Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 29, 2018 | 2 comments

One of the reasons I like a good “end-of-the-year list” is the opportunity to reflect on what I did and did not miss out on over the past year.  I’m always thrilled to discover I read one or maybe even two of the most notable books on the New York Times yearly list.  Then, I start planning my reading wish list for the coming year, which usually involves magical thinking about reading every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature or the all the Pulitzer Prize winners for Non-Fiction from the last ten years.  Even if I don’t actually read all of these books, I believe in having some goals for my reading and other activities.  For the Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog,  I had three goals for 2018:

1 .Write or publish 30 blog posts

2. Increase the number of blog subscribers from 100 to 200

3. Publish 10 guest educator blog posts

Here is how those goals worked out:

1. Wrote only 13 blog posts during the year, but published a total of 21 posts (70% completed)

2. Only added 40 more subscribers to the blog (40% completed)

3. Published 8 guest educators posts (80% completed)

While not all my goals were achieved, I was still able to collaborate with others to accomplish some solid writing for the blog including information about projects that I have been working on, and all my conference presentations for the year.  Below is a list of this year’s posts, grouped around the topics of projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.

Projects: These posts describe new projects that I started or worked on during 2018:

Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators with Allison Curington and Mary Jacque Carroll. The goal of this toolkit is to provide social work field educators with the tools and resources to help students assess, develop, and maintain an online identity for professional purposes.  We published the first edition of the toolkit in July 2017, and have since published an updated edition in October 2018.  You can access the new edition here:

– Second Edition of the Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators

Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology with Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth. This is our forthcoming book, to be published by CSWE Press in January 2019. As part of our collaboration, we have published some of the content that will appear in the book on this blog:

– Social Work Distance Education Assessment of Readiness Checklist (SW-DEAR)
– Course Mapping for Online Social Work Courses
– Reflection Questions for Digital Literacy in Social Work

Social Work Virtual Pal (#SWVirtualPal) with Amanda Taylor-Beswick. Built on the idea of pen-pals, this project is designed to build a virtual community of social workers from around the globe.  The project as gotten some new energy due to grant funding from the Council on Social Work Education’s Katherine A Kendall Institute for Global Social Work Education.  This post gives an overview of the project:

– Social Work Virtual Pal (#SWVirtualPal)… a very ‘real’ connection!

BPD Technology Assessment Checklist with Nathalie P. Jones. Two years in development, this checklist was crowd-sourced and peer-reviewed by dozens of social work educators and practitioners to offer one of the first social work assessment tools about technology use by individuals and families.  You can access a free copy of the tool here:

– BPD Technology Committee’s Technology Assessment Checklist for Social Work Practice

Guest Educator/Student Posts:  These posts focus on technology in social work education, specifically how to best incorporate technology into one’s pedagogy and how to use technology for productivity:

– Social Work Educator Tips: Guidelines for Online Discussion Forums by Karen Zgoda
– Incorporating Flipgrid into the Social Work Classroom: Tips for #SocWorkEd by Todd Sage
– Course Mapping for Online Social Work Courses by Denise Krause
– Student Placement Software for the Social Work Field Office: Goodbye Post-it Notes! by Kristen Samuels
– Social Work and the Open Education Movement by Matthew DeCarlo
– Creating an Infographic in a Social Work Course: A Student’s Perspective from Danielle Davis
– Using Mobile Apps with with Social Work Students by Steven Struman
– Teaching in the open: How I published a free textbook by Matthew DeCarlo

Conference Presentations: I attended one international and four national conferences during 2018, for a grand total of seven presentations. Topics ranged from teaching with technology to using technology for professional development:

Conference #1 –  Annual Meeting for the Association of Baccalaureate Program Directors in Atlanta, GA, March 2018.

#BPD2018 Harnessing Technology for one’s own Good: Professional Learning Networks in Social Work with Nathalie P. Jones

Conference #2 –  Annual Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX, April 2018

#SW2018 Visualizing Data: Infographic Assignments across the Social Work Curriculum with Melanie Sage & Nathalie P. Jones

Conference #3 – 2018 Interprofessional Education Collabortive’s Spring Institute in Washington, DC, May 2018 

Three things I learned at #IPECSpring18

Conference #4 – Social Work, Education & Social Development Conference in Dublin, Ireland, July 2018

– #husITa18/#SWSD2018: Visualizing Data: Infographics for Teaching and Learning about Social Welfare with Melanie Sage, Todd Sage, and Nathalie P. Jones
– #husITa18/#SWSD2018: A Connected Community of Learning for Practice: Social Work Virtual Pal with Amanda Taylor-Beswick
– #husITa18/#SWSD2018: Sustaining lifelong learning through the use of Technology-Mediated Professional Learning Networks with Melanie Sage, Nancy J. Smyth and Jonathan Singer

Conference #5 – Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Orlando Florida, November 2018

– Using an Interprofessional Perspective for NASW’s Technology Standard for Social Work Education with Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth
– #APM18 Teaching with Technology using the SAMR Model with Melanie Sage, Nancy J. Smyth and Jonathan Singer
– #APM18 Helping Social Work Students develop a Professional Online Presence for Interprofessional Communication with Allison Curington and Mary Jacque Carroll

After reviewing everything from 2018, I see a few patterns.  First, it is easy to write blog posts about my conference presentations while writing about what I learned from the conferences is more challenging.  Second, the guest educator/student posts provide engaging and insightful glimpses into essential topics for social work educators, such as the open education movement, how technology can enhance our teaching and productivity, and the effects of assignments on student learning.  Finally, there is not a lot of engagement or feedback on or about the blog – few comments, a low number of subscribers, etc.

Based on these observations, here are my 2019 goals for the Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog:

1. Write or publish 30 blog posts
– Publish 10 guest/student educator blog posts
– Write at least 12 blog posts about topics other than conference presentations

2. Enhance the reach of the blog
– Increase number of blog subscribers
– Share the posts more widely (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, BPD Listserv, etc.)

3. Create a culture of engagement and feedback for the blog
-Increase the number of comments on blog posts
-Write or publish on at least three topics based on feedback

Any thoughts on these goals?  Please send me a tweet (@laurelhitchcock) or submit a comment this post if you have an idea for future blog posts.  Happy New Year!

How to cite this blog post: 
Hitchcock, L. I. (2018, December 29). Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018 [Blog Post]. Retrieved from: https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2018/12/29/review-of-teaching-learning-in-social-work-for-2018/