Three Effective Ways to Look for Educational Content in Twitter

November 26, 2014
Twitter search is a great alternative to the conventional ways of searching the net. This socially-based kind of search allows students to access content and resources that are both timely and relevant. And most importantly, students do not need to have Twitter accounts to search its database. Below are some of the ways students  can leverage the power of Twitter search to  look for educational content:

1- Twitter Search Operators
similar to Google search operators, Twitter search  provides a set of powerful operators that students  can use to conduct focused search queries. They can use a combination of search operators to look for tweets from specific persons, sources and locations.  Check out this cheat sheet to learn more about these search operators.

2- Use Hashtags
Hashtags are a good way to gather people around content. There are hashtags for almost anything: news, events, conferences, you name it and you will probably find a hashtag for it. Students can search for content using a specific hashtag. For instance if they are looking for resources on educational technology they can run a search query in Twitter search using the hashtag #edtech. Here is a cheat sheet with all the educational hashtags out there.

3- Use Twitter advanced search
Twitter advanced search provides some powerful features to help students refine their searches and access relevant resources. Here is some of what they can do with it:

A- Words section

The Word's section in Twitter advanced search allows students to specify the terms, and phrases to be included or excluded from the tweets to be returned in result pages. It also lets them search for tweets that include a given hashtag. They can also specify the language of their tweets and choose from a wide variety of languages provided there.

B-People

Students can use this section to look for tweets coming from, sent to, or mentioning a certain account or multiple accounts.

C- Places

This is a great feature that students can use to look for trending tweets and news in a particular place. To use this functionality, they need to click on "add location" and Twitter will automatically add their location or they can choose the location they want.

D- Dates

This feature  enables students to look for tweets and resources shared within a specific period of time.

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