Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology Book Group

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 23, 2019

If you teach social work with technology, either online or in a traditional classroom, we (Melanie, Nancy and Laurel) invite you to learn with and from peers in this free book group – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology.  Goals of this virtual book group are to: 1) create a supportive learning community; and 2) provide space for reflection about one’s own professional development with teaching with technology.

This group will run from January to June 2020, with monthly meetings and a moderated online private Facebook group. The group will include live virtual meetings, with discussion moderated by an author and a guest educator.  In between meetings, social work educators will lead and moderate book discussions, and offer reflective questions and simple learning tasks. Participants should have access to the book by January 2020. The schedule follows:

Three Ways to Model Good Boundaries with Technology in Social Work Ed

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 3, 2019

The National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice (2017) offer a number of standards for social work educators and practitioners.  One of these standards focuses on maintaining boundaries with our students.  This is not a new ethical practice for social work educators; we have always worked to maintain boundaries with our students.  Rather, the challenge has been navigating these boundaries in virtual spaces as technology has changed when and how we can communicate and engage with each other. 

Not surprisingly, the tech standard from NASW focuses on the social work educator taking precautions.   Managing risk is a good idea, and I would suggest that we also embrace the affordances that digital and social technologies can offer our students, our classrooms and our own professional development.  The big question for most of us is how to do this in ways that are comfortable, manageable, and ethical.  Over the past few years, many social work educators have contributed their knowledge and expertise to this blog about how they engage students around technology in their classrooms.  In this post, I have pulled together some of their suggestions for how you can model good boundaries with technology in your teaching practice.

Reviewing my 2019 grading practices for #SocWorkEd – Part 2

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 27, 2019

As I started the Spring Semester back in January, I reviewed my grading practices to make this assessment process more manageable and enjoyable for me. I wrote about this review in the following post – Changing my grading practices in 2019: Tips for #SocWorkEd.  I focused on feedback from colleagues on Twitter to identify three main practices I wanted to adopt: 1) Rubrics and Grading Comments; 2) A list of Common Writing Mistakes; and 3) Creating Intentional Grading Practices. In this post, I want to share what I learned, how it worked, and some of the tools I developed. 

#SWDE2019 – A Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 11, 2019

It is the second day of the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference and at 10 AM, I’ll be in the Peraux Room of the St. Anthony Hotel to share our poster about the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators. This is a project I have been working on with Allison Curington (University of Alabama), Mary Jacque Carroll (University of Alabama at Birmingham),and Robin Snider (Jacksonville State University). The poster will provide both information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies to achieve practice outcomes. Participants will learn how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.

If you can’t make it to the poster, I am included all the important details in this blog post.

#SWDE2019 – Incorporating Technology into Social Justice Assignments for Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 10, 2019

Today is Day One of the fifth annual Social Work Distance Education Conference at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, TX.  The wonderful faculty and staff at Our Lady of the Lake University Worden School of Social Service are once again hosting this wonderful conference.  This year’s theme focuses on how pedagogy in social work education can advance social justice.  With our new book out, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I decided to share some insights from Chapter 4 about how Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration can be used to incorporate technology into traditional social justice assignments in social work education.  We are presenting at 3:00 PM CST in the Jones Room. 

For those of you who can’t make the presentation, we are including the details in this blog post.