Live Tweetfeeds for Blog Sidebars - Olympic Games

[Anne Mirtschin]

As I enjoy watching the Olympic games and wish to pursue aspects of the London12 Games with my students, I wanted to add a live tweetfeed widget to my global2 class blog(a campus of edublogs) As part of this exercise, I will also get my students to add the widget to their blogs. (See Tiff's blog) 

Rationale and Learning Intentions

• these games are termed the social games. This will give them an opportunity to learn what this means giving them an opportunity to see how social media can be used for live events and
• encourage them to learn more about the Olympics.
• We will learn in real time what the feelings and happenings are both within and beyond the Games precincts, in REAL time.
• We will be exposed to the full range of games events - some of which students may not be aware of.
• Tweets will also be used for discussion purposes in class - the good, the bad and the ugly! The what, the where and the why!
• Students will learn to grab code and embed on a blog.

However, as I did not know how to do this, I put out a tweet requesting@edublogs to share an appropriate widget. They did (within minutes) and @mrpbps also suggested a live BBC widget.

Here is how it was done.

1. @edublogs suggestion was for the Twitter Feed Search widget. This was a simple procedure and the tweet feed for @AUSOlympicTeam was chosen. It had a useful test option before finishing and grabbing the code. See image below. I tried to add it to this wordpress blog as well, but was unsuccessful. Different countries would need to choose the official twitter handle for their teams.
2. @mrpbps suggested the BBC widget which simply required grabbing the code and pasting  it into a text widget on the sidebar of the blog.

The widgets could have been added to a page or a post, but the sidebar is preferable.

Do you think that grade 4/5 are too young to put the widgets on their blog sidebars? Did you add a widget to your blog(s)? Are you using social media in your classroom for the Olympic games? If so how? If you are from another country what tweetfeed or hashtag would you use or would you suggest?