A Google A Day and Search Literacy Lessons

I've always observed an overlap between tech literacy/digital citizenship and safety with language and social skills-- probably why I have pursued the instructional tech and SLP sides of my work. I recall materials like Google's Search Education existing at the dawn of its search engine (I also recall AltaVista), and am happy to see them again. 

Search essentially involves central coherence/main idea thinking, vocabulary selection and question formation, among other skills, and that's just the first part. What follows involves text comprehension and determining what is the best result to pursue, not to mention evaluating sources! All good language and social cognition work.

At Google's page above you can check out leveled lesson plans with wonderfully broken-down Google Slides visuals- perfect for teletherapy but also in-person learning, and also of course, modifyable- just make a copy, shorten or add and pick your path through these lessons. 

A Google A Day is available as a stand-alone activity with daily challenges but also from selectable categorical challenges on the above page. Great engaging activity for the end of sessions, perhaps. 

Memorizer.me

As SLPs, at times we need to assist our students with work that is a bit pointless. I recall that Social Thinking® had some material about this; as students we are expected to follow the "group plan" and sometimes complete tedious tasks. Memorization of lists or passages is perhaps a good example. I recently needed to assist a student with memorizing a lengthy section from a book, I won't say which one. While the requirement was maybe in that zone of "Why tho?" it still was a good opportunity to apply Ehren's concept of the "strategic/therapeutic focus" and work on:

-ensuring comprehension of the passage as a whole and its vocabulary, sentence structure
-paraphrasing
-looking for opportunities for visualization
-noting language structure such as the flow from main idea to details in the passage, also several sentences had parallel structures that could be used as a memory trick i.e. adjective-infinitive, adjective-infinitive, adjective-infinitive.

Putting the passage in Google Docs and commenting in the sidebar with these memory tricks while discussing and eliciting paraphrasing and connections from the students made for a good teletherapy activity for a high schooler!

A quick Google search also found us this gem, which was great to leave my student with so that he could work on the actual memorization independently. Memorizer.me allows you to paste a passage or ordered list, then provides strategies and prompts to help you work on memorizing the language. For example, the website manipulates your pasted text to provide first letter or beginning of line cues. 

I recall having to memorize this above passage from Henry IV, Part 1 in high school and I wish I had had this tool!

GIFs- simple animations

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.

Some metaliguistics for you

I went to grammar school. I mean it was intense diagramming-sentences kind of grammar back then. I learned what the subjunctive mood was. Actually my mother taught my eighth grade ELA class, but that's another trauma to not talk about for now.

Anyway, for this reason as an SLP I've always had a lens on syntax, at least in its functional capactity of comprehending and producing complex sentences. This involves building some syntactic awareness of parts of speech and the functions of words. There is evidence that knowledge of parts of speech and how they go together impacts language and reading comprehension. Approaches like sentence combining are research supported and require this kind of awareness in students.

For these reasons, interactives around parts of speech can be considered on-point in our therapy. Check out Sheppard Software (overall) and their specific ELA interactives. Their Parts of Speech tutorial is adorbs and a fun visual way to explore the functions of nouns, adjectives, and verbs (note also that adjective+noun equals elaborated noun phrase which we can be measuring as microstructure in narrative).

The sparkly cloud

The sparkly cloud is hiding

Finding an interactive website of this type is helpful as you can follow the activities in a sequence, which helps with session flow. I have added this website to the Teletherapy Resources List.

As a child of this era also I loved Schoolhouse Rock and have used their engaging grammar videos in therapy to build awareness of parts of speech.

A Little Interaction Makes a Fun Vocab Lesson

Merriam-Webster is known for documenting the changing words of our language. Their Time Traveler website (accessible in any browser) will allow you to look up any recent year and see a list of words that had their "First Known Use" in that year.

Click on any site to see a definition; you may have to provide "kid-friendly" definitions. This site would be great if you want to incorporate engaging material or current events content, which often has many contexts for teaching narrative and expository text.

Many of the words featured are nouns. For a strategic focus you can teach semantic structures with a tool such as the Expanding Expression Tool. 

Example: 

Escape Room (2012)

Green/Group: A recreational place

Blue/Do: It simulates a locked room according to a theme, you have to get out

?/What does it look like?: Room or series of rooms

What is it made of/Parts: Puzzles, codes, hints, themes

White/Where: Often in a mall or amusement center

What else do I know? I once did one that was a fallout shelter

Buy one, or the kit, but did you know you could make a template for classroom instruction, or use mine at this link? (please DO NOT request access, rather, you can click File> Make a Copy to copy to your Drive).

Sentopiary

Sentopiary ($4.99) is a new and very interesting app from one of the creators of Popplet (a favorite of mine) that has nice potential for use in targeting complex syntax. With Sentopiary, you can explore sentence building with students within two modes:
-The "create a sentence" mode lets you build leveled sentences (e.g. at level 1 with articles, nouns, pronouns and present-tense verbs whereas when you increase difficulty, tenses, adjectives, prepositional phrases and adverbs come into play)
-Similarly, the leveled "challenge" mode asks you to recreate a sentence using the above grammatical categories.

Check out this video to see how it works.



SENTOPIARY - Create - A Hungry Bull from eeiioo on Vimeo.

Sentopiary is fun and engaging, as well as aligning with research demonstrating the importance of phrase elaboration for development of literate language. Kahmi (2014) states "There are three basic ways to make sentences more complex: (a) noun phrase elaboration, (b) verb phrase elaboration, and (c) conjoined and embedded clauses." This app includes contexts for (a) and (b), but not (c)- so I wrote to the developer and requested that they consider this! They promised to do so for future updates.

Kahmi also writes "My general principle for targeting complex syntax in therapy is this: Target the meanings and/or functions conveyed by the syntactic structure rather than the structure itself"- i.e. to make the intervention pragmatically appropriate. This app would seem to contradict that principle with its emphasis on labeling the structures. However, the metalinguistic aspects do align with curriculum goals (e.g. identifying nouns and verbs) and clinicians can easily incorporate strategies to emphasize meaning as I often recommend "around the app" such as:
-incorporating sketching or visualization strategies about constructed sentences and at the same time increasing bombardment/elicitation of the structure.
-utilizing the app's potential for absurdity in constructing sentences.

So check out Sentopiary- looks like a great tool for a wide age range!

Wrapping up GlogsterEDU Week: Extensions, Ideas, Examples

Before I get started, please check out my post over on Mindwing Concepts' blog about Glogster and ThemeMaker, their excellent tool for teaching students to comprehend and produce expository text.  An example Glog is included over there for a fun crossover post!

So, this has been a fun and busy week talking about one of my favorite resources, GlogsterEDU.  As I mentioned before, it seemed key to present this resource in a week-long instructional series. There is so much to say about it, and I couldn't just talk about one piece and leave you hanging for a week or so before the next post.  So I hope it has been helpful and not overkillish for you!

Two things that I feel are worth mentioning as extensions to Glogster.  First of all, if you take advantage of the possibility of opening student accounts, once students have marked a glog as "Finished," they will be able to view each others glogs via their Dashboard (the section marked "Glogs from my Classmates").  When clicking through to their classmates' Glogs, they will have the opportunity to leave a comment, thus further practicing language, pragmatic skills and digital citizenship.  One of my colleagues did a project in her Spanish class in which the students created real estate posters describing an imaginary property.  For this project she gave the students a kind of taxonomy of comments, and required that they use all 3 kinds in the process of interacting with classmates: a) give positive feedback on the property and say why you like it b) give constructive feedback on the property and explain why it would not meet your needs or c) ask a question about the property.  That kind of language structure is helpful to ALL students in learning how to have a digital conversation, but particularly so for our students. The second extension I wanted to mention is that you can--obviously since I did it in my first post and am about to do so here-- embed a Glog in a blog, website or wiki.  Here's a post on how to do that and change the scale in the process.

So, again, why should SLP's care about Glogster?  You have seen/heard of a lot of potential applications for speech/language therapy over the course of the week, but here are a few more ideas for SLP-related Glogs:

• Make a Glog with a series of stimulus pictures or videos related to a sound or phonological process, or phonemic awareness skills such as rhyming or recognizing word families- using Glogster's audio recording feature!
• Create Glogs to visualize, define and apply vocab lists.
• Use Glogs to teach complex sentence formulation by developing a Glog each for key conjunctions (e.g. because, so, when, while, etc), or a Glog exploring a theme or topic with multiple featured conjunctions (and use student audio)!
• Illustrate and demonstrate a repertoire of strategies in a Glog, such as listening, word retreival, or executive function strategies, with videos (perhaps student-created) serving as models/practice of the strategies.
• Use Glogster as your Speech-Language Program home page linked to your school website, with links to helpful resources.
• Glogster can be used to lend awareness to issues related to communication disorders and prevention, such as ASHA's Better Speech and Hearing Month, CASLPA's May Month, or TBI or Hearing Loss prevention. (Thanks @ndnspeechmom for your tweet regarding this idea).

And without further ado, a few more actual Glogs to serve as examples (note, hover over the GlogsterEDU logo at the top of each Glog to have the option to view full size):

I recently created this Glog to serve as a visual when presenting to Boston University's Public School Seminar for SLP Grad Students; the topic being the SLP's "bag of tricks" for interventions and materials.  Glogs can be used instead of PowerPoints in these situations!  Check out the links!

Glogs are great as a visual pallette to explore social skills and Social Thinking©. I created this Glog with a group of kids to emphasize the importance of reading others' visual cues. It's based on the idea of the Unthinkable characters in Michelle Garcia Winner and Stephanie Madrigal's Superflex curriculum.



This next Glog was the result of a class project targeting description, parts of speech, and the year-long theme of "Heroes." The students chose/researched a real-life hero and described him/her through nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc specific for the person. They also created a game applying grammar categories using Studystack (you can see that on the "click here" doggy-it brings you to the flashcards, but if you click below you can "play" the stack as different games).

I hope that you have found some inspiration in Glogster and this series. Please let me know about your experiences with Glogster and email me links to any Glogs you and your students create that you'd like to share. I'd sure love to revisit Glogster in a few months and showcase your work. Thanks, as always, for reading!!

Note: author contracts with Mindwing Concepts, Inc. to produce content for their blog.

Yet more (Mad) grammar

Kids, with their sophisticated humor, love the silliness of Mad Libs! This type of activity is yet another method for touching on categories and parts of speech.


Funbrain's version is dynamic and good if you want to avoid (but still have the option of) typing.



Wacky Web Tales is nothing new, but has more story forms and calls for kids to generate more category items such as plants, states, or liquids.

Grammar in Song

Using the short music videos from Schoolhouse Rock is another motivating way to review grammatical categories with your students prior to their annual testing sessions. Kids' enjoy these, never having had the opportunity to see them every Saturday morning as we did. They are all up on YouTube!

Language Lens:

• These songs really get in one's head, and as we know, music uses a different side of the brain than language, resulting in a handy mnemonic.
• Using printed lyrics of each song is a good follow-up activity, with kids being asked to identify examples of the parts of speech in each song.

That time of year...

I am not huge on the idea of SLPs being responsible for teaching parts of speech...I think this grammatical content needs to be explicitly taught in the classroom, and has been deemphasized a bit, perhaps rightly, in favor of other things. However, they are abstract categories that our kids tend to struggle with, and we can assist in reviewing them during this high-stakes-testing time of year.

One new interactive, part of Sheppard Software's set of cool visual pages, is the Grammar Tutorial. This series of games emphasizes identifying nouns, verbs and adjectives, a common type of question at least on the MCAS. You also can create a character on a stage using a noun, verb, and adjective--here is my green cloud laughing.

BBC Schools also has some nice interactives for review. One is embedded below, and the link is here. I always like visiting their site to see the interesting dialectal variations and slightly off-color (according to American standards) educational content--one of the animations below has a boy falling down the stairs...



Language Lens:

• Lessons in parts of speech and traditional grammar build metalinguistic and writing skills, as well as abstract categorization abilities.