Use of Twitter in my teaching - @drnickmorris
Member of staff: Nick Morris Students: Years 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the degrees offered by SBMS (~850 students)
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
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.
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.
Twitter in teaching
Student Engagement, Research-Informed Teaching, e-learning/UNITE
Undergraduate (all Stages)
Biomedical Sciences
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