Shortcut

Shortcut by Donald Crews has always been one of my favorites to use in therapy. It's a personal narrative, so good for teaching story elements, with some suspense. This story has an important message about evaluating dangers- a family of kids had been told not to take the shortcut (railroad tracks) and is surprised by a freight train running off schedule. Suspense is built as the situation unfolds but the children escape safely- reporting at the end that they never talk about the event again, but also clearly have thought/felt about it because they never take the shortcut either (more landscape of consciousness).

Shortcut is also a good representation of black characters in a different time.

As I reported to the parents of group members this week, the book also points to a bigger picture/main idea relevant to our current time (here represented with Story Grammar Marker® icons, Note: Author has a contractual consultative relationship with Mindwing Concepts for provision of blog and presentation content, but receives not royalties should you buy their products).

Note: your use of story mapping need not always be super-pretty, this was in an email.

I found this book on YouTube and planned to turn off the sound and read it aloud. Working with a terrific graduate student in telepractice sessions, I prepped him to do the follow-up activity. I had always had my students make a map of the story, because the setting is so integral here. I sent my student a quick Jamboard sketch (remember, Jamboard available in your Google tools) of what his target might look like, guiding him that he could ask questions like: where did they start? where were they going? where did the road run? where did the tracks run (must make a "shortcut")? other setting elements so it could end up looking something like this?

As activities often show, the students had their own vision when engaging in collaborative drawing, and did more of a micro-setting look at the story. It ended up being more of a mood-board than our original vision. But especially now, it's important to let our students express themselves how they choose, and reinforce their cooperation, inclusion of narrative elements, sharing imagination and following a group plan (terms from Social Thinking®).

What to: Using Google Slides for simple session agendas and visuals in telepractice

Today I did my first telepractice session with a social group of four middle school boys (emerging telepratictioner here) and am thrilled with how it went! As I've said I am making efforts here to share resources and ideas helpful for those looking to make a rapid transition to telepractice in these crazy times.

In yesterday's post I demonstrated the screen sharing feature of telepractice platforms and used this during this session. My graduate student WY Lo created these visuals with me, and they served as a support during the session targeting concepts such as The Group Plan (see Social Thinking®), conversational skills using the 6 Second Story™ (Based on Mindwing Concepts' work) and a brief discussion of the concepts of Body in the Group (Social Thinking® again) vs Social Distancing when in the community for safety. On that slide (5) the stick figures are movable if you are not in Present mode, and you make a copy (see below)

6 Second Stories along with the expectation and elicitation of comments and questions are a great activity for any session and worked well in this telepractice environment (Gallery View toggled w Screen Share are probably best, I realized). These "moves" in conversation also align with the PEERS® Curriculum.

Here is the link to the presentation. As usual please do not ask for permission to this presentation; you can click File>Make a Copy and it will be editable to you in your Google Drive


Notice how this presentation is "no big deal" nor would it be a lot of SLP talking head. That's the point: keep it simple and visually supportive. Hope you all are doing well and thanks for the response on the posts.

Add YouTube Clips to Google Slides

As Google Apps (G-Suite) becomes more ubiquitous in school settings, it becomes more useful for SLPs to tap into the power of these tools. Whether conducting in-class therapy activities, or via a small group with your laptop, or even in my case frequently in the private practice setting in a room with an Apple TV, having a visual "space" to explore contexts, language, and strategies is important. Using Google Slides allows you that space- I often encourage thinking about presentation creators flexibly, as you don't need to be creating a whole series of slides or a "PowerPoint." It's just a space, and one that is much more easy to work with than that of a word processor, because of the whole fitting things into paragraphs aspect (and the nightmare of trying to insert and place an image in a doc as opposed to a slide).

Another tool you can consider within Google Slides is the ability to insert a YouTube clip.

On a Google Slide, that's Insert > Video > Search, which searches YouTube.

Once onscreen, you may want to drag the video corners to make a bit larger.

Doing this has a number of advantages:

a) You can place helpful videos into lesson sequences within your Google Slides "decks" and therefore have them for subsequent groups, years, etc

b) Inserting the video here on a slide removes ads (sometimes) and distracting sidebar content

c) Your following slides can be a place to graphically/visually explore the ideas of the video in discussion with the group (e.g, a story map, see my post A Story of Shapes.

Considering your professional development schedule this year? Check out Sean's offerings for training sessions.

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).

More on mapping expository texts using tech, Part 2

In a recent ASHA Leader article I discussed intervention activities centered around social studies and expository text, and am continuing to discuss expository language in part one of this series and in this post.

One of the most useful apps for categorization and other expository language activities is Kidspiration Maps (free to try, $9.99 for full app). I truly believe this app should be in every SLP's and reading specialist's library as it has so many contextual uses. Pair this app with a picture book, textbook passage, video, discussion, information from another app or website...the list goes on. Kidspiration has been around for many years as a software resource and is still available also for Mac or PC, but at a higher pricepoint than the iPad version that shares almost all of its features.

I will talk about the diagramming features of Kidspiration (and its older brother Inspiration) and expository language in the next post, but in this post I would like to highlight Kidspiration's terrific Super Grouper feature. Super Groupers allow you to create an activity where you sort words and pictures into categories. Again, I find that these activities can be created to accompany any book or topic, and students enjoy taking your "wordsplash" or "picturesplash" and putting it in order. In the process, you can ask them to verbalize categories and descriptive attributes that serve as rationales for their sorting.

To offer a contextual example, students of mine were reading Iron Thunder by Avi- this is the story of the fateful battle of the ironclad ships Merrimack and Monitor during the Civil War. As we reviewed the first chapters it was clear my students were not so solid on the concepts and associations around the North and South at this time. I constructed a simple Super Grouper activity to address this:

The Super Groupers are the large blue and gray (color coded purposefully) rectangles in this case, with ovals containing information about perspectives, characters, synonyms, geographic information, actions, and so on, to sort. The student interacts with the activity by tapping and dragging the items (which can be pictures also, see below) into the Super Groupers. Once completed, you can also switch to Outline view (tap on outline icon in upper left) to see the information in a linear fashion:

One great feature of the Inspiration Software apps is that diagrams and outlines can be exported- from Outline View tap the share button and you can export as text to other apps such as Pages or even Google Docs, where students can expand on the language.

To create a Super Grouper activity, select the Super Grouper option from the home screen. The Super Grouper menu (highlighted at top) lets you tap and drag shapes into the work area. Double tap at the top of your shape to label it. Tap to select your shape, then tap the paintbrush at the bottom menu to change the background color.

The picture library is accessed from the "frame" icon. Browse the categories to tap/drag items to be sorted; you can also search the library or add photos, making even the visual contexts of Kidspiration limitless. You can add audio support to your activity or have students record sentences as they sort by tapping any picture, then the microphone button at the bottom, which allows you to record an audio note.

To make a more text-based sorting activity, use the Shapes menu. Double tap on any shape to type in it.

A very helpful feature of Kidspiration is that activities can be duplicated, so that in the event you complete the sort with multiple groups, you don't have to keep unsorting the items! From the Open Document menu, tap Edit, then tap to select an activity, and tap the Copy icon. This menu also allows you to share your created activities with colleagues who have Kidspiration. From the Open Document menu, tap Edit, then tap to select an activity, and tap the Share icon. From there you can mail the activity, send it to Dropbox, or tap More to send to Google Drive (where you can share the file with whomever). It's a great idea for a group of colleagues to work together creating and sharing activities that would be useful to all.

Amazon Prime Ads: Good context for teaching narrative structure or problem-solution

Video versions of ads can be motivating ways to target students' understanding of narrative and expository text structures. I have recently enjoyed the series from Amazon Prime in which people solve animal-related problems. Here's one featuring an adorable little horse:



As the ads are wordless, they offer an opportunity to work on student narration and also interpretation of nonverbal information.

Westby and Culatta's recently published article "Telling Tales" offers a tutorial on assessing and intervening on narrative skills (primarily personal rather than fictional), and as you know I am a big fan of (and consultant for) Story Grammar Marker® to break down and produce narrative material. I also highly recommend Dr. Anna Vagin's books (and mailing list) for terrific information on how to use video to target narrative and social cognition skills.

Here are two more in the series of ads:

Cloudart

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.

Develop Descriptive Schema with Trading Cards

ReadWriteThink, a longtime online presence developed with the participation of the International Reading Association, has amassed an impressive amount of interactives (flash-based, so not accessible on iPad) that can be used to build language skills. My issue with the more complex ones that could be used with older students was that your work could not be saved, and you had to finish your work in one sitting.  This problem has been addressed both on their site, which I am glad to see that they have continued to develop, and with their Trading Cards (Free!) app.

Trading Cards has for years existed as a great activity on the ReadWriteThink site, and came out as an app last year. With this app, you can create a descriptive "trading card" about any of the following:

Each type of card has a different schema to it, and it actually would be a good pre-activity to have students predict what attributes would be on a card about a Real Place vs. say, an Object.

The website has a few extra choices of the type of card you can create, and also lets you create your own schema.

The app allows you to set up user profiles so that collections of cards are stored in the app. When creating a card, you can add a picture saved to the camera roll, access guiding questions and type text (limited to certain defined lengths), flip the card and finish your work, and save/print/email your card. As this is a task that may take several sessions, it's great that you can return to the app and continue work. On the Trading Cards activity on ReadWriteThink's website, you can download a partially completed card and re-open it later for continued work. 

Trading Cards would be a great way to develop more advanced descriptive language while working with geography, books that students are reading or that you have chosen for the session, the Social Thinking® concept of people files, or other contexts.

Interactive Books and More with Collins' Big Cat Series

Harper Collins' "Big Cat" Series of apps for iPad is not to be missed- you should be sure to download all 8 of the apps while they are free! These interactive books are great for your early learners or those working on developmentally lower skills. Each book consists of a short, simple story which can be read to students via audio, or students can read themselves, activating small interactive elements (animations) which boost engagement along the way. The books contain rich illustrations without many words, so that clinicians will have the opportunity to stop and elicit language, which can also be recorded and played back to the student for engagement and auditory feedback.

An illustration from "Playing"- a contextual means to elicit pronouns, verbs, causals, or other targets.

Each book smartly has a contextual language theme or category woven into a story- weather, directionality, etc. The stories themselves have an action sequence narrative structure, and could be used with tools such as Story Grammar Marker® to target narrative elements and retelling of characters, settings and actions.

The BEST part of the "Big Cat" apps is that each is also a creation tool in which you can make your own "books" within the app. Students can arrange backgrounds and visual elements from the story, adding text and audio for a retelling or their own creations. This is truly an awesome feature for a free app! Although these creations cannot be shared outside of the app, this is where screenshots come in handy.

Grab 'em and spread the word!

Note: author has a contractual relationship with Mindwing Concepts, creator of Story Grammar Marker, for creation of blog content.

Animonths: Speaking of Sheep...

Here's a great wordless narrative video for you! Have your students provide the words...Probably it would be best for older kids given the quick underwear scene, but use your best judgement. Happy story mapping!



Sheeped Away from Junaid Chundrigar on Vimeo.

The Write-N-Ator!

The Write-n-ator is a site from New Hampshire Public Television based on the PBS Series Word Girl!  The site presents 20 different short clips from the TV show, followed by a writing challenge. What I love about the site is that it presents writing prompts in a fun context, and the prompts are all prime targets for S/L or literacy interventions.  They ask kids to work within basic text structures- list, sequence, or descriptive paragraphs- and could be completed in a relatively short period of time.  This would be a great resource to use when teaching kids to use graphic organizers, write basic paragraphs, elaborate and expand sentences in their speaking or writing, use main idea and details, or a variety of other IEP goals.

This would be a good resource to take some time with this summer and consider which videos you might like to use with a particular grade level(s).

Welcome to GlogsterEDU Week!

I have been meaning to write about GlogsterEDU for some time, but have put it off because, though a wonderful and easy resource to use, it requires a series of posts to really do it justice. It was hard to commit. But here we go- It's GlogsterEDU week on SpeechTechie!

GlogsterEDU is a free (with some nice paid features) site based on the concept of "poster yourself." Yes, the idea is to offer an online, electronic and easy-to-use poster-maker for teachers and students to publish their cool creations related to the curriculum. Glogster started out more as a social network for teens and still exists that way, (like blogging, but graphic, hence the name) but has wisely embraced the education market and is fast becoming an extremely popular alternative to "Death by PowerPoint" assignments in schools.

Why Posters? We've probably all tried a poster project with our students at some point. Posters are a fun and engaging project to embark on with students, and clearly are language-based, what with their ability to incorporate lots of information and visuals. However, they can be prohibitively time-consuming if one wishes to have the kids design anything worth displaying, and with our population frequently having fine-motor issues limiting their writing and drawing skills...it can be tough. GlogsterEDU provides an interface that allows students (and teachers) to create well-designed projects in a fraction of the time of a traditional poster. Additionally, as a 21st-century poster-creator, GlogsterEDU allows you to embed audio, video, and links to websites to make your project truly interactive.  The main idea for SLPs is that GlogsterEDU can be one way to organize your visuals, text and links for an activity, series of activities, or theme, or help students to consolidate their learning about a topic in a graphic and engaging way!

This week, I am going to be covering GlogsterEDU with screencasts on how to use it, and a number of examples of how it can be used in SLP practice. To begin with, let's check out their "Best of" gallery, itself a Glog. Click around and explore the categories below to see what's possible with GlogsterEDU! Some of my favorites after exploring these examples:

A Night at the Museum: Students produce first-person narratives from the POV of famous people!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss: A good example of how a Glog can provide a context to explore a topic, and a landing page for students to direct their own learning.

The Outsiders: A Glog can be an engaging way to summarize, highlight story grammar and visualize any book.

What Can You See Underwater: Glogs are a great way to explore and break down the language of any curriculum area and focus on categories.

And best of all, GlogsterEDU so easy to use, you'll be able to involve students in the process of creating Glogs. Tune in this week to see how!

So, here's the plan:
Tuesday: How to set up your Glogster account, create a new Glog and add text.
Wednesday: Adding images and graphics.
Thursday: Adding links, audio and video.
Fri: A few last features and some more examples and ideas of Glogs related to SLP practice (If you have any you'd like to share, please email me!)

Use Flickr to find Visualizing and Verbalizing photos, or interesting stimulus pictures.

The early steps of Lindamood-Bell's Visualizing and Verbalizing program involve training students to describe a presented picture in detail, using "structure words" to help them organize and generate detail.  I have always found these techniques to make great, curriculum-relevant lessons (many kids are told to visualize what they read but do not really know how), even if you don't go exactly by the L-B book.

Rather than poring through magazines (I don't really have any) to find resources for this level of V/V, I really like Flickr's Interestingness Calendar.  On this page, Flickr features 6 photos per day, uploaded by users that are interesting in terms of content, color, and composition.  You would want to look ahead of time and bookmark the URLs of images you find appropriate for therapy.

I have found it helpful to combine V/V activities with Story Grammar Marker- after the picture is described in detail, it can serve as a story starter!

I need to emphasize that the Interestingness Calendar is something you can use to bookmark and/or save images you can use with students, but you should not go there and click around during a session.  Like all photography, some of the images are, well... provocative.  You can click through to an image and bookmark it in your browser or diigo.  You can save SOME Flickr images (some users do not allow you to download their pictures, understandably by selecting Actions above the full-size image, then View all Sizes, then click the size to download.  If this doesn't work, you can always bookmark and display the image on your laptop, iPad or iPod touch during a session.

Qwicki

Qwiki is a brand new site that has great potential for use by SLPs. Enter a search term into Qwiki (right now, the available terms are limited), and a wall of images and video-like a dynamic slide show-results, along with audio providing information about the topic. This is why the site is called "The Information Experience."

Right now, Qwiki is in Alpha, which means it is in the very early stages of testing. You can try a sample Qwiki here, or request to join their alpha at the site, which gives you access to search.

Language Lens:

Qwiki would be a great context to develop information organization or auditory comprehension strategies. Try using a graphic organizer, Inspiration/Kidspiration, or key word generation task after watching a Qwiki result.

Thanks to iLearn Technology for featuring 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.

The 50 Worst Inventions

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.

Describing by Parts

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.

Using Kerpoof, Part 2

Cross-posting on Mindwing Concepts' blog today. Please click over to see my post that goes deeper into how to use Kerpoof to develop narrative skills using Story Grammar Marker. I made a little booklet using PowerPoint and publishing to issuu (a great site that makes your doucuments look like a glossy magazine) and it details a project I did with a 3rd grade classroom using these tools. Check it out!

You need to click through to the Mindwing Blog to see the booklet:

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).

Leprechaun Experiments

I'm guessing your students' eyes will be smiling when they see these kids' scientific moves...how cute, and what great role models for academic curiosity! Not that we here in the flooded Northeast want to do any more mixing of St. Patrick's day and WATER, as is shown in these experiments.

Thanks to Steve Spangler at Making Science Fun for this video clip.

Language Lens

• This video would be a great complement to an experiment of your own, such as this one. Experiments are a perfect context to practice listing materials and using temporal and causal language.
• Try the "Who Wants to be a Millionare" sentence game- kids earn increasing amounts of "money" as they create a sentence (in this case, about the video) using and, or, but, when, because, so...

Visible Thinking

Visible Thinking is a terrific teaching resource from Harvard University promoting the use of activities called Thinking Routines to develop students' higher-level thinking skills. Language is, of course, a manifestation of thinking, so all of the Thinking Routines promote language skill development. The routines are game-like, structured discussions (if you are familiar with KWL charts, these are basically Thinking Routines) that take place around a topic or visual context (e.g. a YouTube video, map, or picture) and lead students toward operating on higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. I often would turn to a Thinking Routines activity when I found something visually interesting, such as a book cover, and wanted to use it to elicit language within a session. A good example is the "Headlines" Routine:

"This routine draws on the idea of newspaper-type headlines as a vehicle for summing up and capturing the essence of an event, idea, concept, topic, etc. The routine asks one core question:
1. If you were to write a headline for this topic or issue right now that captured the most important aspect that should be remembered, what would that headline be?"

This article on the blog Infinite Thinking Machine provides more examples of how Thinking Routines can be used in relation to YouTube videos, such as this one:



Language Lens

• Thinking Routines are great discussion structures when you are working at the discourse level with students.
• The prompts in each routine are often related to the classic "main idea and details" type of goal, but also move students toward higher level thinking.
• The elements within each routine generally link together in ways that foster complex sentence formulation skills.