With wintry weather in the forecast, Penn State public relations officials said they are hopeful that students will look to their phones for class cancellation notices via "PSUTXT."

"Subscribers will be able to know if the university's canceled classes due to weather through their cell phones," Annemarie Mountz, Penn State spokeswoman, said. "Everybody else is going to have to wait to find out on other media."

The university's "PSUTXT" service, which began in August, sends information from the university directly to students' cell phones, including emergency notices, concert information and sports alerts.

While there is no charge to join PSUTXT, subscribers' network providers may still charge for incoming text messages. "Right now we've got almost 2,200 subscribers," Annemarie Mountz, Penn State spokeswoman, said. "I have a feeling after [today's predicted] snowstorm we'll have a few more."

Conlan Boyer (freshman-business) said that he signed up for the service soon after it debuted, but has not yet found it useful.

He did say that the service would be well worth it if it kept him from going to classes that had been canceled.

Mountz also said the university is not planning to expand PSUTXT to the commonwealth campuses.

"Right now it's just in University Park. We just launched this in August and want to get our hands around it," she said.

PSUTXT is powered by third-party company e2Campus, which specializes in providing text message notification services to universities.

Mountz said that the impetus for creating PSUTXT came from observations of how students preferred to communicate. "Walking around campus, I saw that everyone had a cell phone to their ear," she said.