FREE Apps Today: Montessori Crosswords and Draw With Stars

Please check out Moms with Apps today for a description of two great free apps available from the U.S. (I feel I need to qualify that after a Canadian reader- thanks Janelle- pointed out that a free app wasn't free there) iTunes store today, Friday, September 3.

Montessori Crosswords (only on iPad, sorry, and now that I have one I could test it out!) would be a great way to work on word naming, categorization, and phonemic awareness. The app's Moveable Alphabet activity would have all kinds of applications, including a fun, motivating way to present words for articulation practice.

The same developers, L'Escapadou, are also offering for free today their Draw with Stars app (also on iPhone/Touch). This app allows you a night sky canvas which you can use to draw anything, but with stars (spinning optional). Again, many applications for this in therapy, such as drawing items in a category or playing Pictionary. See- I drew pants! I don't know why...

Remove Distractions from YouTube

Our students tend to be distractible.  Correct me if I am wrong.

I believe YouTube has enormous potential for instruction (hopefully your district does, too, and doesn't block it), but nothing annoys me more than when I take the time to locate a fun instructional video on YouTube, and while I am presenting it, student B says "OH, there's a link to ____, can we watch that   too?" Even more annoying is when they consider having YouTube on screen as an invitation to suggest unrelated videos out of the blue.  Gee, I am writing a lot here about being annoyed.  I am sure none of my readers ever get annoyed by students...

A good solution to this...distraction is using something like ViewPure, which allows you to present YouTube videos "without comments, suggestions, or the other things."  Simply copy/paste the URL location of the video (the web address at the top of your window when the video is playing on YouTube), and ViewPure will give you a new URL and screen that shows only that video, like this example.

Even better, ViewPure has a bookmarklet button you can drag up to your bookmarks bar in your browser, and it will "Purify" any YouTube video you would like, without having to navigate to ViewPure and cut/paste, etc.

Thank you to Richard Byrne for pointing out this resource.

Good language-based lesson from Kerpoof

If you have given Kerpoof a brief look but not signed up for their free Kerpoof Scholastics service, I would really recommend joining.  Scholastics gives you the opportunity to set up classes (say, a grade-level group) and control logins, passwords and how the site is being used.  In addition, you will receive some newsletters that give quite specific academic applications of Kerpoof.  This month's Poetry Partners lesson would be a great way to (here comes the Language Lens):

• Break the ice (we all need some light lessons when beginning the year).
• Preview poetry units that would come up during the year.
• Introduce figurative language and work on descriptive schema.
• Utilize the first sounds of words as a word-retrieval strategy (one of the poems suggested is an alliterative one)
• Work on interactive skills, interview strategies, and "friend files."

Follow links here for a screencast, and here for an instructional booklet on Kerpoof.

Google is your friend.

In addition to providing great therapy resources, the Web can also make our complicated SLP lives a little less complicated.  Please click on over to the ADVANCE Speech in the Schools Blog to check out my first  post in a series of I-don't-know-how-many-yet on the usefulness of specific (free!) Google tools.  This week, let's tackle that ever-fun calendar problem!

Great Conversation Game...

...to start the year or get a social group talking.  The website EFL Classroom 2.0 features rules and a supporting slideshow for the game "Pass the Paper," a kind of musical chairs for conversation.  To quote the site:

What is it? Basically, the students are in a group with one crumpled piece of paper among them. The music plays and they “Pass the Paper” . When the music stops, the one with the paper must do something preset by the teacher. It can be many things.


Basically the options all involve using language to interact with group members.  The site has an embedded slideshare presentation that has all the prompts and even the music for you! 

Click here to view the site and slideshow.

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for featuring this resource.

More on get-to-know-yous

Please click on over to the Mindwing blog to check out my post on more activities that allow group members to describe themselves, and groupmates to build "friend files." This post focuses on activities in which students provide less concrete information about themselves, leading to good opportunities to build social inferencing skills.  In each of these posts for Mindwing, I have mentioned the useful function of creating a screenshot (because a lot of these flash-based creation tools don't let you save your work).  I thought it would be helpful if I made a screencast showing how to make a screenshot, so please feel free to view that below.  If you are interested in steps for making a screenshot on a PC, you can view those here.


According to the FTC guidelines, I will disclose with each of these cross-posts (and in other references to Mindwing products) that I have a contractual relationship with Mindwing as a guest writer. In no other instances am I compensated to review or endorse products or technology resources (i.e. websites).

Why shorten URLs?

Often you will see that when people are sharing a link online, in a place such as Twitter for example, they will use a shortened URL (website address) such as what you see in orange below:

On Twitter, people do this because of the 140-character limit of their tweet, but URL shortening can have other uses if you are going to use links with your students in therapy. Have you ever tried to ask students to go to a link such as:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/sysm/landscapes/highlands_islands/flash/index.shtml?flash=land_ms_compass ?

That one is an extreme case, but in my experience, even asking a class of typical middle school students to navigate to a website by telling them the URL (or displaying it on the board or screen) will set you up for some frustration. To get all Vygotskian, it's just not in their Zone of Proximal Development to be able to alternate attention between the displayed URL, their keyboard, and their screen in order to monitor their accuracy. And often, students' problem solving ability is limited to directing your attention to the "Not Found" or other website on their screen, rather than checking their entry first. All of this can result in teachers and SLPs feeling frazzled by their lesson and maybe deciding not to use technology next time.

So, URL shortening is one thing to try. If you have a simple enough URL (e.g. enchantedpalace.org), I would say asking kids to enter that in is reasonable. However, if there are a few extra "/s" you're better off shortening.

Try these two: TinyURL and bit.ly. All you need to do is copy and paste your long link, and they will give you a short link to your targeted site. TinyURL has the advantage of letting you customize your link with a meaningful word if you would like, like I did below.

Another newer tool is fur.ly, which lets you shorten multiple URLs into one- so when students enter the one short URL, they are directed to your first entered URL, with a menu bar at the top that allows them to easily navigate to the next site, like my example here: http://fur.ly/1e6y

So try some URL shortening when you are going to be sharing an unreasonably long URL with students- it's a great accommodation for our (and other) kids.

Moshi Monsters

I have been interested in some time in the potential of "virtual pet" websites for language development.  Like pet therapy, the need to attend to another being (and develop feelings vocabulary as you monitor it), feed it and provide other comfort measures seems to be a great context to elicit language.  The thing is, many of these sites are too ad-ridden, complicated, or costly.  Moshi Monsters, based in the UK, seems to be an exception worth exploring.  You can "adopt" and customize a monster, decorate its house, and take it around town.  There are simple games on the site that might serve as a reward for challenging students, and the Monster also poses "puzzles" which, when solved, earn you points toward furniture in the Monster's home, etc.  The puzzles are actually academic in nature and would probably be appropriate for 2nd-3rd or older grade levels (or you can do them yourself) There are paid features such as a disco you can go to hear (and make your Monster dance to) "Lady Goo Goo" and "Broccoli Spears," and also a social networking component with "friending" of other kids, but you can avoid these if you like.  You can only adopt one Monster per email, so maybe prepare to set up some extra gmail accounts if you like what you see and want to use it with kids (and, given the social network element, a letter home would be a good idea). You can see a review of the site here, the site's parent page, and a video demo below.

Language Lens:

• Moshi Monsters would serve as a great intervention context for a younger group, tough-to-motivate student, or a pragmatics group working together to take care of their pet.

Category Play

Building basic categories and subcategories is so critical to students' functioning in the classroom.  If they don't build basic schema for describing items, as we know, it gets really difficult as vocabulary and concepts become more advanced.  Toy Theater is a simple website that can be used as one way to build some basic categories (I also always liked Linguisystems' Category Card Games), even if out of context.  You can create a picture array by selecting different items in a category, changing their size and position, and switching categories to create a more diverse picture if you like.  With many examples given in each category, it seems a great opportunity to discuss essential similarities and differences between items.  The site does not give you an option to print, but this would be a good place to use your screenshotting skills!

Finishing up with FIVES, for now...

Please check out my post today on the ADVANCE blog, regarding the last of the FIVES criteria for picking good tech/therapy resources: ensuring targeting of speech and language goals, or the quality of being "Speechie."  I am working on a booklet that incorporates all those posts about FIVES; it will serve as kind of a mission statement for this blog. The booklet gives me a chance to play with Apple's Pages app on my new iPad, which I am loving!