Use Twitter for School Communications

The following Twitter tutorial introduces Twitter and explains how it works. Watch it with this consideration in mind;

Assume that your school's administrators and teachers all signed up for twitter using a prescribed naming convention. Our school is EO Smith so let's say my Twitter id is eos_frank so that it is different from any personal Twitter identities. If all teachers and administrators at the school signed up for Twitter and selectively subscribed to each other then a powerful social tool is suddenly available in the school.

A principal for example would immediately know from a twitter feed what's going on between periods, who has a hall pass, who's sick or fighting and so on. Secretarial staff at the Superintendent's office would see issues from the principal's staff, and so on.

This kind of thing could catch on!

If You're Going to Twitter, Do It in Public

There's a website called Twitter that is doing something very wacky and creative. It asks people what they're doing right now and then just streams out the results and it is fascinating in a very strange way.

As I was poking around on their site I noticed that communities could twitter as well. Here a fire department logs what it's doing, uh, right now. Now I happen to think that's pretty cool.

Imagine a school twittering throughout the day and sending their twitters to an rss feed that is updating a portal on their website? That would be very interesting to see snapshots of activity in the whole school over a period of time.

But wait a minute. Could teachers also create a class twitter? I mean with students offering ideas during a class about what's being learned? My head hurts thinking how cool a virtual gestalt session in an interesting classroom might get.

I better stop now. I'm feeling a twitter coming on.