UEA lecturer is urging other teachers to use social-media to share work
TikTok's 'Grammar Slammer' has attracted millions of views and thousands of followers
A lecturer at the University of East Anglia is encouraging teachers and academics to use social-media as a way of sharing their work with students.
Sarah Brownsword, who teachers in Primary education, started using TikTok to share her course content, with some of her videos on grammar getting millions of views.
"You need to meet them where they are"
Sarah told us how this all came about:
"I was struggling to really engage them in learning the grammar content of the course, which they need to master in order to teacher grammar to children in schools. When you're struggling to cut through, you need to meet them where they are
"Grammar content needs to be short and snappy bits that they can look at, go away from and then come back to. Rather than teaching this part of the curriculum in one go, which wasn't really cutting through.
"It can be very nerve-wracking, particularly when you're making videos of yourself. You're recording your own face, voice and opinions, that can feel really vulnerable. You do get criticism, people don't hold back when it comes to typing things on TikTok".
How did this all come about?
Sarah was inspired to start as she noted that students were arriving with limited experience of grammar, something they would later be required to teach, and existing learning resources weren’t being accessed.
But despite her intentions to create just for the students on her course, her audience has since grown to nearly 18k followers.
With her videos on grammar, punctuation and vocabulary, under the handle @grammarslammer, having been liked more than 177k times and viewed more than 6 million times and counting.