Opinion
Student Well-Being Opinion

Teach Students to Create Twitter Moments for Curation

By Starr Sackstein — December 15, 2016 2 min read
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When I clicked onto Twitter this morning, I noticed something new and that is very exciting. Automatically my wheels started spinning thinking of ways to use the new function.

Users can now create Twitter Moments of their own. I’ve use the Twitter curated moments in the past with my newspaper students to review curated current events in a quick and manageable way as well as find story ideas that they can connect to. Now we can have that power as users - both teacher and students.

Here’s how you do it:


  1. Log into your account.
  2. Go into your profile and click on moments, all the way at the right.
  3. Once you’re in the new screen, there will be a create moment button on the right. Click it!
  4. First title your moment and find a cover photo for it. Twitter will provide you with your current tweets so that if you want to curate what you have done recently by way of specific topic, you can.
  5. Once you’ve selected and titled your moment, you can either publish it right away or safe it to finish later.

Twitter Moments can be a very powerful curation tool if you are using the social media outlet with staff for professional learning or with students as a backchannel.

Now in lieu of having to go to a different application like storify, you can curate information directly from Twitter and then share that to be favorited by students and colleagues alike.

Think of the many ways we can use this tool with students:


  • As support for class discussion while curating back channels. Students can review the discussion from actual pictures, videos and live tweets that become selected by a particular criteria.
  • Students can review class material over time or even during an extra help chat that students may not be able to attend.
  • Students can research a particular topic and curate findings to go back to later to support claims
  • Resources can be stored in one place and then labeled for easier access later
  • A library can be put together for future use and reflection

Another useful tool that Twitter already has in place, is the polls function for potential exit tickets and formative check-ins which can now be curated too. Additionally, now that Periscope is directly linked to Twitter, we can curate live videos for future review and reflection as well.

These are just a few ideas of how a tool like this may be useful for both teachers and students. I’m eager to hear how you might use this tool in the future. Please share

The opinions expressed in Work in Progress are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.