How many of you have found yourself searching for new ways to incorporate technology into your sessions? I would hope you all are! Technology is the future; our students are expected to know how to craft PowerPoints, use digital media, and keep up with new generations of smart phones. Plus, I’m constantly on the look-out for how I can introduce new types of technology into my sessions because my students end up more engaged!
Unfortunately, it appears that app designers must imagine that all students with speech and language issues disappear in 6th grade, because I have had a very hard time finding apps that are appropriate for use with older students. Apps that tout themselves as stand-alone therapy activities, like digital irregular verb flashcards and childish articulation games, are a dime a dozen (I’m looking at you, Thera App!)! I quickly learned that a ready-made, no-prep, grab-and-go, app for teenagers probably doesn’t exist. And realistically, how could it? Teenagers typically aren’t interested in cutesy animations and mindless games that are based solely on luck. I realized that if I wanted to use apps in my therapy sessions, I would have to incorporate them as pieces of a larger therapy puzzle (rather than relying solely on an app to do my therapy for me).
So, without further ado, here’s Part 1 of favorite FREE app “tools” that can be used in conjunction with your favorite therapy activities.
Have you ever seen those crafty SLPs who print out large, customized dice with cute pictures or specific vocabulary? Ever thought to yourself, “My kids would tear those apart in a minute,” or “I don’t have time for cutting and glueing nonsense!” Don’t you wish you had the ability to quickly and easily make custom dice? Look no farther than Make Dice Lite. This app gives you the ability to program the dice to contain whatever you want - large numbers, phrases, single words, new vocabulary, anything! Once created, you shake the iPad “roll” the dice randomly. You can even mix and match dice to make combinations! I have used this app to augment writing tasks (e.g. dice with custom vocab words), figurative language tasks (e.g. dice that say “metaphor,” “simile,” “idiom,” etc.), and more.
Although I prefer to use my SMARTBoard or wall-mounted white board for visuals when working with groups, there are definitely times when having a small white board is necessary. But the unfortunate thing about traditional whiteboards is that once you’re done, your creation is gone forever. Not so with Educreations! Think of Educreations as if it were a saveable whiteboard. Draw diagrams, make lists, and create therapy activities that you can then save and access any time in the future! In fact, you can add an audio recording to your progression of writing and drawing and turn it into an instructional video that can be saved and played back any time. In addition, sometimes I use the screencast function to display what I’m writing on the app to my SMARTBoard. That way, I can be writing something on the iPad and have it show up on the SMARTBoard for all my students to see.
Let me just say first of all that I am a Time Timer acolyte. I set my large
Time Timer at the beginning of each session - I would be lost without
it. But sometimes, one timer is not enough. Sometimes, I need my Time
Timer to count down the duration of the entire session, but I need another
timer to count down an individual student’s turn. The nice part about this
app is that even though it’s free, the ads are not distracting and the timer
motivating for older students, but it may be distracting for certain
populations.
When I first started therapy, I used the built-in recording option of my
phone or iPad to audio record assessments and some therapy sessions. It
worked just fine, but the options to edit the recordings were pretty
limited and the files were housed with all the other non-work-related
audio I had stored on my phone or iPad. I realized I needed a good audio
recording app to edit, modify, and organize my audio files. With Voice
Record, I can easily move files to Google Drive, add notes and pictures
to be paired with audio files, and edit things like volume, pitch and
speed. The app also provides a visual feedback mechanism for loudness
that is a great visual for students working on increasing or decreasing
their volume! I end up using recordings a lot now - not just for
assessments, but for...
- students with language disorders to hear themselves give an explanation or tell a narrative,
- fluency students to hear themselves using strategies or stuttering easier,
- articulation students to hear the difference between productions,
- moderate/severe students who enjoy the sensory aspect of hearing themselves on a recording,
- and so much more!
There’s an extremely high chance that your students have never
seen or heard of a metronome before, but several of my articulation
students are now intimately familiar with how it functions. I was
originally introduced to the idea of using a metronome with articulation
students when I attended a SATPAC workshop; although when I first got to my school and began to wade through the stacks of materials from the 1970s that were there, I did find a rusty, dusty metronome right next to an ancient SeeScape.
Anyway, as a part of the robust SATPAC Program, students are encouraged to work on achieving a naturalness to their speech by practicing articulation words and sentences in rhythm with a metronome set to around 140 bpm (although you can start slower and work up to this conversational speed, of course). Since most of my students are working on intelligibility and articulation goals at the sentence and conversation level, I’ve found the metronome to be helpful in helping them to overcome the slow, drawn out, “over-therapized” sound of many of their sounds. When using the metronome, they can’t draw out and over emphasize their target sounds. There’s lots of options for digital metronomes (Google even has a built-in function when you google “metronome!”), but they certainly all beat having to dig up a “real one!”
I hope that you can start to imagine how you might use some of these apps in order to augment your current therapy style. Come back next week for Part 2 where I’ll discuss another five apps that I’ve found to be indispensable when working with adolescents.
As always, it doesn't have to be fancy, just keep it fun and functional!
- Jillian, the No-Frills SLP
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