Using Twitter?

[mcnallyfc]

Anyone use Twitter at their school for updates?

 

Thinking of utilising it for snow updates, updates for parents, pupils and staff that follow it?

 

Wanted to look at disabling comments etc to make it a bit secure but cant seem to do that?

 

Interested to hear if other schools utilising this and what problems if any you have had?

[elsiegee40]

Yes, we use twitter and it's very popular with our parents. Our feed is public, anyone can follow it.

 

Equally, people who don't want a twitter account can look at it too. I'd say only about 20% of our parents actually have twitter accounts and follow us, but most seem to have bookmarked our twitter page and were using it as their primary source of information in the snow last winter.

 

I'm just sorting out our "Contacting You" webpage - We use twitter, our website, the local radio stations and email if the school cannot open or closes early. This gets all, but 5 families who need text messages if we close during the day.

[Sylv3r]

I looked at it but the takeup from students / parents was quite small. This was a year or so ago and probably Twitter was just new to some people.

 

We have our own Facebook page with 1,500 or so members for annoucements and we also send SMS messages for school closures and we will continue to do so as the system works well.

[TechMonkey]

I have created one and try and keep it up to date with events and messages but it hasn't een advertised hugely. When I get a sec I am going to rejig our communication page on the website and hopefully it will get noticed then.

[FN-GM]

I would like to know if its possible also

[tech_guy]

We looked at using the big T but found that on Twitter the @'insertourschoolnamehere' was already in use by someone in the Philippines and for rather unfortunate purposes

[WithoutMotive]

Use it all the time as a feed on our website - it's brilliant for informing parents and also staff/pupils of news, info and any maintenance that's going to happen.

[DaveMurphy]

We use RSS Grafitti which pulls news from our Website to the College Twitter account, which is just @collegename which is also linked in with our Facebook Fan Page so it's a case of update one and everything updates. Of course you have to keep an eye on people putting innapropiate posts now and again. So far over 600 people have 'liked' us on Facebook though Twitter isn't as popular, we've just had the Council and a College down south follow us... 100 followers :-(