UPDATE: Easily add current, course-relevant news to your Moodle courses

Posted on: September 6, 2012 | By: Dan Reis | Filed under: Instructional Technologies, Moodle, Teaching & Learning

News TickerUPDATE: This post was updated on 9/12/2012 after Twitter changed its widget creator.

Ideas for using Twitter in higher education are easy to find. One simple way to use Twitter is to embed a widget into your Moodle course. Embedding Twitter into Moodle is an easy way to add current, course-relevant news and opinions to your course. Twitter is full of companies, news organizations, non-profits, professional associations, activists, politicians, celebrities and more – nearly every discipline can find something of value on Twitter. It’s easy, and you don’t even need a Twitter account (though you’ll have more options if you do) and all you need is a Twitter account. This post includes ideas for using Twitter in Moodle and step-by-step instructions for adding a Twitter widget to your Moodle course.

Ideas for use

IDEA 1: Follow professional organizations and news sources relevant to your course to start classroom discussions

IDEA 2: Follow known professionals in the field and help students develop their professional social media network

  • Find scholars, CEOs, writers, activists, and more. Go to www.wefollow.com and search for the discipline you want to find people. For example, for a list of people who post about “writing”,  search for writing.

IDEA 3: Find brands or marketing firms for examples of social media marketing and customer service

IDEA 4: Find international organizations or native speakers who post in their native language

IDEA 5: Encourage students to write about course-relevant experiences they have outside of the classroom and label those tweets with a course-specific hashtag. Or, encourage students to retweet news they have found on Twitter and share it with the whole the class.

Twitter account

A Twitter account is required to make a widget. Create a Twitter account here.

How do I find people/companies to follow?

Websites like WeFollow.com can help find interesting accounts on Twitter. It works best to search by a topic, like chemistry or economics, rather than with a specific person or organization name. If you are looking for a specific person/organization, it is easiest to search at twitter.com/search.


How to embed Twitter into Moodle

Learn how to embed a Twitter widget into your Moodle course.


Canary Wharf news ticker image by Wikimedia Commons user Senseiich / Creative Commons licensed BY-SA 3.0


About the author

Dan Reis is an Instructional Technologist with Elon University’s Teaching and Learning Technologies.

Dan Reis

Dan Reis is an Instructional Technologist with Elon University’s Teaching and Learning Technologies.

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One response to “UPDATE: Easily add current, course-relevant news to your Moodle courses”

  1. Slash says:

    I used your approach to add a twitter widget to my course but am having problems. The twitter feed is there but it seems to interfere with other javascripts running on the site. I cannot dock or undock my blocks once the twitter feed is added but if I remove it things go back to normal. Any thoughts?