It’s very easy to integrate one, two, many Twitter feeds with a WordPress weblog. Bring microblogging to your course macroblog.
If you’re reading this on the front page of Blogs@Baruch, click on the title of this post to see a page with a Twitter badge tied to the baruchblogs account in action.
For feeds that just display your own tweets, you can go to the Twitter badge page http://twitter.com/badges), select the bottom option (”Other”), and then on the next page choose either the first or third option– “Flash/Just Me” or “HTML Javascript.”
After doing so, and selecting how you want your widget to display, copy the code Twitter gives you, and paste it into a Text widget (available through your Design>Widgets menu).
If you’re interested in having your entire Twitter feed displayed on the sidebar, select the “Flash, With Friends” option. You can fully customize how your feed displays, and choose whether you want to slap it into a text widget on your sidebar, or embed it somewhere else on your blog (contact me for help with that one).
For faculty members, Twitter offers a unique opportunity to extend the reach of a class into your students’ lives. All students (should) think about course material at times other than when they are doing their reading of sitting in class; this technology offers you a method to capture those thoughts for later reflection, or to have an ongoing, asynchronous conversation about course material. Or, if you’re just interested in blasting your students with some short thoughts throughout the day, get yourself a Twitter account, link it into the blog, and let er rip.