Policing school twitter account

[SimpleSi]

I'm not a expert Twit(ter) and one of my heads as asked about setting one for their school for parents to follow but is worried about a small minority sending abusive messages and wouldn't want the other parents seeing them.

 

I'm assuming some of you are doing this - how do you police/filter things?

 

regards

 

Simon

[vikpaw]

You mean abuse e.g if someone says something nasty and @mentions the school?

You could restrict who is allowed to follow the account, but i don't think they'll see anything nasty unless they search for the name. On a follow they'll just see school tweets.

 

If the parents follow the school account, they can just look at the profile or your tweets or search for a hashtag rather than search for the school account so they don't see mentions, but anything public will be prone to some form of abuse. Any one with the smarts to use twitter, should be able to ignore any minor issues.

 

Maybe consider creating a feed of your tweets or presenting the information in a different format so it can be seen on the webpage. Something more fun that i know you'll enjoy is if you create an app (at least for Android) for the school, giving basic info, and also with a twitter feed. So it can show more than just twitter data, but also for example term dates. I'm working on something similar myself for iPhone at the moment.

[SYNACK]

I'm working on something similar myself for iPhone at the moment.

 

I hope you are working on it for other platforms also unless you want the school to be seen as advertising Apple products.

As for twitter its greatest benifit (being public) is also its greatest danger but as above short of the parents doing a search they are not likely to come across others comments.

[vikpaw]

Initially iPhone, but yes, it will port (in theory, or so the app maker app tells me )

Blackberry is the biggest market here, but i wouldn't know where to start for that. Android and Win 7 are on the cards though.

Besides, there's no hard in advertising Apple We're on our third lab i think, plus many macbooks, and now some ipads. The head of our upper school is called Mrs. Mack