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:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2019
It is that time of year again – the annual review of the Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog. This will be my fourth year reflecting on the work of this blog; the first end of the year post was in 2016. This year, I am thinking more about my motivation for starting and maintaining this blog for the past seven years. As I think back on why I started Teaching & Learning in Social Work, I’d have to say I wanted to be a more confident writer. Academic writing is not easy. This blog helped me to find my academic voice while allowing me to experiment with writing. I try to be personable in the posts I write, using plain language and concise phrasing. While I can say I am more comfortable with my professional writing, the greatest benefit to this blog is having space to share my work and the work of others in a very non-traditional space. Publishing is a peer-reviewed journal is currency for academics, and it is a narrow, rigid, and polished way to share one’s work. By writing blog posts about my work early in the process, I can share with a wider audience including students, social work practitioners and professionals from other fields. I can also as publish work that may never find a home as a journal article, but is still of value to others. For example, I write frequently about my assignments and classroom activities on this blog. I also post information about my conference presentations here so others can easily reference the materials. Overall, I can say with confidence that writing and publishing Teaching & Learning in Social Work has truly be beneficial and motivating for my academic writing.
For 2019, I had three goals for improving the blog:
Reflections from the Summer 2019 Institute on Pedagogy and Technology for Online Courses
Growing up, I loved summertime! I have some fond memories of traveling, riding my bike, swimming, and general goofing off. Now, this past summer I worked….okay, there was a little swimming and a lot of traveling, and I took an online course. Not just any course; I am a proud graduate of the Columbia School of Social Work’s Institute on Pedagogy and Technology for Online Courses. In what has to be the most tardy “what I did over the summer” essay ever, I want to share why I took this course and more importantly, my key takeaways from this experience.
The Institute has been around since 2017 and consists of five weeks of modules with a two-hour live session and homework each week. While it is geared toward training instructors for Columbia’s Online Social Work Program, anyone can apply for the Institute, and completing the training doesn’t obligate one to teach for Columbia’s Online Social Work Program. The Institute models what a typical online course is like at Columbia, and incorporates many best practices for how to teach an online course. In fact, the Institute has won awards from the International E-Learning Association and United States Distance Learning Association. To learn more about the Institute I recommend the following articles:
#APM19 – Building Capacity for International Field Placements: A Program Development Checklist
Are you attending the Council on Social Work Education’s Annual Program Meeting in Denver this week? Want to know more about how to do an international social work field placement? Do you need a session to attend on Friday, October 25th at 7:30 AM? Well, then we have a session for you. Please consider attending the panel discussion about the ongoing development for our international field placement checklist; which I am doing with my good colleagues from the Department of Social Work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Colleen Fisher, Mary Jacque Carroll, Stacy Moak and I will talk about how the key benefits, challenges, and social justice considerations of developing new international field placement, and review our checklist which is in the early stages of development. Overall, our goals is to share our capacity building strategies for international placements through a practical checklist designed for social work.
For those of you who cannot make the presentation, we are including some details in this blog post. First, here are some screen shots of our checklist:
#APM19 – Evolving the Signature Pedagogy with the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators
On October 27, 2019 at 8:45 AM, during the Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Denver CO, Mary Jacque Carroll, Allison M. Curington, Robyn V. Snider and I will be presenting on information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development and assessment strategies around interprofessional communication with digital and social technologies. If you are still in Denver, please come find us in Governor’s Square 11 – Plaza Building of the conference hotel. We’ll also be sharing how you can develop your own professional social media policies to support communication with students and field agencies as well as how to create activities for students in field to increase understanding of the ethical use of social and digital media in social work practice.
You’ll also learn how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.
#APM19 – Changing Teaching Practices for Technology: Using the SAMR Model for Technology Integration
On October 27, 2019 at 10:00 AM, during the Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Denver CO, Melanie Sage and I will be sharing some insights from Chapter 4 of our book, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, co-written with Nancy Smyth. If you are still in Denver, please come find us in the Majestic Ballroom –Tower Building of the conference hotel. We will be sharing how Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration can be used to incorporate technology into traditional social justice assignments in social work education. There will also be time to adopt one of your current assignments using the SMAR Model.
Additionally, we’ll be talking about our virtual book group that will be launch in January 2020. You can read more about it here:
For those of you who cannot make the presentation, we are including the details in this blog post.
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
