Thursday, 5 November 2015

Day 43: Using TweetDeck to Organize Twitter Feeds



Recently Marci Duncan posted an excellent blog entry encouraging the use of Twitter. Someone suggested in one of her links that Twitter is a great source of professional learning. While I agree with this, the flip side of the coin is that Twitter can sometimes be a little overwhelming. Marci touched on TweetDeck as a useful Twitter feed organizer and I’d like to expand on that idea just a little bit.

I had the privilege of attending Web 2.0 Boot Camp a few years ago in Philadelphia with Will Richardson, @willrich45, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Will suggested that a great way to get started with Twitter was to follow personal interests. So in addition to my education and math related feeds I added some of my sports gurus and entertainment heroes as well as some friends. All good fun! Except as I expanded my network of follows, and as they became increasingly prolific, my Twitter feed blew up. Too many feeds on too many topics! I had to stop the madness…

Enter TweetDeck. Thanks to David Petro, @davidpetro314, fellow math educator and technology enthusiast whose session I attended at the annual OAME Conference, I now use TweetDeck to organize my feeds into personalized categories that make sense just for me. TweetDeck lets you organize your feeds in multiple ways. Here are a few of my favourite strategies:

Lists: This allows me to group feeds by person. My Education List includes math gurus such as Dan Meyer, @ddmeyer, as well as SCDSB shining stars such as Mike MacAlpine, @MichaelMac151. To see what members of my Program and Innovation team are saying I scan my P and I List. 

Keywords: Sometimes it is beneficial to collect tweets by topic, rather than person. Using hashtags, I can follow all tweets that include key words such as #growthmindset and #scdsbmath.


Notifications: This interesting feed column shows me all the activity of the people whom I follow: their favourites, mentions, new follows and retweets.

Activity: Curious about who your new followers are, or who is retweeting your tweets? This column shows you all activity directly related to your Twitter account.


Scheduled: Got a great idea for a tweet in the middle of the night, but worried that it will be missed? Tweetdeck lets you easily set a scheduled tweet that goes out during prime time or on any time and date of your choosing.



Notifications and Activity are where I often find intriguing new people or topics to follow. TweetDeck automatically sets up these and other default columns, including Home, which is your running feed of everything you follow, as it would appear in Twitter. List and Keyword columns are just some of the types of columns you set up yourself.

So now I have my work-related feeds set apart from my more personal ones. Some power users actually have multiple Twitter accounts to further this separation. But I don’t roll that way: I like to have ready access to all information all the time from one simple platform. One feature I really like about Tweetdeck is that it allows me to easily change the order of my columns. That way, when I am at work, I can focus on education and math related tweets, and when I am on vacation I can switch things around so that I get my Habs updates and entertainment scuttlebutt first and foremost.

There are various ways to access TweetDeck. I currently recommend downloading the TweetDeck Google App from the Chrome Web Store. For more information about setting up TweetDeck to organize your Twitter feeds, check out the following links:

TweetDeck for Beginners: Setting up TweetDeck

TweetDeck Columns

Organizing My TweetDeck with Lists and Collections


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