What to: Sharing Screens, Giving Remote Cursor Control, Using Interactive Websites in Distance Learning and Telepractice

Or, Telepractice with a Teddy Bear.

Continuing to work here to share information for those who are considering or working to transition to telepractice given the ongoing Coronavirus Emergency. I am going to focus on "what to" rather than "how to" but this post has a little of both. In presenting with some amazing experts, Amy Reid and Nathan Curtis of Waldo County General in Maine, I have liked to say "I'm not a telepractitioner, but I play one on TV." I'm the SLP/Instructional Tech Specialist, so there's some overlap, but I'm only an emerging telepractice SLP. But I hope this is helpful.

Using Zoom (you decide what tier and apply HIPAA procedures) and other platforms you can move from videoconference to screen sharing and then remote control/giving the mouse and keyboard control to the student participant, shown here in my video:

See Zoom's full document here.

Main idea: screen sharing and giving interactive control to the student (you can always take it away) opens worlds of contextual activities. The one shown was Draw A Stickman (I'd recommend ep 1-2)

Using interactive websites allows you to work in context; just do a little task analysis. Draw a stickman lends itself to extracting a narrative, sequencing, and using verbs and causal and conditional structures (because, so, if/then).

Some other sources of interactive websites:

-Look on Pinterest or Google in general or for a topic e.g. "interactive websites trees." (there are not many good speech-language specific interactive websites so remember, task analyze..."oh this one has categories.")*

-PBS Kids is ripe for Task Analysis

-UEN Interactives

*flash based websites becoming outdated and may be an issue. If it doesn't work for you, keep looking. Develop a Google Doc or other repository of sites you like and share.

If you have other sources of interactives you like, please let us know in the comments.