina. A hashtag is the most versatile way to have your students indicate that what they are tweeting is part of a larger whole. A hashtag can also give a sense of identity to your project, and even become somewhat of a rallying call for participants.

How to choose a hashtag? First, you probably want to find a hashtag that no one else is using. Try your hashtag in the twitter search.

And the answer is yes, someone already used that hash tag. Try again.

A hashtag should be as short as possible, to make it easy for people to remember and so it does not take up the valuable characters available for your students to use. It should  be somewhat recognizable as to what it represents. Who would know what #dty765xxwed is affiliated with?

If you use a hashtag that is already in use, you might want to investigate it’s usage via http://hashtagify.me/. (It can be embarrassing sometimes, to choose something that is already associated with something you may not be interested in associating with!)

For some other suggestions on hashtag selection, see Twitter’s own How to choose a hashtag or Tintup’s guide to How to Pick a Good Hashtag.

Okay you found the prefect hashtag. What to do next?

Use it! Send the first tweet to announce it and put it out there into Twitter. Then you can try some of the tools in the challenge bank.

Beyond Hashtags

You might be able to corral your tweets by another specific search term.

The other option would be to create a special twitter account just for your course or project, and have your students tweet to that account, for example the way we run the UDG Agora Daily Try.

Challenges

Each of these challenges introduces you to a different tool for curating/organizing tweets. There are reasons why you might choose to use more than one as they are not all equivalent. If you do not have your tag identified, you can user #UdgAgora as something to experiment with.

• Archive and Save Tweets with Twitter TAGS Worksheet Automatically collect your students’ hashtagged tweets to a Google Docs spreadsheet that generates summaries and visualizations of the activity. Set on up one early!
• See The Twitter Activity with Visible Tweets a way to generate an animated near real-time visualization of twitter activity, typically meant for continuous display in a public area.
• Collect Activity Across Social Media With Tagboard Display in one place content with the same tag from twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, Instagram, or Vine.
• Assemble Almost Anything on the Web with Storify build and annotate a custom collection of almost anything you can find in social media or on the internet.