Podcast Assignment for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 15, 2020

Editor’s Note: This blog post shares information about a podcast assignment developed and implemented in multiple social work classrooms over the past year.  This assignment is a collaboration between myself and Melanie Sage, Todd Sage & Michael Lynch of the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work.  We share a copy of the assignment and rubric along with information about why social work educators might want to try this assignment in their own classroom.

Podcasts are now a well-known part of social work education.  With so many different types of social work podcasts, it is easy for an educator to assign a podcast instead of an article, asking students to listen instead of reading.  Examples of podcasts designed specifically for social work include:

• The Social Work Podcast by Dr. Jonathan Singer

• inSocial Work Podcast Series by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work

For a more comprehensive list of podcasts, check out this blog post written by one of us (Melanie):

• List of Podcasts for Social Work

Briefly, a podcast is an audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, or other device.  Podcasts are easy to create and do not require many technical skills which making the technology a good fit for student assignment and for faculty who do not have a lot of technology experience.  One of us (Laurel) has been using and writing about podcast assignments for several years.  Here are links to a series of posts she wrote back in 2014 when she first started using podcasts in her classroom:

#husITa18/#SWSD2018: Visualizing Data: Infographics for Teaching and Learning about Social Welfare

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jul 4, 2018

Today is the first day of 2018 Social Work, Education & Social Development Conference in Dublin, Ireland, and my first international social work conference.  My first presentation will be with colleagues Nathalie Jones, Melanie Sage, and Todd Sage. We are presenting on the use of infographics in the Social Work curriculum on Friday July 6, 2018 at 10:03 AM in Dobber B of the RSD. This blog post does a few things. First, it offers an example of infographics as a tool for improving digital literacy with social work students.  We also provide copies of all the presentation slides and handouts.  Finally, this post helps us share and better disseminate our research findings.

Three of us (Nathalie, Melanie & Laurel) have been using infographics as an assignment in our classrooms for several years and have even collected some data across our universities to ask students about the pros and cons.  Guess what?  The students overwhelmingly love infographic assignments. They appreciate working their creative muscles, like the opportunity to learn a new and transferable skill, and say they’ll use infographics again.  Also, the technology can be a little bit frustrating, and some students are uncomfortable with the lack of structure. We argue that it’s good for students to sometimes get uncomfortable with lack of structure- this experience of managing some ambiguity is an important practice skill, as we know well!

We have shared this work in a variety of ways with our colleagues (from conferences to listservs & Twitter to water cooler conversations) in the US and are excited to bring infographics to an international conference.  In a previous blog posts, we offer assignment details and even rubrics you can use to build your assignments if you are a social work educator.  We share these in the spirit of service to our profession and to support your work.  Here are links to these posts:

– #BPDNOLA17 – Visualizing Data: Infographic Assignments across the Social Work Curriculum: This post includes copy of the infographic assignment and links to tutorial videos.

– Teaching with Infographics: My experiences with digital literacy and non-traditional students: In this post, Nathalie provides details about how she incorporated infographics into her classroom.

Below you’ll find our conference proposal and a link to our slides. We’d love it if you joined us on Friday, July 7^th and shared your comments and experiences about using infographics in the classroom. 

Incorporating Flipgrid into the Social Work Classroom: Tips for #SocWorkEd

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jun 4, 2018

Todd Sage is a social work educator at the University at Buffalo, and a Doctoral Student in Teaching and Learning: Higher Education at the University of North Dakota.  In this blog post, he shares his tips for educators on how to use Flipgrid to enhance online learning and develop class community. Todd can be reached at ToddSage@Buffalo.edu.  Follow him on Twitter: @socialworksage.

In 2017, new National Association of Social Workers’ Standards for Technology in Social Work Practice were issued to address the intersections of social work practice and technology.  These standards encourage educators to equip social work students with technology skills that will prepare them for tech-mediated practice.  Student exposure to classroom technology primarily happens through Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard and Adobe Connect, which can be useful tools for online teaching, but are geared for educational users are rarely used in the practice world.

To prepare the next generation of social workers, it is vital that social work educators inform students about readily available collaboration platforms that are transferable to real world practice. It gives students an opportunity to learn a new tool, evaluate its pros and cons, and think about how these tools can be applied to future practice. On some occasions, the tools also work much better than institutional platforms.

When I taught Motivational Interviewing last term in a primarily asynchronous setting, I didn’t know how I would use the existing institutional tools to teach interview skills. This is why I was happy to find Flipgrid.  This platform works like a discussion board, only all the content is short video clips, and the desktop and phone-app platforms are so easy to use that even kindergarten teachers have students create videos.

What is Flipgrid? Flipgrid describes their website as one “… that allows teachers to create “grids” of short discussion-style questions that students respond to through recorded videos. Each grid is effectively a message board where teachers can pose a question and their students can post 90-second video responses that appear in a tiled “grid” display”(Flipgrid, n.d).