Applying for a developer account for educators

[Maziyar_sh]

Sure @LeBraat, I appreciate the support

[LeBraat]

One thing that you can do to get the process going is to have the professor apply as an organization account. We will have more details on this process soon.

[GLC]

Thanks @Maziyar_sh and @LeBraat for the clarifications. Looking forward to hearing more about this new process!
GLC

[Maziyar_sh]

Sounds great @LeBraat, I am gonna keep an eye on the announcements and Blog for more info when it is available.

PS: We may need some instructions for the teachers who are already applied/approved (individually or their university as organizer). How should they change their org or become an organization account.

Many thanks again, it’s good to know this is possible and simple for students.

[mdjoner]

PS: We may need some instructions for the teachers who are already applied/approved (individually or their university as organizer). How should they change their org or become an organization account.

@LeBraat, thanks for the extra info.

In addition to this ask (how to change to an organization account), I also need perspective on timing for these new changes. If the changes are >3 weeks away I need to know, so I can revise my course for this offering and delete the Twitter content (and I can bring it back in a future offering when you’ve completed your deployment).

[LeBraat]

Hello all,

Sorry for the delay on this. If you are an educator and would like to use Twitter in your classroom, we recommend that you read through the following playbook:

Playbook: Twitter for Education

Please let me know if you have any questions about the above.

@Maziyar_sh - At this point in time, there is no way to convert an individual account to an organization account. If you are negatively affected by this, please let me know in this topic and I will reach out to you privately with some options.

[GLC]

Hi @LeBraat, thanks for the update, this is terrific! I have created an organizational account but I am running into a problem: I tried inviting the students, but I am getting the following error sending the invitations (see below).

Unfortunately I had already directed my students to apply for a developer account. Is this error somewhat related to that? If yes, do you have a good way to work around this hurdle? Please DM me if possible. Thanks!

Giovanni

[Maziyar_sh]

Yes, it is related to the account (handler) you are trying to invite. The account is either under review (I have tested this) or already been approved (I have tested this one as well).

If the account has been already approved, then the students can go ahead and create an app for the class. If they haven’t, another nice feature would be a cancel button next to “Currently under review”. This would save a lot of time for Twitter employees. Also, make it possible to be invited to different “groups”.

[computa_mike]

You don’t need to apply for a developer account, just create an application (see twitter apps) and you will get instant access to all of the APIs. You can, however, use 1 account and create 35 apps, each assigned for a specific student, and share with them the API keys.

Don’t you need a dev account to create an app now?

[Maziyar_sh]

Yes, you do. Everything in that statement is wrong. You need to apply and get approved, then app limit is 10, and you can’t share API keys as it is forbidden. So, totally ignore that and follow this instruction if you are using Twitter APIs during the class:

Playbook: Twitter for Education

Otherwise, just follow the instruction at https://developer.twitter.com

[LeBraat]

Hey @GLC,

This error is delivering because your students have already applied. There are two routes that we can go in this situation. We can either have your student’s create a temporary Twitter account that you can add to your organization account, or we can wait for your student’s accounts to be approved.

I know this is not ideal, and I apologize for that. We have listened to you and have plenty of work to do to improve this process. I will make sure to keep you updated on our progress.

[mdjoner]

At this point in time, there is no way to convert an individual account to an organization account.

Hi @LeBraat, at the moment I am still waiting for my review process to complete. I had submitted as an individual account before this thread took off. Is there a way to switch my application to an organizational one?

[mdjoner]

Well, my individual application approved yesterday. Should I just create a new twitter account and apply for an organizational dev account? Or is there a better approach / way to convert my account over?

[computa_mike]

I’m just wondering here : Could we create a ‘fake’ twitter - somethin that responds with canned responses? There are testing servers out there - something like https://github.com/sideshowcoder/canned might be useful.

You could sppin up a ‘fake’ twitter API endpoint with canned responses and you wouldn’t need to create a twitter developer account just to try testing application interoperability with twitter? It’s not ideal - but it might get you over the stumbling block of not being able to talk to the API.

[computa_mike]

There are probably other fake servers you could use. At the moment educators are waiting 2-3 weeks for an account - what if we as a community set up a fake twitter project (spent like 2-3 weeks working on it) and making it available as a resource for twitter developer learning. This would mean that you wouldn’t need to wait on twitter for a developer account to start learning to use the APIs

What do you think? If the API has a high level of fidelity it should be possible to emulate or simulate many of the situations that API developers may experience (such as rate throttling). Maybe the canned server isn’t the best solution - or maybe you know of a better solution. Let’s discuss.

[computa_mike]

Hi @GLC - I wrote a reply here Applying for a developer account for educators . It might be that this is too tight a timescale now for your coursework - but using a mock API totally removes the need to access the Twitter API, and potentially canned responses like that could be packaged into a github project, meaning that students can work totally disconnected.

What do you think? The only downside I can see is that you wouldn’t be able to see things tweeted on twitter - but you might be able to write some unit tests to confirm that the API is being called in the right way.

[GLC]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I am not aware of any mock API service out there. Can you suggest any? One downside I see is that there is value in having students get their hands dirty with the actual API — there are several behaviors that are hard to replicate with a mock system, for example how to back off exponentially from a stalled connection. But it could be definitely an interesting alternative!

GLC

[GLC]

Oh I just saw your other suggestion. I wish I had 2-3 weeks available at the moment!

[LeBraat]

@SidfDevelopers - This topic is dedicated to educators. We have an existing topic on our waitlist timing for individuals who are not educators.

Marking your response as off-topic.

[system]

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