Link RSS feed or Twitter for Announcements?

[Renee_Carney]

Posting this question for  @dusty_parrish ​

Also, is there an easy way to link an RSS feed or twitter account within canvas. This way, I can use twitter and it would "post" within Canvas "Announcements." I am still looking into scripting with google drive/doc/sheets/slides for added functionality and workflow.

[Stef_retired]

 @dusty_parrish , I've seen this solution offered for pushing Canvas Announcements into Twitter, but so far, not the other way around: Pushing Announcements to Social Media . Also, I wonder if the current 140-character limitation would be an impediment for most people, although I see that Twitter is considering increasing the character limit to 10,000.

[dhulsey]

Yes, you can do this using the instructions in Stefanie's link. You can also use a blog and pull the blog posts into announcements with the rss feed. However, the last time I tried this, you could see delays of up to several hours before the blog post sowed up in a Canvas class as an announcement. Of course, it has been at least a year since I tried it.

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi  @dusty_parrish ​,

Yes, there is a Twitter app that you can install in your course that will then let you embed twitter feeds anywhere you have access to the rich content editor.

I just tested it to make sure it works like I remember it working - seems to work great.

[GregoryBeyrer]

Almost but not quite. What would be great is an option to make the Twitter widget appear on the Announcements page alongside Announcements and not embedded within one. I want to use Announcements for material that is course specific but also want to use Twitter for information I want my students and my followers to see.

[scottdennis]

Hi Greg, That is true that there isn't currently a way to have tweets trigger the generation of Canvas announcements.  Please consider creating a feature request if you feel that this is a needed feature in Canvas. Thanks, Scott

[scott]

Is there a way to put the RSS feed at the top of a page in canvas?  I am trying to find a way to have the announcements on our home page in a course that would automatically generate the weekly message.  Just wondering if there was a way to set announcements to post on certain dates and then set an RSS feed on a page to accomplish this. 

[dhulsey]

Hey, Regina! Sure, you can set your announcements to publish at predetermined times and then use this handy Announcements Widget for Home Page​.

I hope that helps!

[Stef_retired]

Tangentially related, I just saw laurakgibbs​'s tweet about using Blogger to embed an announcements feed on a Canvas page. The description and instructions are here: OU Digital Teaching: Blogger Announcements as Canvas Homepage

[laurakgibbs]

I'm glad that was helpful, Stefanie! I don't use Canvas much, but I am a huge fan of "live content" inside Canvas spaces, so RSS, blogs, etc. I tested that out and shared what I learned here at a demo course (open, no log-in required):

Growth Mindset Playground: Growth Mindset Playground

A good tool for doing RSS in there is also Inoreader; I provided some info and samples about that here (Inoreader is an AMAZING RSS tool which allows you to remix and rebroadcast feeds like the old Google Reader did, and also Yahoo Pipes, but so much more powerful than either of them):

RSS: Growth Mindset Playground

That was stuff I was just playing with over the summer, and I'm glad to answer questions about any of it. We are really lucky to have a Domain of One's Own installation at my school which gives all faculty https webspace if they want it. That is the key to making things work in Canvas because of the strictly enforced https rules. Very grateful to acroom​ who is the Domain of One's Own / Reclaim Hosting guru at my school. Being able to combine DoOO with Create offers great possibilites!