@Bristoldemos – using twitter to engage students in anatomy revision: New Horizons in Professional Education conference, University of Bristol (19 November 2014)

Anatomy is one of the fundamental sciences underpinning medical education. One of the challenges in a medical curriculum is to make the learning experience modern, interactive and fun without losing emphasis on factual content. Social media is now one of the most common ways for individuals to communicate with each other and access information. The Bristol anatomy demonstrators set up the @Bristoldemos twitter account (September 2013) as an additional anatomy learning resource. Students can access the twitter feed at https://twitter.com/Bristoldemos, and can sign up if they wish to post answers on the site. Anatomy questions are posted daily alongside links to useful anatomy sites and images. Students are replied to via the twitter conversation to confirm correct answers and any reasoning. Using hashtags means the students can search for questions on a certain topic, e.g. #1styrMSK, #1styrdentists. Student usage of the twitter site increases around exams so extra questions are posted at these times. Over the first year, @Bristoldemos have made 620 tweets and have 190 followers. Bringing together social media and teaching material using twitter has allowed us to offer additional learning materials to students in a non-threatening, informal way using a modern format. (195 words)