How to make a curated collection of tweets with TweetDeck

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Screencasts | Monday, February 19, 2018

How to make a curated collection of tweets with TweetDeck

Gather the best tweets from a Twitter chat into a single collection. It’s great for sharing new ideas from a Twitter chat in a blog post!

Twitter chats are a whirlwind of good ideas. Educators tweet to a single Twitter hashtag, answering questions and sharing their best ideas.

But when the Twitter chat is over, the ideas often disappear from our brains without a concrete way of harvesting those ideas.

Many of us have used a service called Storify to gather and curate tweets after Twitter chats. However, Storify announced that it will cease to exist in May 2018.

There has to be another way to gather tweets into a collection, I thought.

Turns out the answer was under my nose the whole time — in a tool I was already using.

Use TweetDeck to create a tweet collection

Twitter already offers what I was looking for! It’s called a collection, and it’s pretty easy to create directly from TweetDeck.

I really like this because you can pick and choose the best tweets from a chat to add to your curated collection.

Plus — and this was most important for me! — you can embed your collection in a blog post and publish it!

Note: My highlighting and zooming got a little out of sync for a minute or so early in this video. Stick with it … they’re only like that for a short bit!

1. (1:10) Go to tweetdeck.twitter.com.

2. (2:15) Create a new column with the content you want to curate / save / archive. (In the video, I made a column for the #DitchBook hashtag, where we had a Twitter chat.)

3. (2:30) Create a new column called a “collection.” Give it a title and a description.

4. (3:00) Start dragging tweets from the content column (for me, the #DitchBook column) into the collection.

TIP: (4:00) Add “A1” to your hashtag in your content column to only display answers to the first question. Then change it to “A2”, then “A3”, etc. to capture answers to all of the questions more efficiently.

TIP: (5:00) It’s much easier to drag them in reverse chronological order. (If you’re curating tweets from a Twitter chat, add answers to the questions in backward order.)

5. (7:51) When your collection is complete, click the settings button at the top of the column and click “Share.” Choose “embed” to add it to a blog post/page, “view” to see it on Twitter, or “tweet” to share it via Twitter.

6. (8:10) If you’re embedding it, make any customizations you’d like and then copy the embed code. Add it to a page or post on a blog or website.

Part of the beauty of these curated collections is that you don’t have to add every tweet from the chat. In fact, by choosing the best tweets for the reader, it makes it even easier for him/her to consume them.

How can you use this?

The easiest and most clear usage I can see is saving tweets from Twitter chats or other hashtags you love.

However, if a major news event happens — or if there’s a relevant hashtag to your class — this could be useful in the classroom, too. Students could create these collections or view the ones you’ve created for them. (Your students would have to be able to access Twitter for this to work, though.)

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