Stored Case Studies

Twitter in teaching

Submitted by: Nick Morris (n.j.morris@ncl.ac.uk)
Biomedical Sciences,

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What did you do?

Use of Twitter in my teaching - @drnickmorris

Who is involved?

Member of staff: Nick Morris Students: Years 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the degrees offered by SBMS (~850 students)

How do you do it?

I tag tweets with module codes and these are shown on my web page, and echo to my blog and to my 'student' Facebook page. I also use a nifty little script that automatically tweets on slide change in my lecture to students where I talk about the use of social media in the sciences. During the lecture I also run a twitterfall and encourage students to engage with the material by tagging tweets so they appear on the fall. The first year I ran this (2010) only one student use the fall. This year (2011) I had around 10 - 20 of the class join the fall during the lecture. The students enjoyed it, and we had some amusing tweets. I am @drnickmorris

Why do you do it?

Social media is increasingly important in the sciences. If you go to pretty much any scientific conference now they will have a hashtag so that people at the conference can post and their tweets show. In addition, people not at the conference can also follow along (virtual conferencing). Also, Twitter, if you follow the right people and organisations, can be a very useful tool in research as it uses the power of crowd sourcing to find new ideas and material. I view Twitter as an important and useful tool so the students should be made aware of it.

Does it work?

After the social media lecture I always see a spike in students following me on Twitter. If a student follows me, I will follow them back. I also find that the students I follow (and that follow me) are more willing to engage (and will often DM me) with the course, and it is also a useful way for me to sample student opinion through reading what students tweet. I have already caught a number of concerns and problems raised by the students on Twitter and I have been able to intervene and help.

Your title

Twitter in teaching

Coherent Curriculum themes

Student Engagement, Research-Informed Teaching, e-learning/UNITE

Students\' Stage

Undergraduate (all Stages)

Academic unit

Biomedical Sciences

Learning technologies

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Type of interaction

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Main trigger for your practice

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