Tweeting for class: using social media to enable student co-construction of lectures.

ABSTRACTMotivating students to be active in learning is a perennial problem in education. We describe our experience using Twitter for student "co-construction" of lecture materials. Students were required to tweet prior to each lecture related to that day's topic. These tweets - consisting of questions, examples and reflections - were incorporated into the lecture slides. Students reported that they found lectures including their tweets in class to be engaging, interactive and relevant, and nearly 90% of them recommended we use our co-construction approach again. Future iterations of this model could streamline the process by using automated processing and aggregation of tweets and/or having students in the class responsible for this.