Using Twitter Favorites to Share Relevant and Current Ideas

I want to share with my teacher education students what other educators' opinions are of Professional Learning Networks (PLNs)... to give a flavor of the excitement and benefits that come from being part of a PLN.

Rather than create a third Storify story for the class I decided to look for another approach. I have learned--and shared in this blog--how easy it is to create a Storify story to provide current, relevant content. I have already created two Storify stories that I will use with my students in our Spring 2014 online course.

Twitter escultura de arena / Rosaura Ochoa / CC BY 2.0

So I watched Twitter on TweetDeck for a while. I created a column (timeline) that held tweets that contained PLN or #PLN. From those tweets I chose the ones that I thought would provide useful information to my students about PLNs. I favorited those. Then from my Favorites column I chose to share the tweets that included PLN (and, thus, #PLN) and I embedded those in the website for my course (as I have done below for this blog.) When you create the filter for the favorites that you want to use a widget is created for you that you can embed in your website. The process is easy.

I plan to use this data widget in my social media unit. However, I think I will find many uses for providing information for my students in this way. Is this a technique that you can use with your students?

 Favorite Tweets by @joschiff