A Teacher’s Guide to TweetDeck

Twitter is a great resource for getting classroom and lesson ideas to building classroom relationships with virtual experts, bringing credibility to your lessons.

Have you started following some Tweeps and are having a hard time keeping up? Were your co-teachers talking at lunch about a Tweet you must have missed?

TweetDeck is a great resource to make Twitter more digestible and also offers some automation as you begin tweeting more often.

You can login to TweetDeck with your Twitter username and password.

The layout allows you to create search columns and connect to your Twitter feed.

In the search box you can add a #hashtag you are interested in following.

Once you add your search item you will create a column. In the upper right of the column is a settings button.

Clicking the settings button will provide several options including:

• Content
• Location
• Users
• Engagement
• Preferences

Content sets up your follow criteria. You can show tweets with different content (i.e. images, videos, links, etc.). You can  choose your hashtag or matching criteria. You can set exclude rules and set a date range. You can include or exclude retweets.

Location options give you the ability to follow tweets in your area. If you are at a conference and would like to get local info, this feature is great!

Engagement gives you a way to find trending content. You can decide if you want a certain number of retweets, likes and replies.

Users allows you to follow tweets by a specific user or show tweets where a specific user is mentioned.

Preferences give you some app functionality like notifications, alerts, and media size displayed.

Another great feature built into TweetDeck is the ability to schedule tweets. If you are wanting to stay organized and pre-load some tweets to push out at a later date, you can schedule your tweet. After clicking “New Tweet” you will be able to expand the “Schedule tweet” option. This will open a date/time view. Once you finalize your tweet will be queued up… ready to go!

Happy tweeting with TweetDeck!