Developing a Personalized Social Media Policy for Social Work Practice
Editor’s Note: This blog post is adapted from the Second Edition of the Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators.
There are many reasons for social workers to have a personalized social media policy – to maintain boundaries, protect privacy and confidentiality, and model professional behavior. To be clear, I am not referring to the policy that your organization or institution might have, directing the faculty, staff, and students on when it is okay to use social media, but one that you develop and follow as an individual practitioner, student, and/or educator. The purpose of a social media policy is to inform clients, students, colleagues, and others about when, how, and why you use social media in a professional capacity. From an ethical lens, this is a recommended practice per National Association of Social Worker’s (NASW) Technology in Social Work Practice Standard 2.10 – Social Media Policy and fits with the NASW Code of Ethics standards of informed consent with clients (1.3e-i), respect with colleagues (2.1), and when conducting supervision and consultation (3.1).
The following steps provide a guide for developing a social media policy that can be used as an assignment in a classroom with students or adapted for practitioners:
A review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2020
2020 was a strange year with many firsts for me – first global pandemic, first sabbatical, first live sessions in an online course, etc. Because of all these firsts, blogging took a bit of back seat to some of my other projects and goals for the year. I had four goals for the blog over the year, and some minor successes. They were:
#1 – Publish 30 posts – only published 19
#2 – Enhance the reach of the blog – there were almost 45,500 visitors from 153 different countries with each visitor spending an average of 1 minute on the blog.
#3 – Build a culture of engagement – only had 10 comments for the year.
#4 – Publish content in other places – there will be two articles in 2021 with content from the blog.
Outside of these goals, I did update content on the blog and created an archive page. The two most popular blog posts of 2020 were:
A Love Letter to Social Workers on the Front Lines of COVID-19 (4/10/20) by Melanie Sage with over 24,000 visits
The Power of Lighting in a Virtual Classroom: Tips on Improving Webcam Lighting for Online Educators (3/16/20) by Agata Dera with over 3,000 visits
Pinterest Assignment for the Social Work Classroom
A few years back, my colleague, Dr. Lisa Baker at Samford University’s Department of Social Work, and I collaborated on a study about a technology-meditated assignment that we developed for a Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) course. Our goal was to breathe some new life into a stale assignment. In this post, I want to share how we approached the development, assessment, and dissemination of our study related to this tech-mediated assignment.
Podcast Assignment for the Social Work Classroom
Editor’s Note: This blog post shares information about a podcast assignment developed and implemented in multiple social work classrooms over the past year. This assignment is a collaboration between myself and Melanie Sage, Todd Sage & Michael Lynch of the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work. We share a copy of the assignment and rubric along with information about why social work educators might want to try this assignment in their own classroom.
Podcasts are now a well-known part of social work education. With so many different types of social work podcasts, it is easy for an educator to assign a podcast instead of an article, asking students to listen instead of reading. Examples of podcasts designed specifically for social work include:
- The Social Work Podcast by Dr. Jonathan Singer
- inSocial Work Podcast Series by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work
For a more comprehensive list of podcasts, check out this blog post written by one of us (Melanie):
Briefly, a podcast is an audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, or other device. Podcasts are easy to create and do not require many technical skills which making the technology a good fit for student assignment and for faculty who do not have a lot of technology experience. One of us (Laurel) has been using and writing about podcast assignments for several years. Here are links to a series of posts she wrote back in 2014 when she first started using podcasts in her classroom:
Digital Advocacy in the Social Work Classroom: Students speaking out online
Editor’s Note: Julia Kleinschmit is a clinical associate professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Iowa, and Breanne Benson is a currently MSW student in the School of Social Work at The University of Iowa. In this blog post, Julia writes about an assignment that uses social media to promote advocacy skills and professionalism among social work students. Breanne offers her experience with the assignment as a student and reflects on how she grew her skills as a future social worker. Julia can be found on LinkedIn, and Breanne is on Instagram at _bmbenson.
Addressing Technology in Changing Social Work Environment
The Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Competency 1: Demonstrate Ethical and Professional Behavior requires social workers to use technology ethically and appropriately to facilitate practice outcomes. Many have focused on the need for confidentiality in electronic communication and social media boundary management. These are important issues, but at the University of Iowa’s School of Social Work, Megan Gilster, Stephen Cummings, and I believed we could also teach MSW students to use their online identities and social media as powerful tools for effective advocacy.
Sharing power with students by seeking their input on a grading rubric
Editor’s Note: Matthea Marquart is the Director of Administration for the Online Campus at the Columbia School of Social Work and Elise Verdooner is an Associate with the Columbia School of Social Work. In this blog post, Matthea & Elise share how they sought input from social work students in one of their courses to revise and update an assignment rubric. This practice offers social work educators at all levels the opportunity to bring equity to the classroom.
Introduction: Why did we decide to try sharing power with students around the rubric for our final assignment?
This spring, we worked together to teach a course on Staff Development, Training, and Coaching at Columbia University’s School of Social Work (CSSW). This is an elective course for second-year students in their final semester of our MSW program. Matthea was the instructor and Elise was the Associate (similar to a TA, an Associate at CSSW provides academic support to graduate social work students).
As we were planning the course, Matthea attended a workshop on “Grading, Rubrics, and Feedback for Equity and Inclusion,” which was hosted by Monique M. Jethwani, Director of Faculty Development at CSSW, and led by Amanda M. Jungels and Chandani Patel of Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). Matthea’s key takeaway from the workshop was to try an activity to increase inclusiveness around grading by giving students the power to amend the rubric for the final assignment, and Elise was willing to give it a try as well. The activity appealed to us because as social workers we believe in creating an inclusive classroom.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
