Twitter

Ok, so I don’t usually veer away from the Home Ed theme on this blog, but just had to get this down so I can pass it on to others I’m trying to persuade round to the Twitter way of thinking 😉

I first set up a Twitter account about a year ago, just to see what the fuss was all about.  I didn’t get it at all, so never logged back in.  However, a couple of weeks ago, some friends were visiting us who were heavily into Twitter.  I said I’d take a look to see what the deal was now.  I dusted off my account and had a browse.  I signed up to ‘follow’ the usual suspect celebs that the news is full of.  I read the ‘tweets’ for a couple of days, and then decided that was deadly dull.  However, I had a nose at what a couple of other friends were ‘following’ and selected a couple of local things, like our local radio station, bbc news station etc.  I immediately struck lucky, as one of the first updates I received were details of a new NHS dentist opening up near where we live, so I clicked on the link and signed us all up!  It was in our local newspaper the next day – so I was ahead of the game 😉

I then found that a lot of museums and other places we like to go were on there. Usually I surf round their websites looking for open days, freebies and new events.  I found that by receiving their twitter updates I was having the information delivered to me without having to search for it – bonus!

I then started signing up for various things like the Victorian Society, Science Week etc, in the hope that I would receive information that could be useful and give pointers to some resources I could squirrel away for HE purposes!

I have found that I’ve now signed up to so much that I was getting information overload! I downloaded TweetDeck today in an attempt to organise it all, and it seems to be working.  It basically sets out your updates into columns – each column filtered as dictated by you.  I’ve divided my followings into ‘Lists’, and then made each list into a column. Job done!

To finish the job I’ve removed any of my followings that are duplicated from my facebook account.  What I’ve found is if you follow something on facebook, and they send you a status update, you also have to put up with all the ‘comments’ that other people signed up to the same thing have sent, and it clutters up your status page.  With Twitter, you get the same info without the comments, as you can’t see what other people send your followings unless they are also following you, and you go looking for the information in the first place!

From a Home Ed point of view, its fantastic.  As an example, I signed up to the Imperial War Museum, and this week started getting hour by hour updates as they relived the Blitz which happened this week in 1940.  It included a googlemap with linked photos of sites in London that were bombed.  There have been many little gems I have uncovered in the past couple of weeks 😉

You are welcome to come follow me!!