GroupTweet

I’m continuing my series on using Twitter, with the intent of coming up with some original and creative ways to use Twitter in the classroom. Before I get to that, however, I’m going to tell you how I solved creating a Twitter group for our department, so we could easily tweet to our group. I thought it would be easy through Twitter, but I actually found and used a service called GroupTweet: http://www.grouptweet.com

Here’s how GroupTweet describes itself:

Problem: Malcolm, Zoe, Kaylee, Simon, and River all work together on the same web development team. They are avid Twitter users and want a similar way to broadcast quick messages and updates to everyone on their team. Since these messages may contain confidential information, the team doesn’t want them published to their public Twitter timelines or to any followers who are not part of the team.

Solution: GroupTweet allows Malcolm and the gang to send messages via Twitter that are instantly broadcasted privately to only the team members.

I thought this solution would work for our department, with the exception that we actually want our posts to be public, so that students and the world could see what we were interested in, what we were doing, and anything else of interest in our field of educational technology.

It’s working out quite well.

I followed the instructions on the GroupTweet home page, created a new Twitter account, asked people to follow the group and set up the group to follow those same people. When I want to post a message from my Twitter account to the group, all I need to do is put ‘D edtechbsu (that’s the name of our group) and the message after that and send it. It shows up on our edtechbsu Twitter group and the people who are following the group can also see it.

Already I have discovered that one of my colleagues presented today at a virtual conference and the presentations could be viewed and commented on through VoiceThread (which I thought was pretty cool), and I was able to tell everyone that my publicity promotion on a closed circuit TV for an upcoming workshop seemed to be working.

Tomorrow, a post about using Twitter in the classroom.