Podcasting for Social Work Students, Part 1 – Describing the Assignment

Posted By on Jan 16, 2014

One of my favorite technology-based assignments is the student-created podcast in my BSW macro social work class.  My motivation for this assignment originated several years ago from a very selfishPodcast desire to grade something beside another written research paper.   I was not looking to eliminate writing from my courses or minimize its importance for college students and professional social workers.  I wanted another way meet the needs of an organizational assessment assignment that was engaging and challenging for the students (and for me) in a course that already had two major writing assignments.  The idea for a podcast assignment came from a colleague in the English Department who asked students in introductory writing classes to create a podcast instead of a paper and then write a self-reflection about the process.  He contended that the students had to complete the same amount of research and apply the same critical thinking skills to complete the podcast as writing a paper.  He convinced me to try it, arguing if the assignment bombed I could easily go back to a written paper and quietly ignore any comments on my student evaluations.  Seven semesters later, podcasts have become an integral assignment in my course.

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Using Storify to Explore Theory in the MSW Classroom by Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Posted By on Jan 5, 2014

Dr. Jamie Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Wayne State University.  In this blog post, Dr. Mitchell writes about how she incorporated Storify into a theory-based assignment for an MSW class last semester.  

When I realized this past summer that a standardized core assignment in my regular Human Behavior in the Social Environment course had been changed in a way that limited the ability of students to explore a theory of their choosing during the semester, I began testing educational technology tools as a means of restoring that opportunity in a fresh way. I know from experience that some MSW students may view social and developmental theory as abstract and somewhat dated; and I work incredibly hard to highlight the relevance of having a strong theoretical foundation to praxis. It’s important to me that students connect with and write about at least one theory that engages them personally, leading me to develop this new assignment centered on Storify.  Storify is a website that allows one to curate a digital narrative on any topic using an integrated social media search engine to locate sources such as tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, and Google images. That “story” can then be published publicly and shared on other social media platforms.

My goal in developing this assignment was to give students an opportunity to articulate how a theory of their choosing could be applied to a real-world underserved population or problem of interest. Before the course began, I developed my own test Storify that could serve as an example to students and used it to develop a detailed rubric.

Dr. Mitchell's Storify Rubric

Dr. Mitchell’s Storify Rubric

From the first day of class I introduced the new assignment and fielded questions from anxious students who were not comfortable with social media. To provide support for adopting Storify, I created a folder on my course website with existing tutorial videos and fact sheets on using Storify, and I developed my own resource for students on how to integrate a variety of content using bookmarklets to capture content around the web to import into Storify. I also worked through any glitches with students as they experimented with the platform and reserved a few minutes at the end of each class to demonstrate Storify functionality throughout the semester.

I was beyond impressed with how invested students were in creating high-quality digital narratives. The majority of students included more sources than were required, and went further in contextualizing how each source contributed to an understanding of the theory’s application to the issue or population than was required by the assignment rubric. Students also chose topics that were deeply personal to them and incredibly germane to the field of social work; covering topics such as human trafficking, school bullying, rape culture, racial profiling, immigrant experiences, inner city poverty, and LGBTQ empowerment. I used my own twitter account to share student projects, even tweeting prominent authors like Dr. Brené Brown when students utilized the Shame Resilience Theory she pioneered. I consider this initial foray into employing Storify as a course assignment to be a resounding success!

Dr. Mitchell's tweet about a student's Storify assignment.

Dr. Mitchell’s tweet about a student’s Storify assignment.

I would advise instructors who are interested in developing an assignment with Storify to familiarize themselves with the variety of existing resources such as free tutorial videos (Storify Guided Tour and Getting Started) and tip sheets, to experiment with the service themselves, and to explore the wealth of existing Storify stories for inspiration. Storify is free, intuitive, and user-friendly but it can be optimized by using additional strategies. For example, Google Chrome offers a bookmarklet or browser extension for Storify that allows users to bookmark content around the web and store it in a collection within Storify for later use. The website Topsy allows one to search for tweets by key words and hashtags as far back as two years, well beyond the six months that Twitter archives. Students may also find it useful to know that in addition to using the internal search engine within Storify, and using a bookmarklet to capture outside content, they can copy and paste the URL of any webpage into Storify to import content.

I’m excited about the possibilities for integrating Storify in other ways in my MSW classroom. This refreshing platform has proven to be a reliable and creative social media tool for encouraging students to research, contextualize, and curate content. Below are just a few examples of Storify submissions by my MSW students:

Feminist Theory, Slut Shaming, and Rape Culture by whitentonm

Racial Profiling: Do I Look Suspicious? by Tony Theel

Prison: The New Slavery by MStellini

Women in Sports: Woman first, athlete second by Natalie Savoy

Opening Our Eyes To The Truth About Older Adult Abuse by Melissa Stumpo

The Disney Princess Effect on Young Girls and Feminist Theory by sternb13

Walking the Tightrope of Motherhood by Ellen Coleman

**Note, Storify is a public domain and students are aware that all submissions are public until removed**

How to cite this post:

Mitchell, J. (2014, January 5). Using Storify to Explore Theory in the MSW Classroom by Dr. Jamie Mitchell [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2014/01/05/using-storify-to-explore-theory-in-the-msw-classroom/.

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Twitter Learning Activities for Social Work Competencies

Posted By on Dec 18, 2013

Last month, Ellen Belluomini wrote a very practical and helpful blog post for social work field educators and students about technology-based activities that can be incorporated into a social work student’s learning plan for field education.  I tip my hat to Ellen and am shamelessly borrowing her idea to present my own list of learning activities for each of the CSWE Social Work Competencies.  My list focuses on using Twitter, a microblogging social media platform, as a tool for students to practice and demonstrate proficiency of social work skills,  knowledge and values.  As you may guess from my previous posts and research interests, I am a big fan of Twitter as a tool for professional social work practice.  This list includes just some possibilities of tasks, assignments and readings all based on students using Twitter as part of a course.  It is by no means a comprehensive list.  What are some other ways you have used Twitter as part of your courses or as part of your social work practice? How have you used Twitter to enhance your own social work practice.  Please share your ideas or thoughts.

CSWE Social Work Competency

Classroom Tasks, Assignments and Readings

Identify as a professional social worker and conduct oneself accordingly.

1. Create a free Twitter account and develop a public profile as a professional social worker.

2. Review the public profiles of practicing social workers, educators and/or students.  Develop of list of common characteristics from these profiles, identifying any best practices or good model.

3. Review the tweets of practicing social workers, educators and/or students for examples of professional vs. unprofessional demeanor in communication.

Apply social work ethical principles to guide professional practice.

1. Read Dr. Frederic Reamer’s article Developing A Social Media Ethics Policy.  Write and post a tweet about the most important concept you learned from the article.

2. Write a brief one-paragraph social media policy for how one plans to use Twitter as a professional social work, including examples of what one will and will not include in their tweets.

2. Post tweets about the National Association of Social Worker’s Code of Ethics. For example, send out a tweet describing one of the six core values including a hyperlink to a source that represents the value.

Apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgments.

1. After each social work class, post a tweet about what you learned in the class.

2. Alternatively, after each class, post a tweet with a question that you have about the class content.

3. Create a public list on Twitter about a social problem or important social work topic, and follow at least 10 different groups or organizations.  Provide a reason for why you included each group on your list.

Engage diversity and difference in practice.

1. Create a public list or groups or organizations that focuses on an area of diversity and difference in practice such as a list of LGTB advocacy agencies or bloggers who write about aging in American society.

2. Search for new articles about an issue of diversity that is important to you and re-tweet with a comment.  Consider focusing your tweet on how the article supports or does not support the dignity and worth of the person.

3. Read NASW’s Standards for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice.  Identify three ways you could use Twitter to develop culturally competent knowledge and skills as a social work student, and in the future as a social work practitioner.

Advance human rights and social and economic justice.

1. Participate in a live Twitter Chat that addresses a social and/or economic justice issue such as the Mental Health Chat.

2. Create a public list of advocacy organizations on Twitter related to social or economic justice issues such as poverty or health care disparities.  See my list on food insecurity as an example.

3. Watch a documentary movie on a social justice issue and send out tweets with hashtags about the movie, focusing on the movie’s message and important facts from the movie.  See Dr. Jimmy Young’s blog post on twitter and documentaries for more details.

Engage in research-informed practice and practice-informed research.

1. After reading a social work research article, write and post a tweet summarizing the article.

2. Create a public list of researchers interested in an important social work issues or social problem.

3. Read the blog post From Tweet to Blog Post to Peer-Reviewed Article: How to be a Scholar Now by Jessie Daniels.  Identify ways Twitter could be used to answer important social work research questions.

Apply knowledge of human behavior and the social environment.

1. Post tweets with links to different newspaper articles about topics relevant to HBSE.

2. Do a search with hashtags on Twitter about different developmental stages covered in your HBSE classes such as #aging or #childhood and read what others are tweeting.  In a brief paragraph, identify different themes you discovered from the tweets and describe each one.

3. Go to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s website and search for the most recent information about who is using Twitter in the US and why. Write a brief paragraph about what you learned.

Engage in policy practice to advance social and economic well-being and to deliver effective social work services.

1. Identify a policy issue of interest to you and tweet a question about it to the local, state or federal government agency responsible for implementing the policy.

2. Create a public list of local politicians in your community, and share your list with others.

3. Write and post tweets about current social welfare policies using links to newspapers articles, policy research centers and other professional literature sources.

Respond to contexts that shape practice.

1. Read Dr. Nancy J. Smyth’s blog post Twitter 101 to learn about Twitter.

2. Read the NASW & ABSW Standards for Technology and Social Work Practice. Identify examples of how these standard will influence social workers using Twitter for professional practice.

3. Participate in a live Twitter Chat about a social work topic that interests you.  Write a brief paragraph about the experience and what you learned.

Engage, assess, intervene, and evaluate with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.

1. Create a public list of organizations that focus on one of the five different client systems.  For example, a list about agencies or organizations that focus on small group work or practitioners who specialize in family therapy.

2. Write and post tweets about new research on interventions strategies used by social workers. Check out the Information for Practice website as resource for this activity.

3. Develop and moderate a live Twitter Chat about an important issue in your community or offer to host a live Twitter Chat for a local non-profit on a topic related to their mission.

Twitter Learning Activities for Social Work Competencies

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2013, December 18). Twitter Learning Activities for Social Work Competencies [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/12/18/twitter-learning-activities-for-social-work-competencies/.

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Twitter: The Educational Commons By Justin Vest

Posted By on Dec 9, 2013

Education via Twitter

Justin Vest graduated with his BSW from the University of Montevallo in December 2013 and begins the MSW program at the University of Alabama in January 2014.  In this post, he discusses how his use of Twitter grew from a class assignment to a professional tool.

Twitter can be about celebrities and national or global trends, but I find its value in connecting users with educational content. I was first introduced to Twitter as an educational tool in Spring 2013 while taking Dr. Laurel Hitchcock’s class on social work with groups, communities, and organizations. The assignment encouraged students to engage with social media as a means of discovering information and connecting with other professionals. Over a relatively short period of time I have modified my own Twitter usage from that of  fulfilling a course requirement to actively utilizing it as a tool for continuous learning. Above all else, I feel my role in the Twitter-sphere is that of student. I have a wide array of interests (mostly professional) that I keep up with via Twitter to the point that it is one of my primary sources for information regarding specific topics. To do this, I have created lists reflecting professional interests and categorized most of the people and organizations I follow into one of them. I am then able to filter out everything in my feed except tweets from pages within a specific list. Other Twitter users can also choose to follow these lists.

As a social networking site, Twitter can also be a valuable tool for networking with other professionals. While I don’t personally generate a lot of interactive content, I have found it to be very useful in connecting with other social workers who share my own interests in macro practice, particularly in areas of policy. Given the limited emphasis on macro practice within social work education, it is nice to be able to follow the work and thoughts of social workers employed in the macro arena. Several great resources that I’ve seen come from Rachel L. West including this one on how to search for macro job listings and this one on using social media to establish a career in macro social work. Others of note include:

Perhaps the thing I find most fascinating about Twitter is its ability to give a voice to people who may not otherwise have the means to express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Twitter and other social media sites were credited, at least partially, with many of the successes of the Arab Spring. It was paramount to Occupy Wall Street organizers’ ability to call supporters to action at a moment’s notice and it provided a venue for many to express their frustration and educate others about issues of systemic racism in the U.S. after the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial. Most of the pages I follow provide information that is not readily available via mainstream media sources and it is a great benefit to essentially use Twitter lists as a RSS feed pertaining to topics I want to learn more about.

One of my constant struggles with Twitter is determining what to share. The vast majority of my tweets contain links to outside sources, typically with the intent to inform others of something I believe is important or otherwise of note. Many things translate simply into an obvious category of professional interest like tweeting against cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to prevent reduced access to food for low-income households. Other topics do not fall neatly into the purview of social work and may be more prone to divisiveness. My main concern with these topics (think partisan politics) is how it will appear to a potential employer, so I attempt to convey an educational message while not necessarily endorsing the content. I do also plan to get in the routine of blogging about policy issues from a social work perspective over the winter break as means of both exploring in greater depth some political ideas as well as highlighting my professional values and skills to potential employers.

How to cite this post:

Vest, Justin. (2013, December 9). Twitter: The Educational Commons By Justin Vest [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/12/09/twitter-the-educational-commons/.

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