Conference Presentation: Developing a Professional & Ethical Online Presence for Social Work Practice

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 2, 2019

On Thursday, October 3rd, I will be at the Alabama/Mississippi Social Work Education Conference presenting with Allison Curington, Field Director at the University of Alabama, about best practices for social workers in the use of social and digital media when working with clients and communities.  During this workshop, we will cover the basics of social and digital technologies as well lessons learned from experience with training students and social work practitioners.  Additionally, we will be sharing how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.

If you won’t be at the conference, I am including all the important details about the presentation in this blog post.

First, you can access your own free copy of the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators here:
https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2018/11/05/revised-social-media-toolkit/

Second, here is a link to a worksheet from the presentation: Develop your Professional Social Media Policy Worksheet

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.

Tips for New Online Social Work Educators

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Aug 21, 2019

Editor’s Note: Melissa Thompson, MSW is a lecturer at Dominican University in Chicago, IL, and tweets at @mmt98.  Nathalie P. Jones, PhD, MSW is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Tarleton State University and tweets at @Dr.NJones.  In this blog post, they share their best tips for social work educator who are new to online teaching.

According to the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Technology Standards for Social Work Practice (2017), social workers are urged to use technology in an ethical manner for practice and learning environments. In higher education, we hear about “digital native” students, who have grown up with a life centered on technology and who present as digital super humans. However, research is increasingly showing this concept to be a myth, and that designed learning environments focused on this myth can lead to poor learning outcomes (Kirschner & De Bruyckere, 2017). Another myth we often see among social work educators is the perception that non-traditional students are resistant to the use of technology in the classroom.  Recent data from the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) National Workforce Data Brief (2018) shows this to be a myth as well, reporting that when it comes to online education in social work, the highest enrollment rates were non-traditional students.