Schedule your tweets to help avoid tweeting mistakes and saying dumb tweets

I know a few teachers who use twitter.

• Some teachers use twitter to connect professionally with other technologically minded teachers.
• Other teachers use twitter as a way to update their class websites. They tweet from their phone and they set up their class website so it’s essentially a live feed of their twitter account.

We often tell students to “think before they click” about the possible ramifications of social media. Of course, as teachers, we need to practice what we preach because you can lose your job.

• Hutch Carpenter posted about how to tweet your way out of a job when a job applicant at Cisco wrote about hating the work and a channel partner advocate for Cisco responded.
• Carpenter’s post went viral and it’s kind of interesting looking at the traffic graph of his blog. He wrote a retrospective on the Cisco fatty storyand it’s interesting to hear the background and his thoughts:
  • You tweet things and get positive reactions from those with whom you interact. Or, more likely, a lot of what you tweet gets no reaction.
  • I can very easily see someone developing a false sense of privacy in this realm. After all, there are millions of people tweeting.”
  • “Twitter search and the retweet protocol makes anyone’s tweets accessible everywhere. With Twitter, you have to keep your guard up.

There are even websites dedicated to dumb tweets.

So, how can you avoid tweeting a dumb tweet? By scheduling your tweets so they don’t get sent right away.

• That way, you can fix any auto correct errors so you don’t end up on this site.
• It also gives you time to check your message and to think about what you’re tweeting. After all, we live in a world where tweets can cause political scandals, get people fired or arrested.

There are a few twitter clients that will let you schedule your tweets, but I haven’t been able to find one yet that will do it automatically for you. I would love it if you could change a setting so that when you click send, it automatically schedules your tweet 5 minutes later.

Here are two Twitter clients that I use to schedule my tweets.

Use the HootSuite app on the iPad to schedule your tweets

On the iPad, I just discovered HootSuite. (Up until now, I’ve used the free TweetCaster app for the iPad because I could live with the ads and didn’t need to upgrade to the pro version. )

I find the HootSuite app better than TweetCaster because you can schedule your tweets to go out at a future time. You can see all of your pending tweets and edit any mistakes before they go out.

(I find the HootSuite app doesn’t update the pending tweets list as quickly as it could, but still, it’s better than nothing. If you schedule your tweets an hour away with a flick of the finger, you shouldn’t have any problems with the app not updating the list as often as quickly as you’d like.)

Use TweetDeck on your Computer to schedule your tweets

TweetDeck on your PC or Mac computer also lets you schedule your tweets to give you a chance to undo any tweeting faux pas.

(I like the TweetDeck program on the computer better than logging into HootSuite through a web browser. TweetDeck also has an app for the iPhone (not iPad), but it doesn’t allow you to schedule tweets like the desktop application.

How do you use Twitter in the classroom?

This post was written using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium Wireless. What is Dragon NaturallySpeaking?

[adrotate block=”3″] There are 483 words in this post. Dragon NaturallySpeaking made 10 word errors. So, I had an accuracy of 97.9% in this document. If you include punctuation and capitalization errors, Dragon NaturallySpeaking made an additional 1 punctuation and capitalization error. So, I had an accuracy of 97.7% in this document. The most annoying feature about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking in this post was that every time I said tweet, the voice recognition software thought I wanted to tweet something and opened up a new dialog box. or it misheard me and thought I said retreat.