Any experts on Twitter? Want to add groups to single account

[Mike Lowe]

As a teacher, I'd like to have one account my students can easily add me with to communicate homework reminders etc., but I obviously don't want to send pointless Tweets to students in different classes.

I don't really want to manage 3-5 different Twitter accounts. I'd like to use one account, one email, but be able to either create groups or have students choose which group or Tweets to receive.

Does that make sense? We put a man on the moon...this must be possible.

[Young Drachma]

Step 1. Create one twitter account, probably a separate twitter account for school business if you only want this to reach them and have a different twitter account for personal things. If not, then you can just create oen.

Step 2. Create separate lists on twitter for each class and this way, you can manage the list and they can also follow the list if they want to see what their peers are talking about.

So essentially you'll either need two twitter accounts (one personal, one for this project) or one twitter account and a bunch of lists to manage. It's very straightforward on the whole what you're trying to do, provided I'm understanding right.

[Subby]

You could also just use different hashtags for each class. That way they don't even have to follow you.

@MikeLowe Don't forget Thursday is test day. #class1 #class3

[Young Drachma]

But there's no way to create 'groups' on Twitter or anything like Facebook or direct your tweets, short of a classroom hashtag. Like #math101 or whatever so then they can search that hashtag and wouldn't even have to follow you.

The only thing then is they'd need to search that hashtag to find relevant tweets. When I did this at the college, I just had them follow me, they created accounts (or used their own, it was up to them) and then we created lists and would do stuff on twitter with the class hashtag #ART265. But...if you don't have them at the same computer at the same time or whatever, the monitoring of the hashtag part (especially if you don't get twitter) might be more trouble than its worth.

But Subby's right too.

[Mike Lowe]

Yeah, I'm thinking the hash tag might be too much...essentially, I want students to take the 2 seconds and sign up for a twitter account, I'll promise not to follow them (nor do I want to lol), and I'll then be able to communicate straight to their cell phones for things like remembering equipment (I teach video production), homework reminders, cool shows that are using a technique we're studying that are about to come on, etc.

[Mike Lowe]

Oh, and thanks guys :)