#BPD2018 Harnessing Technology for one’s own Good: Professional Learning Networks in Social Work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Mar 16, 2018

Today, Dr. Nathalie Jones and I will be presenting about Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) at the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors in Atlanta, GA.  This year’s theme is the Grand Challenges of Political Change, and we have been talking with our colleagues about how do we, as social workers, affect change in today’s political and social environments – change to improve the lives of vulnerable populations we serve; change to improve learning outcomes for our students; and change for ourselves as social work educators.  Nathalie and I share a common desire to help other social work educators develop their own tool kits for teaching, scholarship, and service in their lives as academics, mentors, and partners with constituents and communities.  One tool that we know works is having a Professional Learning Network, and we know this because it has worked for us – we met via Twitter using our PLNs.  We have been working with our good colleagues – Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth (both at the University at Buffalo) – to share what we know about PLNs to help raise awareness about this tool in social work education and practice.

We hope you will join us at 1:45 PM in Georgia 2 in the Atlanta Sheraton.  We will describe what what a PLN is and why to use one; demonstrate how to establish your own PLN and how to incorporate; and share how theory helps to inform the process of adopting technology tools for social work practice and education.

Here is a link to the slides from our workshop: https://goo.gl/qCxQdm.

You can also access a copy of the Professional Learning Network (PLN) Worksheet.

Course Mapping for Online Social Work Courses

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Mar 8, 2018

This post was written by Denise Krause, clinical instructor at the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo, and edited by Nancy J. Smyth, Melanie Sage, and myself. It will be included in our forthcoming book, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, to be published by CSWE Press in 2018.

Course mapping is considered a best practice when designing any course content for online delivery via a learning management system (LMS) (Jacobs, 2004; Quality Matters, n.d.; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). need date; more references).  It is the process of aligning the course objectives with module objectives and all learning activities in a course to create a visual overview of the course.  In turn, these documents can be used to create a student roadmap, which provide clear directions on how students can navigate online course content in a consistent and methodical way.  This helps to ensure that student will avoid missing instructions assignments. Roadmaps can be used in any type of online course from a web-enhanced offering to a fully online class.  What goes into a student road map will vary by instructor and/or institution, but key topics include learning objectives, course content, assignments or learning tasks, and assessments.

Social Work Educator Tips: Guidelines for Online Discussion Forums

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 20, 2018

Karen Zgoda is a social work educator, a Doctoral Student in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, MA,  and a founding member of #MacroSW, an online community for macro social workers.  In this blog post, she shares her tips for helping social work students learn how to be professional in online learning environments. This post is cross-listed on Karen’s blog at https://karenzgoda.org/. 

Did you know that 95% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind, 7 in 10 Americans use social media, and that 89% of U.S. adults currently use the Internet? In fact, many check the most popular social media sites daily:

Despite the ubiquitous nature of technology and social media, we should not assume that social work students know the rules of online etiquette, especially online etiquette in professional settings. Students may not realize they are using casual language, making inappropriate or snarky comments, or revealing much about their personal lives they would not want their supervisors or professors to know. In fact, students are learning to regularly clean up their social media to take better care of their online reputations and their brand. If students are not sure what this means, I show a video clip from the The Ellen DeGeneres Show that highlights very effectively in 10 minutes why this can be problematic:

Social Work Distance Education Assessment of Readiness Checklist (SW-DEAR)

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 17, 2018

This post was written and edited by Nancy J. Smyth, Melanie Sage, and myself. It will be included in our forthcoming book, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, to be published by CSWE Press in 2018.

Social work programs develop online social work programs in different ways – converting courses overtime until the entire curriculum is online; launching designated online cohorts; insourcing (hiring faculty to teach online); or outsourcing (hiring an outside firm to put your program online), including varying degrees of faculty autonomy in developing and teaching an online courses. Regardless of the approach, a first step in the process is assessment of a social work program’s readiness for online programming, and a reason for a struggling online program often has to do with stretched capacity. Many campus-wide issues must be considered before launching any type of fully online programming. These considerations include the ways in which online programming makes education more, or less, accessible to different populations of students, gatekeeping concerns, and implicit curriculum issues. To help social work programs consider capacity issues related to online programming, we have collaborated with the faculty members Carol Schneweis, Carenlee Barkdull, and Randy Nedegaard at the University of North Dakota’s Department of Social Work to develop the Social Work Distance Education Assessment of Readiness Checklist (SW-DEAR) which programs can use to assess readiness to launch online programming, and identify opportunities to strengthen current programming.

This checklist is a self-assessment related to best practices and resources for distance education.  The assessment includes 43 items that cover the following areas of capacity: