#SWDE2019 Keynote – What role will Social Workers choose in shaping the digital future?
On April 10th, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I delivered a keynote speech at the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX. We asked social work educators to imagine a world where social workers were innovators with technology. Our goal was to have a conversation and share how we had been talking about technology will writing our book – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology.
We started our conversation about how social workers could help close the digital justice gap on Twitter, moving from virtual spaces to physical spaces. Many social workers joined in this conversation along the way. We talked about a range of issues from boundary and privacy challenges to accessibility and connection with technology. As Nancy said, “we were near-sighted as a profession. We need to look through the lens of possibilities, not the lens of our fears.”
In this blog post, we are sharing highlights, references, and slides from the keynote. We hope you will help us continue the conversation together and in your places of work and community.
#SWDE2019 – Incorporating Technology into Social Justice Assignments for Social Work Education
Today is Day One of the fifth annual Social Work Distance Education Conference at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, TX. The wonderful faculty and staff at Our Lady of the Lake University Worden School of Social Service are once again hosting this wonderful conference. This year’s theme focuses on how pedagogy in social work education can advance social justice. With our new book out, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I decided to share some insights from Chapter 4 about how Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration can be used to incorporate technology into traditional social justice assignments in social work education. We are presenting at 3:00 PM CST in the Jones Room.
For those of you who can’t make the presentation, we are including the details in this blog post.
#SWTech: The Beginnings of an Online Community
In just a few days, Google will eliminate its online community platform, Google+, and with it will go the first iteration of our #SWTech Online Community. This has me thinking about the whys and whats of how our #SWTech community started and developed, and how it will soon evolve. This blog post is my first attempt to chronicle the people and platforms that shaped our community. My methods were simple. I sent emails to some members requesting information, and talked over the phone and video calls with others. I readily acknowledge the bias and poor memory that I bring to this brief and simple historical record. In fact, this was a common theme I heard from others. I think Neil Ballantyne, Senior Lecturer at Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and board member of husITa, said it best when I asked him how he discovered the #SWTech group:
List of Podcasts for Social Work
Editor’s Note: Melanie Sage is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo. In this blog post, she gives an overview of podcasting in social work and shares her crowdsourced list of social work podcasts.
Once upon a time in not-so-long-ago history, broadcast media was limited to the hands of radio professionals with fancy recording devices. Regular people on tight budgets have long tried to harness the power of audio recording and broadcasting, from ham operators to low-fi analog reel or tape recorders. Suddenly, in the last decade, affordable high-quality recording devices fit in the palms of our hands, along with the means to broadcast our voices internationally at very little cost.
Early social work podcast pioneer greats include Jonathan Singer, who launched the Social Work Podcast in 2007 and has over 125 episodes, and inSocialWork, which launched in 2008 at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and now has over 250 episodes. You can listen to either of them in your favorite podcast streamer, such as Apple’s iTunes Podcast Streamer or Spotify, for over 300 hours of learning from experts in our field. You can listen during your commute, at the gym, while doing chores, or when you’re getting ready in the morning. They make it so easy to fit lifelong learning into your day. Learn more about how to listen to podcasts by watching this short video.
Changing my grading practices in 2019: Tips for #SocWorkEd
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.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
