As many of my readers know, I actively use twitter in my university classroom teaching. In particular, I use it most in my Sport Marketing unit (tagged #spm2122). This semester I decided to change the direction of the students’ weekly tweeting. Normally, students are to tweet about course related content from that particular week twice per week. This has led to an unfocused, for want of a better term, number of tweets which don’t lend themselves to good class discussions both online and offline. As such, I have decided to switch it up this semester and set weekly tasks for the students based on lecture content. It is my hope that this new approach fosters enhanced engagement with course materials and drives the conversation better students more effectively.
To encourage take up and participation with Twitter the weekly tasks are only posted on Twitter. As such, students must engage with the site on a regular basis because the social media materials are not posted to the course portal.
I’ll update this post throughout the semester with tweets for the weekly tasks and my opinions on how it goes compared to how I’ve taught with twitter in the past.
For week one, students were tasked with following 50 relevant sport marketing accounts and suggesting ten of those to others using the hashtag #spm2122 (see screenshot of Tweet below)
Of course, I feel that I need to actively participate in the weekly tasks to both encourage students to actively follow the hashtag and to increase engagement with the materials. As such, I completed the task a few days later. I suggest 30 accounts that the students follow and several hashtags that will help them apply out unit content to real world examples.
Thanks for reading this post so far and it’ll be updated with the other tasks and my thoughts on the tasks as we move throughout the semester.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter @olanscott
Olan Scott 