Last year I used the article by Luise Freese (@luisefreese) on Adaptive Cards for Beginners: How to Monitor a Hashtag on Twitter .

The idea is that you can create a card that automatically goes into your selected channel in Microsoft Teams that triggers an action on your part: namely to explore the topic of the tweet.  Also the adaptive card allows you to also add a date in which you can schedule this personal learning.

So in effect, you can add due dates to your learning which is also something that I wanted to include especially as we have specific Learning Days dedicated to our own self-driven learning at work at Adopt & Embrace.

This way I could set the due days to these dates (or really whenever I wanted) so that I could create my own personalise learning plan.

My Process

I followed Luise’s article because I wanted to capture all the tweets I had tagged with #helenexperiments so that it goes into my personal Teams channel in Microsoft Teams to action.

This is how it looks like above when it enters Teams.

Of course, you can do exactly the same process using Power Automate or it was known as Microsoft Flow where you can automate certain actions such as every time you tweet it populates say, an Excel spreadsheet or sends you a notification.

(Microsoft Flow works like applications such as If This Then That and Zapier however, the beauty is that you can now automate WORK flows that is, documents and other work files AT work so you’re not using any third-party applications that your IT department frowns upon.  Using Microsoft products as part of your enterprise licence arrangement means that you can do similar, if not the same processes with your work apps and tools as you do with your consumer apps outside of work).

Five Months Later

The process was going all well and good with no complaints but this time I wanted to incorporate an additional flow of these tweets tagged with #helenexperiments to my individualised Personal Learning Plan that sits on Microsoft Planner (it’s Trello’s competitor).

In this case, I created a flow such that whenever a tweet is shared with the above tag, that it gets filed under the board titled “Tweets To Follow Up On” in my Learning Plan.

Using automated tools like this (whether they are in the Microsoft ecosphere or not) allow us to automate some processes and minimise the need for us to go searching for items we tagged, favourited, bookmarked or saved.  They all get filtered to the one place where we can easily find them.

Using the Microsoft applications means that you can now do what you do outside of work with various consumer apps IN work and AT work all with the approval of your IT department because there’s less risk.

If you want to try these processes out then I recommend you follow Luise who shares some fantastic tips on automating work processes, sketch noting and other O365 tips to get the best out of your use of these tools.

For me, she helped me understand how Adaptive Cards can be used for notifications and how useful they are for developers (and non-developers) to exchange user interface information between platforms in a consistent way.

However, there is a long way to go to learn more about automating processes.

It worked!! Thank you!!! pic.twitter.com/Jt23fGTSMq

— Helen Blunden #AlwaysBeLearning????? (@ActivateLearn) August 9, 2019

References about Adaptive Cards:

• Using Adaptive Cards with the Microsoft Bot Framework
• Adaptive Cards Overview