Changing my grading practices in 2019: Tips for #SocWorkEd

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 11, 2019

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

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 29, 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:

Using an Interprofessional Perspective for NASW’s Technology Standard for Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 10, 2018

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 at 7:30 am in Dolphin, Walt Disney World Resort, Asia 3, Lobby/Third Level, I will be presenting with Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth about our crowd sourced work, Social Work Educators’ Perspectives on NASW’s Technology Standard for Education, Training, and Supervision.  We will be distributing printed copies of our booklet and sharing how social work educators can bring an interprofessional perspective to teaching with technology.

In 2017, new Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice were issued by NASW (and written in conjunction with CSWA, CSWE, and ASWB) to address the intersections of social work practice and technology. One of the standards (standard 4) focuses on technology for social work education, training, and supervision, while the other standards focus on the use of technology in social work practice.

After the standards came out, social work educators told us they wanted more information about how to actually use the guidance from the standards in their classrooms and universities.  We (Laurel Hitchcock, Melanie Sage, and Nancy Smyth) reached out to social work educators and supervisors who have specialized knowledge of teaching and supervision with technology to provide more information related to interpretations.   We used Google Docs to create a place for contributors to share their comments for how the educational standards should look in practice, the best practices related to standards, and the ways educators and supervisors can aspire to best practices related to technology.  Then, we edited the ideas and comments by all the contributors into a cohesive document to provide guidance for educators.

To help disseminate this work, the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work agreed to publish it as a booklet, and we distributed this for the first time in at the 2018 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Here you will find a link to the digital copy of crowd-sourced technology standards: https://tinyurl.com/SWEdTechStandards

You can access a copy of presentation slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17MUD49n79hkwzlqcq20cvtt5IZJc9Rge/view?usp=sharing

Here is our conference proposal with learning objectives:

By the end of the session, participants will:

#APM18 Teaching with Technology using the SAMR Model

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 7, 2018

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.