News articles serve a number of purposes in speech and language interventions:
-context for use of graphic organizers teaching narrative or expository language structures
-opportunity to pose questions and elicit discussion with use of discussion webs (see Hoggan and Strong's mention of discussion webs as a narrative teaching strategy)
-newsela is geared around "text sets" and themes as well as daily news, and also allows you to change the reading level of each article
-within each article is scaled vocabulary known as "Power Words"- these are presented with student-friendly definitions that align with Isabel Beck et al's recommendations for building robust vocabulary.
-presenting this material digitally will add a level of engagement; newsela integrates nicely with Google Classroom.
Wordle has long been hailed as a great visual way to work with language. Text or a web address (URL) can be pasted into this tool and then a word "cloud" is displayed, with emphasis on more frequently used words. In this way, the tool can be used with any digital text passage or content related website, and the visual that results can be used to develop vocabulary and skills of identifying main idea.
Worldle is not iPad-friendly due to its basis in Java, but Cloudart ($.99) is a great translation of this tool to the iPad platform.
Cloudart has a very simple interface, but with many features that make it useful! Simply copy a block of text via Safari or perhaps from an electronic book in iBooks (many samples of novels commonly used in educational settings are free), or a text-based URL (e.g. the Wikipedia article on any academic topic), and the app will generate your cloud. You can then customize it visually, and even tap to remove or change the emphasis of irrelevant/key words. The cloud can be saved as an image to the camera roll or emailed.
Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.2 Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.4 Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 5 topic or subject area.
While Wikipedia is far from the gold standard of research sources, it does give a good general overview of topics and in my experience is quite well-written. It therefore is a helpful resource for developing reading comprehension, background knowledge and use of strategies for vocabulary and breaking down expository text.
I discovered Wikiweb, which displays articles as semantic web connections between ideas, because it was free at Starbucks, but at $2.99 I think it's still fairly priced. It's got a beautiful look and feel and the added feature of displaying visual connections between topics is potentially very useful for therapy. The articles as displayed can be selected in order to activate Speak Selection, so they can be read aloud as well.
This video from Wikiweb is a bit strange, and makes it seem like you should use the app just so you don't become Claire Danes in Homeland, but it gives you more of an idea how the app works.
InsideStory Flashcards pegs their site as "the world's most interesting way to learn words." It is indeed a nice repository of free printable flash cards with interesting images that illustrate vocabulary words. About 1000 of these are available to us free through the site, and for a reasonable cost, the site sells boxed sets of vocab flashcards with "Cats & Dogs" and "Animals" themes for human (well, and certainly animal) vocabulary such as malodorous.
In terms of vocabulary, I am actually a big believer in the Isabel Beck school of thought that kids need Tier 2 Vocab (see all the words on the above page as examples) taught in context and repeatedly. As a result, I think given our service delivery models that it's really tough for vocab to be our sole responsibility, and it is best targeted in consultation with teachers and paraprofessionals. So really, I think that InsideStory Flashcards is more a great model of what you can do using images on the web than a resource in itself. For example, look at how the site approaches the creative and contextual selection of an image for the word frolic, above (the rolling-around polar bear). One could take any vocab word being targeted in the classroom and either pre-select or, even better if you can, have students pick and save images (click here to see how) for their vocabulary words (as this would involve the higher level skill of evaluation).
Make Your Own Backyard Paradise is an interesting, if totally strange, interactive from PBS. Students can select a background and choose from various objects in nonspecific categories (Thing-a-ma-bobs, Doo-Dads, Whatchamacalits), arrange, resize and rotate them to create a potentially absurd scene.
Language Lens
Naming the objects in various categories could serve as a good word-finding and description activity.
Arrangement and resizing of objects provides a good opportunity to work on spatial and temporal concepts.
Discussion of why certain objects go well or look silly in the scene will contextually prompt causal sentence structures.
The category names of the objects could help students with word retrieval difficulties become aware of nonspecific language.
The "Letter" category could be used in a phonemic awareness activity.
We all have trouble describing what fireworks do, and are limited to comments like:
"OOOOOOOOOOOOOh" or
"I like how that one did the squiggly thingie"
The Firework Display Designer from i-Board Interactive (I have no idea why it is under the category of Religious Education) gives us (and our students, of course) a way to simply customize and describe a fireworks display to celebrate the holiday. You can make choices of color, "bang," speed, timing and tilt, thus working on important concepts and descriptive skills along the way. Check it out and have a blast this 4th! Computers are certainly safer than real fireworks...
Thanks to InTec InSights for pointing out this resource.
This week I posted about the importance of directional concepts for understanding curriculum, and presented a complex website for older students. I thought this would be well-accompanied by a younger cousin of that website (again from the UK), the BBC's Landscapes, hosted by their friendly alien (I think) Goggs. The Landscapes website reviews compass directions with animations, a mnemonic, and practice using NSEW to move Goggs around a campsite and then a maze. If you really want to delve into the language of maps, there are further lessons on topics such as symbols/keys and scales.
Also featuring some fun dialectal substitutions such as "torch."
Often our kids have trouble with left and right, let alone the compass points. I always do some activities with kids as these concepts become important in 2nd grade, but they stay important throughout the elementary, middle and high school years. How is one to understand the early American's exploration of the West without the sound concept of West? Our 4th grade curriculum in Social Studies is completely organized by cardinal directions: "Now kids, we are moving on to learn about the Southwest..." Huh?
Cardinal Points is a cool site that, though a little confusing even to me, provides a complex activity that could be used to target these concepts, perhaps with upper elementary, middle- or high school students. The site has two interactive lessons in which you manipulate a virtual compass to navigate and gain directional information about a location in England.
Language Lens
Activities around this site could be ideally accompanied by use of an actual compass (perhaps the one on your iPhone) to navigate the school.
The specific directions that need to be followed to complete each lesson make this resource a great context to work on comprehension.
I want to thank my friend Greg Nasca for designing the new banner you see at the top of the blog. The original one was something I whipped up with my limited Photoshop skills (from both a design and technical standpoint), and his revision really amped it up and made it shiny, while keeping the font and color scheme that I loved. Thanks Greg!
I have been a big fan of iMovie on the Mac ever since I had to learn it really quickly and stressfully to produce a slideshow for my Dad's retirement party. Ever since then I have found it, in its various iterations (we are now on iMovie '09) to be a pretty intuitive way to produce a nice movie. At my elementary school, I became known as "the slideshow guy," and that moniker has followed me up to middle school, though in truth I usually use iPhoto to arrange the photos and music in a way that looks much harder than it is. When Apple announced they were releasing a version for iPhone, I thought that seemed logical and a great idea.
I gave the app ($4.99 at the app store) a try last night, using some of the snapshots I have taken this year to update families in my weekly emails home after private practice group sessions. It was, again, way easy to use. You can pick from 5 "themes" that affect how the photos or video are displayed, with accompanying titles and music. Problem is, I could not get the title editor to come up though I tried following the directions exactly. Anyway, I am sure I/they will figure that out. You can use the theme-based music or anything from your iTunes library. It was midnight and I made this while lying in bed (ha!) so I didn't persist in trying to make anything too fancy. I LOVED that I could upload it directly to YouTube, skipping the plug-into-computer steps necessary with Flip video and other pocket video cameras. This is a montage of photos related to therapy, including:
-A "goodbye" picture a student drew for me. I love it because he so clearly associated me with Story Grammar Marker, which shows that he "got it"
-A picture I sent to a parent to show how we were using Thememaker magnets to learn the difference between the text structures of List and Sequence.
-Several images on how we were using The Incredible 5-point Scale in therapy
-A map of a local Dunkin Donuts I made before a group community trip in order to talk about the "schema" and expected behaviors for that location.
Language Lens
Movies like this one are much simpler to make than you think! A short movie can emphasize work, concepts, and events to parents or students and would be very motivating to watch. iMovie for iPhone can be used to produce social stories and scripted role-plays, or to provide video feedback on session behaviors. It's a great tool for SLPs!
What about you? What is your experience with iMovie and using video in therapy. How would having iMovie on your phone be helpful to you?
What to do with our kids with social cognitive deficits who have trouble establishing "reference," such that you or their peers don't really know whom they are talking about? On the flip side, what else can we do to cue the ones who spend hours and hours in spaces with other human beings and retain no information on them, perhaps even neglecting to to learn the names of teachers and other oft-seen peers? Check out my post on social thinking and the story grammar element of character, over at the Mindwing blog.
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).
I don't know how many of you are caught up in the madness excitement that is the iOS4/iPhone 4 release, but I sure am. My device is a 3G, so this is a big upgrade, not only to the video features that I didn't have, but also new amazements such as multitasking. I put my 3G up to the new operating system on Monday, and was impressed by some of the new things that it could do, but mostly frustrated by what it couldn't. I was lucky enough to get through and order my iPhone 4 last week, and it came today (a day earlier than for anyone who has to wait at an Apple Store tomorrow, which by the way I wouldn't/couldn't have done). Soon I will have a post about what all this means for SLPs who have an iPhone 4 that can access everything in the new operating system, but for now I will just share with you the joy of...unboxing! And it's nice now to be able to have my old 3G serve basically as an iPod touch, so I can hand it around to kiddies with a little less nervousness.
What makes a program, app, or website a good resource for speech and language intervention? Please check out my post over on ADVANCE- I wrote there about the FIVES criteria, something I totally made up but seems to work for me! Enjoy...
At IEP meetings each year, when parents would ask, "What can we do at home?" our team's responses inevitably included reading to/with the child and having the child listen to audiobooks. Audiobooks serve some pretty clear language-enhancing roles such as:
-Exposure to complex language, vocabulary and sentence structure that exceed what the child could read and comprehend independently.
-Providing a motivating context to build auditory comprehension.
-If accompanied by the book itself, fostering reading fluency.
-Scaffolding of children's experience so that they can access
the books their peers are reading without becoming frustrated, thus (hopefully) continuing or developing a love of reading.
All this said, access to audiobooks traditionally has been logistically tricky. They are expensive, and public library offerings could be limited, only on tape, or necessitating a CD player, etc.
A great option for families is now on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and is FREE today from the App store. Tales2Go will offer you a free app today,
and free 30-day trial subscription (after that it is a whopping $2/month) for their service, which offers streaming audio of children's books from a wide variety of genres. I tried it out and it works great! Hope you will check out this great app, highlighted today on Momswithapps.
Sites don't need to be all flash-animated and drag-and-drop in order to represent a good context for therapy. Time Magazine's recent 50 Worst Inventions is a case in point. The site presents a hysterical array of bad ideas in the form of a clickable list, often followed by great images and YouTube clips of commercials for the products, which range from HeadOn (Apply Directly to the Forehead!) to the Comfort Wipe (don't ask) to the Segway. I have used similar lists with groups of students who just love talking about marketing successes and failures, whatever their skill level.
Enjoy vio (I can't make an upside-down i on this computer). It's Coke's brainchild- "carbonated flavored milk." Ew.
Some of the topics could benefit from a quick Google so your students get the full picture of, say, what Microsoft Bob operating system was all about. But that's easy enough!
Language Lens:
The site's descriptive text and video provide a great opportunity to develop information mapping skills and other comprehension strategies.
Real world connections can be used to develop background knowledge and schema.
A possible extension activity could involve students creating their own "bad idea" inventions, or oral presentation "commercials" for these products.
I finished my SLP master's in 1999. I don't know about you, but I sometimes worry that all the content I learned at that time is being eradicated by less important clutter in my brain, such as reality TV show plots, others' Facebook status updates, etc. One very positive movement in educational circles aims to promote more useful brain-stuffing- I am speaking about the development of Personal Learning Networks or PLNs. If you are reading this post, you sort of already have one. Hi! A PLN refers to the set of interactive resources we follow and participate in, whether they be blogs, Twitter feeds, and even your Facebook news feed, depending on what you put in it. I'd like to discuss PLNs more at a later time, but let me recommend one fun and interesting blog here, You Are Not So Smart. This rather humorously titled blog discusses popular social psychology, and often hits on topics related to communication. You might be especially interested in recent posts on fake smiles and narrative memory.
Playing with Plants and Animals is a cute resource for younger students from the e-Learning for Kids site. The activity has two sub-sections in which you reconstruct a plant or animal according to its parts.
Language Lens This activity could be a good supplement or tool to teach students the strategy of describing an object according to its parts.
In these months where the sun's strength is at its peak (at least in the Northeast), Save your Skin could be a nice language activity. The activity provides information about the sun's rays and chemicals used in sunscreen, then lets you "mix" up a sunscreen and test it out.
Language Lens
In addition to promoting healthy sunning habits, understanding of cause-effect, and reading comprehension strategies, Save your Skin would connect to curriculum areas around energy/light, chemistry, and human anatomy.
Technical Note: This site uses the Shockwave Player, and appears to work better in the Firefox browser on Macs.
Apple web browser (also available for PC) Safari 5 was released yesterday, and has a nice new feature that reduces ads and other distractions on pages that contain articles. Though images related to an article are clearly helpful to our students, having one's brain pulled in a million different directions definitely is not. This feature only works on article-based pages, though I have no idea how it determines when to work (probably RSS linked)- you will know you have the option when the page fully loads and you see the Reader button at the far right in the address bar.
So, looking at an article in the Boston Globe from this morning, here's the webpage view:
And here is the view after activating Reader:
Very cool. If you are not at all a Safari person, a similar effect can be created with a simple install of the bookmarklet available at Readability.
Wonder Pets! Save the Day is a cute interactive arcade-style game from Nick Jr. that would be a good activity for kindergarten-level students. Players get to choose a mission- an animal needs to be saved-dress the pets, assemble their boat, and rush to the rescue! The arcade controls are extremely forgiving, so it's unlikely that you or the kids would get frustrated. Some odd music here- I wonder if the Wonder Pets! should burst into song quite that much, but I bet kids would love it.
Language Lens
This activity relates to a number of curriculum-based categories younger kids need to learn, such as animal habitats and living vs. nonliving things. Additionally, part-whole relationships and basic categories such as clothing are targeted.
The arcade game provides a good opportunity to model spatial (up/down, right/left) and temporal concepts (before/after).
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!
