Counseling and Technology: A Marriage made in heaven?
By Wendy Stubbs, SDECCA President & Technology Chair
The advent of the computer and internet on our business world has been a process that has taken many of us by storm, especially baby boomers such as myself. When I was teaching English in Iowa in the late 1980's, I can remember stating that I would be the last person to adapt to computers! The next school year a math teacher talked me into purchasing a large floppy disk that contained a computer software program to enter my volleyball statistics in and from then I on I understood the power of a computer. (Of course, I had to have a student show me how to put the disc into the computer then!)
From there I purchased a cheap used computer to do word processing on and I was hooked. Even though it was much slower than our standards today, it was a computer. (Remember the green screens?) My first 'modern' computer was a 1 gb hard drive Gateway computer. Now flash drives come with at least that much memory and we thought we would never need much more. The sound of the dial up modem is a sound I will never forget!
So, onto this marriage of counseling and technology: how can two separate entities so different co-exist? Well, what would we do without the time saving and paper saving (computers were going to do away with paperwork, weren't they?) gadgets that help to keep us organized? No matter if you are a mental health counselor looking up the latest research in an electronic library, a school counselor who relies on your website to share information, or a college career counselor who uses an electronic database to post jobs, all of us today have probably come to realize that we do rely upon computers and this online technology a great deal.
For instance, much of the information I have gathered about Career Technology I have posted into a concise website called: www.careertechnology.info. I hope to keep on expanding on this idea so if you have information that should go into that site, please let me know. I have no doubt many of you have some best practices when it comes to how you utilize Microsoft Office, Vista OS, or a database. I would hope to share more ideas in the future with you on this topic through this newsletter as well as with my SDECCA colleagues.
My first question is this: What software can you NOT do without? Let me know by emailing me at stubbswk@gmail.com and I will be glad to share anonymous responses. And, if you have any questions on technology I will be glad to try and answer them.