#SWDE2019 – Incorporating Technology into Social Justice Assignments for Social Work Education
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.
#SWTech: The Beginnings of an Online Community
In just a few days, Google will eliminate its online community platform, Google+, and with it will go the first iteration of our #SWTech Online Community. This has me thinking about the whys and whats of how our #SWTech community started and developed, and how it will soon evolve. This blog post is my first attempt to chronicle the people and platforms that shaped our community. My methods were simple. I sent emails to some members requesting information, and talked over the phone and video calls with others. I readily acknowledge the bias and poor memory that I bring to this brief and simple historical record. In fact, this was a common theme I heard from others. I think Neil Ballantyne, Senior Lecturer at Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and board member of husITa, said it best when I asked him how he discovered the #SWTech group:
Changing my grading practices in 2019: Tips for #SocWorkEd
At the end of last semester, I was grouchy about grading. If I am going to be truthful, I am always grouchy about grading. Don’t get me wrong; I love reviewing student work and offering feedback about their growth as a social work professional. What makes me grouchy about grading is that I don’t have a solid process for providing quality feedback in an efficient way. Every semester I find myself spending a lot of time typing comments and not really sure students are looking at anything but the grade. I keep up with grading comments in a word document and I use rubrics, and grading still feels overwhelming. So I decided to reach out to my professional network on Twitter for their suggestions and ideas.
I sent this tweet on December 9th:
And my colleagues did not disappoint; sharing some great ideas from using autotext software to employing self-care strategies. I captured their responses in a Twitter Moment and selected a few to try this semester. I am going to outline their ideas in this blog post, and try them out this semester, reporting back at the end of the semester about what worked and didn’t work for me.
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018
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:
#APM18 Teaching with Technology using the SAMR Model
On Thursday, November 8, 2018, I will be presenting with Jonathan Singer, Melanie Sage & Nancy J. Smyth the Teaching Institute for Early Career Faculty at the Council on Social Work Education’s 2018 Annual Program Meeting. In this session, we are focusing on how faculty can incorporate technology into a social work course. All educators, especially those early in their careers, find themselves teaching from syllabi they had no role in developing. Although there are many benefits to the “hand-me-down” syllabus, one of the limitations is that assignments are rarely updated to reflect the realities of the 21st century workplace, which now includes the use of technology to achieve practice outcomes for clients and organizations. The purpose of this workshop is to learn about how to incorporate the use technology into a social work assignment on your syllabus, using Puentedura’s SAMR Module for Technology Integration. We will provide a brief overview of teaching with technology before focusing on how to infuse technology into an assignment from your syllabus, including learning objectives and associated assessment techniques in your syllabus. Participants will learn to identify ways to substitute, augment, modify or redefine existing learning strategies and assignments with technology-mediated learning strategies and assignments. By the end of the session, the participant will have an assignment that uses technology to meet the learning needs identified in the syllabus.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Laurel Hitchcock
Photo Credit: Jared Bash
