Everyone recognizes Twitter as a valuable means of communication and social networking. The 140 character microblog format of Twitter is being adapted to many educational uses as can be seen in “50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education”, other blogs and tweets. A “google” of “twitter educational use” will bring up scores of other articles and blog posts.

In a Blackboard course, Twitter can be used as another form of announcements, mini-blogs as companions to the Blog and Journal tools, for priming discussions, short writing assignments, commentaries on presentations (“backchannels”) and instant polls or surveys.

Of course, the next step, is how does one get a Twitter feed into a Blackboard course. Fortunately, there are a few different techniques ranging from posting a Web Link URL to using some of the widgets that are available for other social networking sites. There are also some limitations that we need to be aware of when incorporating Twitter feeds into a course.

First, all the Twitter feeds and widgets require an account to be on the public timeline. A recommendation from educational Twitterati is to create a separate Twitter account for your course or educational activities and reserve your personal Twitter account for “outside the classroom”. Many instructors create a Twitter account based on the course code and school name initials.

There are several ways to add Twitter to your course. It will depend on the version of Blackboard as to where you can place the Twitter link or widget and how you would like Twitter viewed by the students.

Twitter web links

One of the easiest ways to add Twitter to a course is by posting a web link. All Twitter accounts can be viewed with the web link URL: http://twitter.com/<twitter_username>. All Blackboard versions support web links with some minor adjustments. With Blackboard Vista/Campus Edition, students can even add web links to their own Twitter accounts.

Blackboard Vista 4-8/Campus Edition 6-8 – Add the Twitter URL as a web link in the Web Link tool with “Open in a new browser window” due to refresh issues when displaying in a browser frame.

Blackboard Learn 9.0 – Add the Twitter URL as a “Create External Link” under the Content Build when in the Edit Mode. Set the “Open in New Window” option due to refresh issues when displaying in a browser frame.

Blackboard LS/AS 6.3-8.0 “Classic” – Add the Twitter URL as an “External Link” while in “Edit View” of any content area. Set the “Open in New Window” option due to refresh issues when displaying in a browser frame.

Twitter web links can also be added to any web pages or other content pages such as discussions, and blog or journal entries. As with posting web links in other content areas, set any “Open in New Window” option to display the Twitter feed correctly.

Twitter widgets

Even though it takes a little more work to set up, Twitter widgets provide a dynamic display unlike web links that are static unless the page is constantly refreshed.

There are currently two widgets that will be of use in a Blackboard course. The first is a Profile Widget that is a dynamic Flash or HTML version for displaying a Twitter feed. After choosing some simple settings, you can grab the source code for pasting into various places in a Blackboard course. The basic HTML-based profile widget can be found at http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile while another Flash-based or HTML-based profile widget is available at http://twitter.com/widgets.

The second is a Search widget that allows you to enter any query to bring up all tweets that match the query. A good example is using “#bbworld09” to see all the tweets posted during and after the recent BbWorld09 conference in Washington DC. By encouraging your students to add a tag or keyword in their tweets such as “#<coursename>”, their tweets can be included in the widget. The search widget can be found at http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_search

Blackboard Vista 4-8/Campus Edition 6-8 – The easiest place to add a widget is in the home page or folder organizer page footer. Here’s a YouTube video from Manchester Community College, USA on how to add a Twitter widget to the page footer of a Blackboard Vista course: Add a Twitter Widget in Blackboard Vista. The other option is to build a quick content web page and insert the code into the page.

Blackboard LS/AS 6.3-8.0 “Classic” and Blackboard Learn 9.0 – There is no page footers to insert the widget so it appears in the Home page at this time. The best option is to create an Announcement and paste the code right into announcement message body with the Visual Editor turned off. The other place is to create a content item in a content area, pasting the code into the Text field with the Visual Editor turned off.

Update: Some Blackboard administrators found the Twitter widget causes resources issues with their Blackboard servers. As an alternative, use the Twitter web link instead of the Twitter widget.

Enjoy tweeting in your Blackboard course…