Twitter as a do-now activity

[mpoole]

Hi all,

This idea has been very popular at my school so I thought I'd share it with the community.  Teachers are choosing a twitter feed to embed in their Canvas page (a favorite for humanities teachers is CNN breaking news) and then having students post to discussions or write about one of the tweets as a brief opening activity.  Because the feed is always updated, the options for writing change with the news.  And because it is embedded into the Canvas page or discussion description, students don't get distracted by tweets from their friends or favorite celebrities.

This has sparked a new interest in current events among the students and gets students focused as class begins.

Here's a screenshot of how I have used it in my 11th Grade Humanities course:

[racole]

Thanks Melissa,

Can you share the code you are using for the embed?

[mpoole]

​Hi Robert,

i couldn't get Twitter's widgets to embed properly so I installed the twitter external app and use that to embed the feed. With it you can choose a # or @ to embed and choose a number of tweets to show. Once that code is embedded, it can be modified to sit at different places on the screen either using the align buttons in the RCE or by adding a div and floating it. The number of tweets shown is also part of that code so can be changed as well.