NORFOLK GOVERNORS' NETWORK

A case study of a governor starting to use Twitter by NGN's Communications Officer, Neil Collins

So Twitter is just for people who want to find out where Stephen Fry is today - right?  What on earth has that got to do with me as a school governor?

Well that was pretty much my thinking before I started using Twitter a few months ago.  It is also not as if I'm a technophobe - I've been working in the computer software industry for 20 years and just love any shiney new gadget.  Even then I just couldn't understand why I should use Twitter but, having dipped my toe in the water, I'm a complete convert and I now think it's one of the best ways for governors to stay in touch with news and information.  So here is how that conversion happened.

It started following an NGN Communications Committee meeting.  We're keen to promote our facebook site (http://www.facebook.com/norfolkgovernorsnetwork) as more of a news and discussion site, rather than a static content site - which is largely what the main www.ngn.org.uk site is for.  Someone suggested we set up a twitter account, link it to the Facebook site and somehow (in a way I didn't really understand) that would be a good thing.  Anyway I volunteered to give a go...

So I guess the first question is "what is Twitter?".  Well it's a web-based service.  You register to "follow" people and then when they send out messages (called Tweets) you get them on your PC, phone or iPad.  It's not like text messages (they don't beep and pop-up on your phone) but they are also not like emails because they are really short messages - in fact they have a maximum length of 140 characters.  You can then search for people you'd like to follow.  I started by searching for "school governor" found a handful of people, then followed some of the people they were following, sat back and watched the tweets role in.

Soon I found that there were some key people who tweeted about school governing in the UK:

• Sean Whetstone (@schoolgoverning) - who blogs on school governor issues
• Clare Collins (@clare_collins) - the chair of the National Governors Association
• Modern Governor (@ModernGovernor) - a governor training service
• Clerk to Governors (@ClerktoGovenor) - who writes and blogs on governor clerking matters

And then I found some really useful local news twitterers - particularly the EDP (@EDP24) and Steve Downes (@stevedownes1973) who is the EDP Education Correspondent.

And then it started to grow.... I spotted some tweets people had forwarded on (something called Retweeting) and followed those people and soon I found that Twitter was becoming the way for me to find out local news and local and national school governor news.  Be that a new article in the EDP, Ofsted announcing a new document, the DfE announce Michael Gove's latest pronouncement....  I was hearing it first on Twitter.

So if you want to give it a try, here's how you set it up.  It's all free.

• Go to http://www.twitter.com and provide your name, email address, pick a password and click "Sign Up"
• Twitter will then suggest a username for you.  Think about this carefully as it will be your identity on twitter.  For NGN I picked "ngnorguk" - so to follow us you need to follow @ngnorguk.
• You'll then be sent an email to confirm your email address and, well that's it - you're on Twitter.

The next step though is to install an application.  Using Twitter just through a Web Browser is possible but not a great experience.  Here are the applications I've now settled on:

• On my PC I use "TweetDeck" (free and easy to install).
• On my iPhone and iPad I use Twitter's own applications (both free and really easy to use)
• (I did experiment with TweetDeck on the iPad but it was a bit too buggy)

Twitter won't be for everyone and if I didn't have a smartphone I don't think I'd use it but if you're interested in getting a drip, drip, drip of small bits of news on any subject you choose then it's out there somewhere on Twitter and school governance (particularly at @ngnorguk) is well represented!