Is your school tweeting? If you aren’t, you really should be, it’s a great way to both engage with parents and really get your name out there (and if you are, give us a follow!).
While School Jotter has a twitter widget which is easy to add to your site, you need to do some things in your Twitter account to make it work, which I’ll be running you through today.
The first thing you need to do is log into your school Twitter account and visit apps.twitter.com. You’ll see this page.
Click on Create New App and you’ll get the following page.
You’ll need to fill out some details about the app now, but it’s not too difficult. Think of the “app” as the embedded feed, that’s all it is!
- Name – Name of the feed. This is purely for your benefit, we recommend naming it “School Twitter Feed” or something similar.
- Description – Something like “The latest Tweets from the school” – users will see this.
- Website – The page it will be embedded on, your homepage
- Callback URL – Leave this blank
Now check the “Yes I agree” box at the bottom to confirm you’ve read the Developer Agreement, then press Create your Twitter application. Return to apps.twitter.com and you’ll see this:
Click on your new “app” and it’ll take you to your apps page. Click Keys and Access Tokens at the top and it’ll bring you to this page here.
Click Generate My Access Token at the bottom. Now you need to go back to your School Jotter Site and click Manage > Settings, then click the Twitter API Settings in the tab on the left.
It’s now just a matter of copying and pasting things from the Twitter page into School Jotter. The following fields map to each other:
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School Jotter |
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Consumer Key (API Key) |
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Consumer Secret (API Secret) |
Consumer Secret (API Secret) |
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Access Token |
Access Token |
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Access Token Secret |
Access Token Secret |
Now save your settings on School Jotter and you’re all set up. You can close Twitter now if you like, you won’t need the app page any more. It’s now a really easy matter of embedding a Twitter feed into School Jotter.
Go to the page you want it on, click Edit Page > Insert item > Twitter, then click where you want it as with any other School Jotter object.
Click the embedded item and the following box will drop down from the menu at the top. Fill it in.
All you really need to fill in is the Twitter login (your Twitter handle) and the number of tweets you want to display. To embed more feeds elsewhere, all you need to do is follow the last part of this guide with the embedding – the authentication key business only ever has to be done once!
