#BPD2018 Harnessing Technology for one’s own Good: Professional Learning Networks in Social Work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Mar 16, 2018

Today, Dr. Nathalie Jones and I will be presenting about Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) at the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors in Atlanta, GA.  This year’s theme is the Grand Challenges of Political Change, and we have been talking with our colleagues about how do we, as social workers, affect change in today’s political and social environments – change to improve the lives of vulnerable populations we serve; change to improve learning outcomes for our students; and change for ourselves as social work educators.  Nathalie and I share a common desire to help other social work educators develop their own tool kits for teaching, scholarship, and service in their lives as academics, mentors, and partners with constituents and communities.  One tool that we know works is having a Professional Learning Network, and we know this because it has worked for us – we met via Twitter using our PLNs.  We have been working with our good colleagues – Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth (both at the University at Buffalo) – to share what we know about PLNs to help raise awareness about this tool in social work education and practice.

We hope you will join us at 1:45 PM in Georgia 2 in the Atlanta Sheraton.  We will describe what what a PLN is and why to use one; demonstrate how to establish your own PLN and how to incorporate; and share how theory helps to inform the process of adopting technology tools for social work practice and education.

Here is a link to the slides from our workshop: https://goo.gl/qCxQdm.

You can also access a copy of the Professional Learning Network (PLN) Worksheet.

Course Mapping for Online Social Work Courses

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Mar 8, 2018

This post was written by Denise Krause, clinical instructor at the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo, and edited by Nancy J. Smyth, Melanie Sage, and myself. It will be included in our forthcoming book, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, to be published by CSWE Press in 2018.

Course mapping is considered a best practice when designing any course content for online delivery via a learning management system (LMS) (Jacobs, 2004; Quality Matters, n.d.; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). need date; more references).  It is the process of aligning the course objectives with module objectives and all learning activities in a course to create a visual overview of the course.  In turn, these documents can be used to create a student roadmap, which provide clear directions on how students can navigate online course content in a consistent and methodical way.  This helps to ensure that student will avoid missing instructions assignments. Roadmaps can be used in any type of online course from a web-enhanced offering to a fully online class.  What goes into a student road map will vary by instructor and/or institution, but key topics include learning objectives, course content, assignments or learning tasks, and assessments.