I’ve been setting up some Twitter accounts for us to use in Solent Youth Action. I won’t go into too much detail about what Twitter is, as everyone already seems to be talking about it!
I think it could be a useful tool for us to use with some of our youth groups. By setting up a Twitter page for each youth group, and inviting the youth group members to register as “followers”, we can send them text messages to their mobile phone.
For example, we can quickly send out a reminder before an event by filling out a web form (or by sending a text message). The message will be sent as an SMS to all members of the group in one go, and at no cost to either us or the young people!
It might not be a perfect fit – the 140 character limit on messages could be restrictive, and it isn’t really intended for this sort of use. That said, there doesn’t seem to be any sign that Twitter mind people finding alternative uses for it (e.g. the BBC News Twitter feed) and services like Jyngle which are a better match are not yet available in the UK.
I think it could be useful – it’s a very immediate form of messaging, and is a preferred method for many of the young people that we work with – more so than email, for example.
We’ll give it a try with one of our smaller groups first and see how it goes. If it goes well, I can see us using it as a communications method with all of our groups.
There is something about using wiki markup that lends itself very well to taking meeting notes. Start lines with a ‘
At the end of the meeting, I used ‘Export to HTML’ to create an HTML copy of the formatted notes. I then launched Outlook and emailed the HTML copy to our administrator – all from the PDA and all before the others had finished packing away their stuff and putting their coats on.