Lifetoon is a fun entry in the range of generative AI tools being offered to us-- it creates a comic from your text/image of a character(s) and description of a story. It does require an image for character creation but you can just use a Googled image based on a character description. You can use yourself of course, but I would avoid uploading images of students into an AI.
I very frequently use this very 70s personal narrative as a model for teaching a complete episode with Story Grammar Marker®. Yes, it's true- I once fell out of a moving car and my mom, driving, failed to notice. I ran this through Lifetoon and it did a fairly good job of rendering it as a comic!
Lifetoon is a good tool to experiment with! Comics such as these could be useful for visualizing the plot of a chapter book or a historical event, curriculum concepts, social scripts and social or executive functioning problem solving situations.
Continuing here to post some companion pieces to my session this week at the SLP Summit (available in its recorded form with others until August 15, register here). One of the app resources I discussed were those available through Toca Boca's Toca Life apps. These are available individually, for example, Toca Life: Vacation which I will discuss here, or the Toca Life: World (also playable on newer Macs w M1 chips) has a way of pulling together your previously purchased apps.
The Toca Life apps are just filled with real-world contexts and therefore can be used to model, co-create, and play out stories in very structured ways or loosely. Make a scene, involve lots of movement onscreen, or record whatever you do as a story through the screen recording feature. This can be done individually or with a group taking turns, or as explicitly or implicitly as you see fit (e.g. with story grammar cues or not). See my recent post on Mindwing's blog about models of learning and instruction.
Taking Toca Life: Vacation, let's consider how the context can lead us to scaffold a bunch of different stories with students.
Airport: Besides the process of arriving, checking in, going through security, waiting at the gate, and taking off in the plane, what if...
1. You need to buy a ticket (use the ATM etc)?
2. Your flight is not listed on the board of funny-sounding destinations and you need to ask for help?
3. You left something at home (if you have Vacation and City added in Toca World, you can move characters in and out of the panel at the bottom and change locations)?
4. A parent surprises you at school with a vacation (same, start at School and move the characters to the airport in Vacation)?
5. Your flight is delayed (good vocab word)?
6. A dog flies the plane and you don't end up where you planned?
This or other parts of the app could be used in conjunction with Google Earth to "fly" to a location and see some landmarks in 3D!
Hotel: Besides checking in, taking the elevator to your room and doing hotel stuff (bathing, sleeping, changing from your luggage, etc), what if...
7. You win a shopping spree at the gift shop?
8. You eat EVERYTHING at the buffet?
9. You make a mess of your room and need help or equipment from housekeeping?
Beach: Besides all sorts of watersports and maybe a wedding (?), what if...
10. Someone gets trapped on the island?
11. The fish get silly and decide to live on land?
And don't miss the treasure chest out on the island...
As I mentioned in the session, check out short videos like this that can show you lots of potential stories you wouldn't even know were there!
I had great experience presenting live for SLP Summit yesterday! The people and responses were wonderful. My session will be available in its recorded form as will the other excellent presenters' until August 15. Register here, the conference is presenting more live sessions practically as we speak; CEUs for live/recorded sessions are available for a small fee. To thank the many who attended and (I noticed!) subscribed to this blog as a result of the conference, I thought I'd elaborate on the content with some additional examples over the coming weeks.
In the session I started by describing how Google Slides and Jamboard can be used to create, interact with and retell stories through activities like making a scene or story mapping. I had previously posted a video on this you can check out. Another example is making a visually supported story retelling activity, in which you can think of Slides or Jamboard as sort of like the old Colorforms- images you insert can be like your stickers!
You can do this with most any context or story, but this past spring I really enjoyed reading We Found A Hat (Jon Klassen) with some groups. There are others in this series but they are a bit darker in ending. The author uses exaggerated eye illustrations (and not much else) to signal thoughts and intentions. Use the book or a video like this one!
For a playful way to work on retelling, make this book a scene. You can do this in either Slides or Jamboard. Slides would offer you more ways to play with formatting; Jamboard would allow easier collaboration (and if you wanted to sketch to change/highlight eye gaze you could do it more easily here). The basics as I show below would be the same.
Start with a blank slide- (either remove any text boxes and such or insert a new blank slide). If you have nothing selected on the slide you should see Background on the bottommost menu. Click that, Choose Image and the Google Image Search choice usually does a good job for any kind of background.
For your mobile (to click and drag about) turtles and hat you can try Insert>Image>Search the Web. This worked well for a hat. Remember to use the term PNG to try to get images without backgrounds.
Sometimes you may have trouble getting images that actually are PNGs. I just go over to Google Image Search (open a new tab and search on Google, again using PNG). From here you can right click and copy images to your creation.
A word about this- be aware of copyright, don't republish or attempt to sell something you have created using Google Images unless you have searched for images that are ok for reuse. This goes for all digital storytelling creations.
Here I copied and pasted the turtle and clicked on Format Options to flip one of them.
From here, use your imagination!
-move the elements to model a story retell and then have students do the same (a SmartBoard might be fun here)
-You can make Google Slides look less cluttered by collapsing menus or hiding elements under View.
-Add text boxes or shapes for dialogue.
-Make a "same but different story" where the turtles find something else besides a hat. Would they make a different decision? Why?
-Talk about cool things you've "found" (bridge to personal narrative)
In a terrific recent PD I watched, Rachel Madel made a great point: why use static photos or drawings to demonstrate verbs, when we have GIFs. GIFs (arguably pronounced with a soft "g" or like the peanut butter) are a format that shows photos or cartoons as a short looping video. Like this:
The weather today in Boston got me like...
As Rachel said, GIFs can be great for verbs but also:
-emotions
-basic narratives
-sentence formulation
-connection to curriculum
-concepts
-figurative language
-are simple stimuli that don't require much sustained attention
-and not least of all, are cool.
GIFs live best in Google Slides, which would give you a place to put them in a flow of context, and you can place them next to typeable space for formulating and visually supporting language.
GIPHY is a great place to get GIFs. To put one in Slides, search for what you would like, select it and click through to it. Click Copy Link and copy the FULL link. Back in Google Slides Insert>Image> By URL. Click to select the image and click INSERT.
Comics are motivating therapy tools that can be used to develop a narrative, work on physical description, emotional vocabulary, interpretation of nonverbals, or social behaviors and conversational moves. Pixton EDU provides much for free currently and as a webtool is very applicable to teletherapy. You can see some of my previous posts on Pixton here and here but in the video below I demo the current upgraded Pixton EDU. Email subscribers can click here for the video.
Sketches to promote narrative, expository language or social understanding are well-documented tools in speech-language pathology, and don't have to be pretty:
In a telepractice session you can use the platform's whiteboard if it has it (I can't figure out how to make the Zoom one come up and may have inadvertently shut it off), or find any number of web-based boards (this no-sign-in Explain Everything board has an educational bent).
Whiteboards can be used to:
-Illustrate narrative (related to strategies of visualization/Social Thinking® sharing imagination). This past week I had the boys follow a "group plan"/gratitude moment of describing a high of the week which included my use of the park stairs for exercise, keeping in touch with classmates, video games, time in nature, and turkey burgers.
-Work on appropriate level of detail, or show a clock to promote pace (executive function).
-Design something collaboratively. Make a collaborative drawing.
-Play Pictionary for general words/main idea or vocabulary sets.
-Play a "Backseat Drawing" style game where one describes/one draws "make a small circle at the end of that line."
This past week I noticed that I started this website 10 years ago (2/24/10). Time flies! I am grateful to all who have read it over the years, and for the opportunities it has provided me: opening doors to many friendships, presenting around the country (and Canada), many trips to ASHA Conventions, and publications there and elsewhere. Thanks everyone!
Of that decade, by far the simple but eminently useful app Pic Collage (free for iOS, Android, Windows) has been my favorite. I recall the day the awesome Sarah Ward showed it to me. It is a great resource for SLPs to make quick visual supports and to co-create with students. Here are 10 things you can do with Pic Collage:
Make a vocabulary board. Note that the Web Image Search makes this a very quick process to do with students (they can choose pictures associated well with vocab words (BING Search is nicely restricted)
Play! Play is about adding thoughts and ideas (see Social Thinking®'s We Thinkers). Here we decorated a treasure chest. Hands-on is great too but sometimes you may be lacking in materials or time. Note that any picture added by Web Image can then be double tapped to "Cutout."
More related to We Thinkers and Story Grammar Marker®- explore what different characters think about, you are therefore relating story events.
Make "Colorforms" from photos to retell/act out a story with dramatic play. In this case Gilbert Goldfish Wants a Pet.
Visualize to scaffold students' personal narrative. In this case we talked about how setting linked to actions and events.
Set the stage for cooperative play with yet another cooperative activity. These students created a sign before playing Lemonade Stand on the Echo Dot.
Target emotional vocabulary based on the 6 universal feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, disgusted, suprprised). These high school students passed Pic Collage and added to kinds of angry (relate to Zones of Regulation®) after watching a Star Wars clip.
Create any kind of story. Here, setting, initiating event and reaction are visualized.
Use dual-focus vocabulary strategies (semantic and structural per Diane German).
Make curriculum language and categories more salient and visual. In this case a consumer science class was covering "ways to pay."
Make comics showing triggers/initiating events and use of tools and strategies such as self-talk.
Show circular sequences. Think of doing the same for Numeroff's If you Give... series.
OK, that's 12 instead of 10 but I couldn't decide which to share!
The free app Toca Life: World (available for iOS, Android, Kindle) works some device magic by uniting any of the Toca Life apps you have on your device. I've long been a fan of these sandbox-play apps that present a variety of scenes mirroring real life for sociodramatic play. Each scene is interactive such that you can manipulate objects and perform actions with characters. Look at Toca Life's settings through a language lens and you'll see many contexts for syntax (verbs, causals), semantics (categories, vocabulary) and discourse (telling a story). This past week I used the Toca Life: Vacation app to model an airport story for my student, and was thrilled to see him tell a same-but-different story (note that there is also a screen/audio recording feature in each app for your to make a movie of your stories with narration). Toca Life: World, in addition to bringing your places together, provides additional settings for purchase. I had fun with the ski resort making this model for one of my groups!
Plotagon Story is a very useful app for iPad and Android (free) that is now also available to download for Mac or PC. Plotagon represents the type of creative app that allows us to create models of concepts, skills or narratives, but also then to use as a co-creation tool so students can apply their understanding while having fun. With Plotagon, you choose a scene (many available for free) and create or use characters, then can type in a dialogue between them (2 characters only). You also can add emotional reactions; see my post walking through Plotagon in relation to the 6 Universal Feelings and Mindwing's Story Grammar Marker® (including a printable visual) here.
For another specific example of a clinical use of Plotagon, consider the Peers® Curriculum, which includes a breakdown of strategies in "trading information" in conversation. One of these includes the twofold moves of asking questions and then answering your own questions (basically topically commenting). In providing an overview of these moves week by week with a group of teens, Plotagon was useful in providing an engaging visual example before practicing the moves in conversation. Here's an example (this took me all of 5 minutes to make).
You can even see me in a tie! That is indeed a rare sight.
Disclosure: Author receives a consultation fee for providing blog content to Mindwing Concepts. Author has also contracted with MedBridge to provide three courses and is part of their affiliate partner program. He will receive a royalty when his courses are available and are completed by members. Additionally, he receives a commission for each membership purchased through his affiliate link.
I've long sung the praises of the Book Creator app. It's definitely the best way to create an e-book due to it's elegant simplicity, ability to add any kind of content (text, photos, drawings, audio, video) and share in both PDF and ePub format. In our work, creating books can be used for narrative and expository language development, social cognitive strategies, metacognitive language strategies, speech practice, repetitive line books to develop microstructure, and so much more.
I recently had the opportunity to get to know Book Creator in Chrome (so, usable on Chromebooks or in any device running the Chrome browser (on iPad, still use the terrific app). It's a lovely port and works exactly the same as the app. One improvement, in the Chrome version you can search for images on Google, which is handy for quick co-creations with students. Sign up as a teacher and you can create 40 books for free (this account also allows you to delete books in your library). Learn about Book Creator here and sign up for your account here. If you are in a Google Apps (G-Suite) environment you can create books FOR your students and have them join your library (where they can read or create).
Social Media is part of life--and a good context for targeting social cognition and narrative language. In general, social media is now one context for us all to be sharing our stories through words and pictures, and also is a way we send messages about ourselves and interact around them. Of course this should be self-monitored; I've shared with my students that I set an intention of at least 2 hours daily in which I don't look at Facebook or Instagram (if you have a goal, you need a measurable action plan). Don't always make it, but I'm trying.
A few contexts in which I have used social media in the last several months:
GCF Learn Free has great simple tutorials on social media outlets. These are good if you are working with individuals who want to begin to use social media as an interactive outlet (learning more about others and making connections).
Related to this, I have been working with a wonderful SLP who uses Instagram photos (mine and many others) to help students "get the story" (situational awareness) implied by a photo, make inferences about relationships depicted in photos, etc. Identifying a few resources you can use with students (screenshot, perhaps, instead of showing them your feed) make for great lessons. These students have also stepped into sharing on Instagram with parental guidance.
There are a number of good resources you can use to make mock text conversations, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat posts. These can be great for presenting narratives and exploring expected and unexpected social media behaviors. Just google and you'll find ones like Status Clone- they produce an image of a fake interaction that you can use in an activity. ClassTools.net also has student-friendly versions of these for you to use for co-creation (see their FakeBook, Twister and SMS Generator).
Here's an example (note: that's not an actual spoiler).
On iPad, I haven't always found similar tools. Social Dummy performs similar functions but I would never use it in front of students because of its horrible name (Dummy meaning fake, not in the way it might be interpreted)! You can use this app to make teaching images saved to your photos app, however. A recent free tool is Texting Story Chat Maker, which allows you to make a dynamic video of a text conversation unfolding. These are additionally good contexts in which to explore the use of emoji, which are easily accessible on mobile devices.
I've mentioned before that following directions (written or oral) is an oft-needed but not so engaging goal to address. Scratch Jr. is a free app that, like its senior (mentioned here and here) was created to teach coding and programming to youngsters. These applications use object-oriented codes that are simple to put together and work a lot like LEGOs.
A great way to start with Scratch Jr., and one in which you'll instantly see the potential for working on following directions and sequencing, is to use the intro activities. For example, students need to follow a few steps to make a car drive across the screen--a surprisingly thrilling activity for the class in which I conducted this lesson. The developers give you a great quick guide if you want to learn your way around the app first.
This simple program makes the car drive across the screen.
After using Scratch Jr., you'll likely find all sorts of contexts for it. A first grade teacher I worked with had her students program how baby polar bears "trail" their mothers, thus integrating work in following directions, coding, and science concepts. The variety of backgrounds and characters suggests potential for storytelling work as well, and these can be drawn, leading to limitless contexts. Students can also be encouraged to use strategies such as re-verbalizing directions and visualizing as I discussed in this post.
You can also create direction sheets of your own with or without text by screenshotting steps and then assembling them in Pic Collage, as I did below. In making a math "game," I encouraged the students to verbally mediate the pictured steps as is important when approaching picture sequencing tasks.
Working on skills in this context, you'll also know you are helping to address technology standards and perhaps starting to prepare your students for a career in programming!
In a recent post for Mindwing Concepts, I described and demonstrated how the various contexts within the Toca Life apps, specifically Toca Life: Farm ($2.99, also available for other platforms), can be used to build narrative language skills. I have recently been using these versatile sandbox apps in other ways, including targeting category development. If you are working in the school setting, especially, working in context just makes sense. Doing so allows you to tie in with classroom topics (in this case, the basics of plant life cycles and animal biology) and sync with the topics of picture books. This practice is also supported by emerging research; Gillam & Gillam (2012) conducted a study that "revealed signs of efficacy in an intervention approach in which clinicians treated multiple linguistic targets using meaningful activities with high levels of topic continuity."
Toca Life: Farm includes scenes such as a field, barn, farmhouse and farm store, each containing movable items in a variety of basic and more abstract categories relevant to the context. Just a few I have noted and used include:
Field: fruit, vegetables, tools, containers, vehicles, ways to water plants Barn: animals, tools, machines, cleaning items, containers for plants Farmhouse: rooms, furniture, meats, grains, vegetables, fruit, spices/condiments, school supplies, personal care items appliances, clothing, musical instruments Store: food categories, dry goods/refrigerated items, containers, as well as a fabulous machine that allows you to "make" products, e.g. items made from milk
Field Scene
Farm Store Scene with Machine
In context you can approach this to target both receptive and expressive categories with students:
"Can you gather 3 tools we need for planting?"
"I just had the girl sit on the chair, bed, and then couch. What category are all these in?"
Check out this and other Toca Life apps (see the Toca Boca website to start) to develop contextual storytelling and semantic skills.
Gillam, S.L., Gillam, R.B., & Reece, K. (2012). Language Outcomes of Contextualized and Decontextualized Language Intervention: Results of an Early Efficacy Study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 43(3), 276-291.
Disclosure: author is a paid consultant for Mindwing Concepts, Inc to provide blog and presentation content.
ASHA 2016 in Philly was a whirlwind, and given a few other busy weeks following it, I am still sort of flummoxed that it has come and gone! I enjoyed presenting with Nathan Curtis and Amy Reid of Waldo County General Hospital in Maine on resources that can be used for co-engagement and co-creation in interventions both in-person and via telepractice. One of the resources we discussed was Google Slides, which is part of your Google Apps available through personal or school accounts, and I wanted to share a video I made demonstrating some possibilities:
(email subscribers please click through to the post in order to see the video)
Some main points here:
-Google Slides is a free tool you can access from your Drive page, just click New to start a new slide series.
-The tool can be used like a Book Creator (in fact, like the Book Creator app itself) to combine pictures and text to make a "book"- think a repeated line book or any book used to convey a narratiev or expository topic.
-The Explore tool under Tools>Explore allows you to search for images and simply drag them into the presentation (these are copyright-friendly)
-One advantage of Slides particularly for telepractice is that you can share the file with anyone with a google account and they can continue working on it.
-You can create and edit Slides presentations from the iPad as well, but the Explore feature to search images is not available (you'd have to leave the app, go to Safari, search and save images to add).
-Check out this post for good ideas on how to use Google Slides in "unusual" ways!
Toca Boca's "Life" series aims to reproduce real-world settings as a context for play with characters and the objects they encounter in indoor and outdoor places. As a result, the series provides a visual play space for us to work with students as they tell stories, make connections, and enact everyday sequences. The latest, Toca Life: Vacation, is another wonderful, visually rich, and highly interactive app you can use to take students on imaginary trips to this beach-y location.
The app contains a number of settings including an airport, hotel, beach, and boardwalk, the many spaces within each setting and interactive objects providing great opportunities to role-play, propose problems and solutions, and consider if-then scenarios (important for executive functioning!). The trailer is below:
Language Lens:
-Consider recommending Toca Life: Vacation to parents as an interactive way to preview an upcoming vacation, complete with the travails of navigating airport security, riding on a plane, checking into a hotel, and sharing a bed with a sibling.
-For your part, the record feature of this app lends potential planning and role-playing a bit more of a purpose: let's make a vacation movie together!
-I am just beginning to absorb the huge amount of ideas and resources for developing language and social interaction through play provided in Social Thinking®'s new We Thinkers: Volume 2 Social Problem Solvers Kit. The manual details a model for scaffolding play with fading adult involvement, and the "GPS- Group Collaboration, Play, and Problem Solving" framework can apply to the use of these open-ended sandbox apps as well as offline play. For example, the program's "Group Play Plan" form could be used for the adult to choose a scene and assign roles to form a story (Level 3) or for kids to collaborate in this process (Level 4). One good strategy is to screenshot a scene or two within Toca Life: Vacation to use as a visual support as you make a "Group Plan" for play.
I hope you have fun going on real or pretend vacations this summer. I'm going to take off for a few weeks myself, heading to Cape Cod and, later, Acadia National Park in Maine! See you in August!
Some technology tools that can provide an engaging model of conversational "moves" and skills have disappeared of late. The web tool xtranormal, which allowed you to type out dialogues that onscreen characters would speak, was wonderful for this, but is disappeared and is only reemerging as a complicated-looking software for Windows only. Likewise, Go Animate! was once school-friendly but has ported to a befuddling business-targeting subscription model. Toontastic of course is an excellent resource for making animations of social interactions, but an extra person or an affinity for making different voices really helps.
Enter Plotagon. This free app for iOS is simple to use and allows you to:
-sign in with Facebook or via an email account
-create (tap the Create tab, then characters) a base set of characters. I'd avoid the randomize button as it results in some folks with hair and clothing combos that would be a bit too distracting for your students- just tap the arrow and you'll be able to adjust face shape, skin color, accessories and such, and save and name your character.
Plotagon's character creator- you'll need to create at least two characters before you make an animated conversation
-create (tap the Create tab, then plots) an animation in a simple way. The plot creator works easily- just add a scene, tap to choose your location (a generous portion of free downloadable settings/places are available), and type in dialogue:
Note that all elements in the "script" interface on the left are editable. For example, tap the word "neutral" and you'll be able to give your character a different reaction or expression. It took me a bit to figure out that to delete a line of dialogue, you need to tap and sweep it to the left.
Once complete, you can view your movie as a preview by hitting the play button or viewing it full screen. Any work you do is saved in your account as a "draft," but you can finalize your creation by tapping Publish and Share and saving it to the Plotagon website. There is currently no way to download the video to your Photos app (so don't use students' real names in videos that are saved to the website), but once "published," you can share to others as a link.
Some ideas on using Plotagon in therapy and language interventions:
-I love using tools like this in conjunction with an internalizable strategy. In one group, we created a 5 Point Scale around Topic Management:
I created plot videos (see links above in the scale) to serve as examples- endlessly amusing to my students- and we discussed how they corresponded with the scale and character perspectives. We then worked to create other examples, particularly of 2s and 1s.
-Plotagon can serve as a context to model other strategies such as Story Grammar Marker's® 6 Second Story and Social Thinking's "Wondering Question" and "Add-A-Thought" expected behaviors in conversation.
-The app can also be used in conjunction with the Superflex® Curriculum by Social Thinking to model examples of Unthinkable and Thinkable moments.
-For students with more significant challenges, the app can be used to create and model scripts for various situations.
-Plotagon is also just a fun way to practice writing or create projects related to curriculum topics.
Toca Boca, long one of my favorite developers of contextual digital toys, has added a powerful feature to one of their already very useful apps- Toca Life: City ($2.99 for iPad). The Toca "Life" apps allow you to move characters around interactive environments; in this app, that includes a loft apartment, theatre, food park, hair salon and mall. Characters can pick up and interact with objects in each setting and even move from place to place with objects as you act out dramatic play sequences. These features in Toca Life: City have been enhanced with the addition of screen recording-- this captures the movement and records audio as you and students speak in order to create an animation. The animation can be immediately replayed, but also saved to the camera roll for later review or even sharing!
After rehearsing or storyboarding a "scene" with your students (further emphasizing your language and social targets), just tap the film icon in the upper left corner and begin recording.
Though the Toca: Life apps (see also Toca Life: Town) provide great opportunities to target play skills, cooperation and social cognition, and language targets such as sentence formulation, microstructures such as verbs and pronouns, as well as overall narrative, the screen recording feature can make this work more salient, with auditory feedback on student performance.
That this feature was added recently again underscores the importance of running and reviewing the contents of your app updates, which can be done in the App Store app Updates tab which provides text descriptions of changes within apps.
Pic Collage (Free from Cardinal Blue for iOS and Android) continues to be one of my go-to apps for all sorts of visual tasks. With it's ease of use, unlimited opportunities to help our students "see" language and social concepts, and again, freeness, it's just gold. You can read my column on the many uses of Pic Collage for ASHA Leader here.
I have also been very impressed by the developers' responsiveness to questions and concerns as an educator. They were very quick to clarify for me that the iOS Settings for the app (Settings>Pic Collage) allows the turning off of social features (which were also linked to ads) and videos if need be.
The app's Web Images search is a unique feature that allows us (and students, who take to the app very quickly) to build a visual very quickly. These searches are based on Google's most restrictive search settings; recently, I was working with a group of teachers around the app and we searched for all sorts of dirty words and found no results (something might slip by, so monitor what your students are searching for).
I recently learned that Pic Collage has released a Kids Edition, also free, which automatically turns off social features, so enjoy that without having to navigate to and switch off any settings.
Pic Collage has also added GIFs to its image search. GIFs (pronounced JIFs, so you don't seem uncool) are briefly animated, looping visuals--kind of like a Vine but shorter. This image format has gained popularity in social media because of its ability to show movement or more of a story.
I initially was a bit annoyed by the ability to add GIFs, as I thought they were too distracting, and I sometimes restrict doing so by directing students to go to the Images tab within Web Images. However, for language therapy goals such as describing actions or formulating an action sequence narrative, well, GIFs are actions! See for example this quickly-created collage of all the actions a cat might perform (note that you don't have to save your collage as a link but tapping on the share button and Share Link allows you to do so). When reviewing a collage in the app with a student, you can pinch out to zoom in on an image to make it larger and screen out other distracting GIFs. Note also that when creating collages that are designed to be printed, you should avoid GIFs as they won't print in action mode.
Vine hit the scene a few years back as a different way to shoot and share videos as six-second clips that loop or repeat. I played with it, shot silly things like a tired me landing at Logan at 3 am, and maybe too enthusiastically smashing a toilet that had sat in my garage for a year. I stuck with Facebook.
Vine Kids (Free, be sure to change the App Store search from iPad only to iPhone, as this is an iPhone app that will run on iPad) on the other hand, is a simple and limited app that gives you access to kid-friendly Vines, the looping videos that the site trades on. Kid-friendly subgenres include silly animations, animals and kids doing funny things, or even quick clips featuring kid-recognizable characters such as Grover or the Minions.
The app does not let you search, which I wish it did, but the repeating nature of the short videos makes it suited to a quick language activity-- you know, the kind where your students think they are getting a reward but actually are practicing skills? A good warm-up or wrap-up! Take a look at the videos themselves and see what is unstated, which is of course the kind of information that you can scaffold your students to state: story grammar elements such as character and setting, and description of these, verbs, situational aspects such as prediction of what came before and after the snippet, discussion of perspective, feelings, and who must have shot the video.
Above: Hampsters eating salad! To get started with Vine Kids, just tap the screen and swipe right and left to navigate through the available videos. Also consider using Vine itself as a follow up, as it has some educational applications. Vine is public, like Twitter, so you wouldn't want to include kids in your videos. BUT it is easy to use and could be used to shoot quick language-based videos such as: -how-tos- steps in a task -items in a category
-a play script (e.g. your Fisher-Price mailman picking up the mail from the Little People town mailbox and delivering it.
DO NOT use Vine Kids if you are put off by a fart noise or even bird poop, or with kids who cannot come back from such a thing to be productive or regulated. I also could do without these videos being included but they are thankfully only occasional!
Have you ever used Vine in your work? Share a link in the comments!
SpeechTechie is my take on simple and interactive technologies you can use in language lessons and interventions. Enjoy!
Interested in learning more? I am available to conduct professional development sessions, including via webinar. If you'd like to work with me to design a presentation or consultation for your school or organization, please check out the "Work with Sean" page on this website.
Sean is a MedBridge instructor for several courses (avail. Feb 2018). Click to join MedBridge at a discounted rate for high-quality online PD and CEUs. A wide variety of courses are available for SLPs.
Visit and "Like" our Facebook Page
Follow SpeechTechie on Twitter for updates!
Thanks, Guys!
Click on the badge to explore a ton of great blogs!
