Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) was the school’s founder’s day, meaning that from about 12:30pm the process of shipping all 1000+ pupils and staff over to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London took place. This meant that myself and the others on twitter were split up in during the transit and service, and so we found that twitter was to be the desired medium for communication. Worked surprisingly well, and was an amazing use of it.
When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…
An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.
Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…
