Using Twitter in Lectora 11

Hi Pier,

There are actually a couple of different ways you can use Twitter within your titles.

The first is a basic "Tweet Button". Selecting this pre-populates a tweet with the page name and the URL to that page. Keep in mind the content will need to be public for this scenario to make sense. Otherwise, any Twitter users who select the link won't be able to access the content. Once the Twitter window opens from Lectora, though, the student can choose to change the contents of the tweet - they can edit the tweet before the post it.

The second way to use Twitter in Lectora is to embed a Feed Widget. You'll need the username of the Twitter account to use this. The Twitter feed will then display the live feed for that user.

Finally, the third option is to embed a Search Widget. In this case, you'll need to enter a Search term. The feed then shows any tweets that contain the search term. So for example, if I add a #Lectora Search, the feed will show me any tweets that contain #Lectora.

An interesting scenario to consider is having a Tweet button and either a Feed widget or Search widget on the same page. In this case, a user could compose a tweet and if that tweet contains @username (or #searchterm), that tweet will show up on their respective feeds on the page. Of course, so would any other tweets from the user (or containing the search term). In this way, the user can become part of an external, informal learning environment while taking a course.

To answer your specific questions:

- No, the person to whom you address the tweet does not need to have Lectora or the course. This all takes place within Twitter and is just embedded in your content.

- The conversations would be public to anyone with access to the Twitter user's feed.

Finally a note on functionality - all of the Social buttons require the content to be hosted on a server or LMS in order to function. You can always test this out on ReviewLink or your own test server before you're ready to publish your title to its final location.

I hope this has helped spark some ideas!

Thanks,

Laura

Hi Pier,

Two alternate suggestions are to use the Send Email action so the user can send an email directly to an expert, and to use the Go To Web Address action to build a link to an external resource.

Thanks!

Laura

Thank you very much Laura. I'm not sure this would serve my purpose but I'll give it a try. What I was aiming at is a direct link to an expert or other external resources that the student could contact during the course to get help or specific information on the subject being studied. I guess I would have to create a specific Twitter account for each course so that only the experts and the students could connect and see the content.

Your answer is very helpul in making think on exactly how to set this up. Should you have other ideas for what I'm aiming at, I would greatly appreciate your input.

Thanks again, this forum has been very helpful to me since I started using Lectora. Kudos to the team behind it!