 Social media integration and Moodle forums is something I was asked to do in work about six or eight months ago. I was asked to have a look at it. The task I was given was basically to try and encourage staff to use the Moodle tools at what we call modules, but courses in Moodle, and then at a wider level as well. But also there was a requirement that a number of our staff used social media. Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, all sorts of other things. The senior staff wanted to encourage staff to use that social media, but of course people don't want to have to post the same thing lots of times. So the idea was to find a way to allow staff to post something once, and it gets published in lots of different places. My first idea was, OK, let's make use of Moodle's messaging plug-ins. I'll write some plug-ins or adapt some plug-ins or have a look at some of the other people have written for me, hopefully, and we'll integrate with Slack, with WhatsApp, with Telegram, with whatever else we need it to, so teachers can send messages and it would go out to whatever platform the students happen to be using. But when I started looking at this about, let me see, five minutes into the thinking, I thought, hang on a minute, there's so much change in what the students use from one year to the next, I'll just end up rewriting messaging plug-ins on almost an annual basis, and that's just not scalable. So this request from senior staff happened to come across at a time when I was actually playing with something called If This, Then That, with my daughter at home. How many of you have come across If This, Then That previously? Probably just under about half the room, OK. If This, Then That is a free online service that basically says, if something happens, do something else. And it all happens through this online service. And you can do all sorts of things with it. My mobile phone is now connected to If This, Then That, so that it turns the Wi-Fi off when I leave a sort of 50-yard radius around my house, just because there are so many Wi-Fi hotspots in the area that it kept trying to turn itself on all the time. It then turns itself back on when I get home in the evening. OK, nothing much, but this service does all sorts of things like that. It's great with weather apps, with text apps, with emails, with office things. But it doesn't currently directly integrate with Moodle. But there are things in Moodle that do trigger If This, Then That. And the one I used was RSS feeds. Because the concept that I'd been asked was allow the staff to post to Moodle forums, well, Moodle forums can generate RSS feeds. If This, Then That can use those RSS feeds as its trigger, and then you can say, OK, if you've received the RSS feed, do something with it. I'll get on to what I did with it in a second. First step, of course, and this is about as technical as it's going to get. So you're fine. Turn your RSS feeds on. They're not on by default in most sites. And for fairly obvious reasons, you won't get an RSS feed output for If This, Then That to look at, unless you do turn them on. So site administration, advanced features, just enable them site-wide. But even enabling it site-wide doesn't mean that every forum is going to participate in this. They still have to be turned on for those people that want it. So every individual forum gets turned on as well. But when you turn on the forums, you get a fairly long and ugly looking URL. It doesn't really matter what it looks like. Just copy and paste it somewhere because you are going to need it afterwards. Because that's the link that If This, Then That is going to use to publish your forums. It's a very useful feature, actually. Some people do still use RSS readers themselves, surprising as it may seem. But that wasn't what I was publishing it to. Obviously, if you're using an external service, you need an account on it. So If This, Then That, I already had an account. Like I said, I was playing with it with my daughter and just messing about with it over Christmas. And you choose one of multiple services. Some of them on there, what have we got? Twitter, particular dates and times. RSS feeds is the one highlighted because that's what I use. If you send an SMS message, it can do it. If you send an email, weather underground, particular phone calls from mobiles, something happening on Facebook, Flickr, Evernote, the list goes on and on. It's quite extensive if you actually go on their website and check it out. But even on the forums that I enabled it on, I didn't necessarily want every post to be sent out to social media. Some things, they're just not relevant or it might just be me testing something. Or it might be, you want some of your students to see it or your students internally to see it, but you don't want it on social media for other people. So the way I got round that was one of the features that If This, Then That has, is you can actually set a trigger within that RSS feed. And the one I chose was I made it have a simple hashtag. There was a little bit of logic around that. It does suggest a keyword or a simple phrase is the setting on there. I used a hashtag, particularly because I was feeding this to Twitter. And if you're feeding it to Twitter, it makes sense to put a hashtag on it anyway because then you can put it into a thread. So I made that hashtag, my key, and then The If This, then that would take it from there for me. Give it the RSS feed that we copied down earlier, and that's your trigger done. If this, then that will then say, right, something's happened, what do you want it to do? My first attempt, I just did Twitter and it worked. It was fine. But with If This, then that, you can actually set up multiple actions. You don't just have to have one action for a trigger. Something happens, make this happen, make something else happen, make a third thing happen, make a fourth thing happen. You can have as many as you want. So I went to town. I did Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, Flickr with Images. I can't remember what else now, but I did about half a dozen things all off one trigger. I then found if one of them breaks down, like I haven't signed into Facebook for about 18 months, so my account, the password had died for some reason. I think my daughter had probably signed into it rather than me, probably. So the Facebook one stopped working and the problem with If This, then that was that once one of them stopped working, they all stopped working. It just shut down. Cut it right back to the ones that I thought were actually useful. Twitter and WordPress to start with. But then I came up with another problem. Although If This, then that would post out the link to my forum and it would post that on Twitter, I've probably got a couple of hundred Twitter followers, I'm not that big a Twitter user, but I've got a few hundred on there, of those probably about 10 or a dozen of them that look at my university, which means that nobody else could actually get at that link because our forums are all behind our authentication. So I set up a second If This, then that, that said, okay, the first one has posted to Twitter. It's taken my forum post and it's put it on WordPress as well. So let's use WordPress as a new blog, as the next action, and put a second tweet out that gave that link for all my followers that aren't at University of Gloucestershire, and then they can see it as well. The other one I did, that I had to do separately, and this was one of the gotchas I'll come to afterwards, If This, then that will do push notifications out to mobile phones as well. So anytime I put something on my forum with that hashtag, any user can get a push notification. But that has to be set up slightly differently because the user who wants to receive it has to set that one up because it needs their mobile phone number, not mine. Because when I set it up first time, I got push notifications of forum messages that I was sending out. Well, I kind of knew I'd sent them out anyway, so I didn't really need a push notification of that, but the people I was trying to post it to did. So that has to be set up as a separate one. But those are all things that I found out fairly quickly. And this is essentially, once you're in the If This, then that app itself, this is what you get. A trigger. An action, thank you. And another action. So the first action is Twitter. The second action is WhatsApp. Not WhatsApp, WordPress, sorry. And there's the gotchas. Notifications need to be set up separately. The Twitter and the WordPress, you give If This, then that, your credentials to set up. That might be a concern to some people. It hasn't been to me because there's nothing on either of them that I object to people seeing anyway. Then the forums, being on the authenticated site, needed to give a separate WordPress link. Started out as a proof of concept. We want tutors to make more use of the social media, but we want them to only have to write it once and publish it to wherever. I took that on and recognised the fact that students keep changing the sort of social media that they use and I didn't want to have to develop multiple plug-ins for each one. At the moment, it's really only being used by myself, and I'm using it to disseminate developments that I'm working on and just to help people what's happening generally in University of Gloucestershire learning systems and developments. But I do have a couple of staff that have been talking to me about rolling it out for their modules, their courses over the summer and to give me some feedback of how they're going to use it. So hopefully over the next six months or so, it's useful grow. It's a fairly simple system, so it should be, I want to say full proof, but I won't go quite that far. And then there's the finishing touch. Of course anything that goes out to Twitter, you can just get the Twitter feed and take the HTML block from Twitter and put that back on your course anyway. So it becomes a sort of circle. I've put something on the forum, it goes out to Twitter, WordPress and wherever else. And it comes back as a Twitter part of an HTML block that just sits on the side of the course page as well. And final page, just some links. If you do want to see those slides, they're on SlideShare, I've tweeted the link out a couple of times this afternoon as well. SlideShare doesn't have the 22nd thing on it either. And a link to if this, then that itself for those who are not familiar with it. I would suggest just go and have a look at it, even if it's just a little bit of light relief to see what it does. You might not ever use it with your moodle in work, but it's some fun things to have a play with in the evening or the weekend as well. And anybody who wants to ask me any questions, obviously I'm here for a couple of minutes now, but you'll either find me around the moot a couple of days, or many of you know me, I'll be on the forums in various places as well. So anybody who wants to ask me anything, feel free. There you go, thank you very much. And I think that was somewhere around 10 minutes or so, so probably a bit more than a big O, but less than a full one. Is that Davo? Yeah, no. There are issues with the WordPress one, for example, it doesn't take images across. If you put an image in your forum post, that doesn't seem to go across. I wasn't too worried about it on Twitter, simply because that was just a link, basically, and the first, when they went up to 280 characters, I managed to get the first sentence or so in there. One thing I didn't put on there, or haven't mentioned, I don't think, one of the bits of advice I gave to the people I have talked to with this, the hashtag that I'm using is the key, use it as part of the title of your forum, because that way you're guaranteed to get it into the 180 or 240 or 280 characters in a Twitter post. If you put it in the body of the forum, you could end up losing part of the hashtag off it. So I've gone into the habit of using the hashtag as part of the title of my forum, and then I know it goes in there. But no, in terms of formatting on WordPress, no it doesn't. I've posted across, and I have gone in and re-edited the WordPress blog to put some nice formatting on some of them. But at least I don't have to re-type it all in there. Anyone else? Dan. I came in a bit late. Did you have a decision to do this rather than, say, use the mobile app which would have push notifications and update people on forum posts anyway? Or was it really just to make sure everyone got it because they were on different social media? My requirement was the fact that a lot of our staff were already using social media like Twitter and WordPress, and it was trying to find a way to allow them to write once and publish to multiple places. So the push notifications is only a small part of it. We don't actually use the mobile app extensively at the moment. We have quite a lot of customisations within our theme and make use of blogs. Although we tell people that the mobile app is there and a lot of its strengths, we still encourage people going back and forth into the main website for certain things anyway. So this sort of... In no way is this intended to replace the mobile app because the mobile app has got just far too many strengths to try and do that. But it gives another alternative and it ties into existing social media accounts as sort of the forums themselves, the push notifications and things like that. I think I've used that then this for my own music-related stuff. I do think it's got a fantastic potential. It would be great if someone could see it as a project and how it could integrate with moodle systems a bit more. I'm not sure what that is yet. I think if we could work out a messaging output to if this, then that to act as the trigger instead of or as well as RSS feeds, then you have your trigger from wherever messaging works in moodle then and then you can do whatever actions you want to after that. I haven't got that far yet. I've stuck to the RSS feeds for now. I think that's it. Thank you very much, everyone.