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Elementary Students Tweeting

I was so inspired by Alice Keeler’s recent post, Class Twitter Account: How Your Students Can Tweet, that I decided to take her idea and generate a Google Form for our soon-to-be-instituted elementary school student tech team to allow them to quickly submit tweets for consideration by our new Twitter feed. That part was easy but I also wanted to make it easy for them to see the Twitter feed as well. I decided to make a Google Sites page containing the embedded Google Form as well as a Twitter widget of the feed. For some reason, I just couldn’t get it to work so I headed to Google Search. I landed on a Tech Tip published by the IT folks with West Hartford Public Schools: Embed a Twitter Feed – Google Sites.

The steps are pretty straight forward if you don’t mind digging into HTML a bit. They suggest using Note Pad but I used Dreamweaver. If you are looking for an alternative HTML editor, try TextWrangler.

I created a Google Sites page and made it totally blank (or at least as blank as I could make it) and set the width to 100%. I embedded the Google Form I created on one side of the page and the Twitter Feed on the other. The end result looks like this:

tweet-page

Sadly, Twitter is blocked on our campus so a big gray area comes up when viewing this on campus.

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 11.02.41 AM

As a way around that, I headed over to IFTTT. I started with appending the tweet to a Google Sheet that I was going to embed in the Google Site. It just didn’t look right. I tried appending the tweet to a Google Doc which, again, just didn’t work for me. I ended up using a recipe to create a Blogger post every time the account tweets. I chose to grab the RSS feed for that blog and embed that beside the submission form. It still isn’t very pretty but, for now, it is functional.

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 10.58.37 AM

I’m looking forward to getting more of our elementary students practicing their digital citizenship skills while also highlighting the great work our students are doing at my school.

 

 

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