More on using music in therapy

Music is motivating, self-regulating and full of language. Recently I have used songs with individuals and groups in a couple of specific ways.

For an individual client I see, I have been working to incorporate many of his interests as part of a neurodiversity-affirming approach. When he mentioned liking the Beatles, I instantly knew this could be a great path to engagement. We started with "Here Comes the Sun" and using Wikipedia to look up some details about the song brought some great conversation. In addition, the famous album cover of "Abbey Road" brought some Visualizing and Verbalizing-style picture description into the session. Songs with lyrics are available on YouTube and through this we discussed figurative language with this song and "Yesterday."

Simple sketches helped with some back and forth- "Wait, 'Here Comes the Sun' is about the sun coming right at us and crashing into us, right?" "Is 'Yesterday' literally about yesterday?"

For a group activity focusing on different kinds of conversations, I was inspired by this TikTok, in which a teacher polled her students for opinions on the #1 song when she was their age. This made a good executive function activity- what would this look like if we did this? What do you need to know? What objects do we need? See Ward/Jacobsen's Get Ready, Do, Done model. All comments were welcome and I was pleased to learn some new slang when one of the kids reported that Heart's "Alone" (showing the music video in this case provided some extra visual engagement- such big hair!) was "mid," meaning "just OK." 

Do you have other ways you like to incorporate music? Let us know in the comments!

A focus on gratitude

Gratitude is a Thanksgivingy theme...but actually much more than that. Much research has supported that practicing gratitude as a form of mindfulness can be self-regulating and cultivate positive neural connections. 

In addition, gratitude has a language lens as it:

-relates life experiences

-can/should be practiced as a "listing" activity

-expresses causality

-can be pushed to the abstract i.e. being grateful for intangible things.

Over this and coming weeks I will be using this and this video in discussion activities.

 

Both are accessible, short and visual. Videos from Headspace are very useful that way, and the second has a bit more of a near/practical hook that will help a lot of my boys access what could be perceived as a dismissible touchy feely message.

As a follow-up activity, Jamboard is a motivating visual way to have students journal, share, describe and discuss. Here's my model:

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®).

May the 4th Be With You

You may not have time to incorporate this into today's sessions, but there's some generalizable ideas here anyway. May the 4th is of course the punny/meme-y Star Wars "holiday" when we can wish everyone all The Force. Using topics of interest to our students is motivating, especially in tough times, and can incorporate many goals around language. LEGO clips (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Adventures, others) are widely available on YouTube and frequently wordless, thus tapping interpretation of nonverbals and situational cues.

Training is a fun such clip.



You can use this clip in teletherapy to:
-Work on narrating or composing sentences about the story
-Use chat to have students write lines of dialogue, working on conversational language (see Anna Vagin's ideas about this)
-Guide a discussion web about a question like "What's something you had to practice to get better at?"

Videos and Discussion Webs

(sorry email subscribers for that last incomplete email, I hit Publish too soon)

Discussion webs are described in one of my favorite articles, The Magic of Once Upon A Time: Narrative Teaching Strategies (Hoggan & Strong, 1994). How nerdy that I have favorite journal articles, but anyway it was very influential for me and helped me see all of the activities that could spring from (any) context.

Copy and pas- I mean, quoting the article liberally: The discussion web (Alverman, 1991; Duthie, 1986) is a graphic aid that is used to support ideas during conversation about the story. Through its use, speech-language pathologists can guide students to discuss more complex ideas and concepts. The speech-language pathologist begins the discussion by asking an inferential or abstract question—for example, “Does the elephant deserve to be kicked out of the jungle?” The students then discuss, either as a whole group or with a partner, the reasons the elephant should or should not be kicked out (Appendix E).

Using the discussion web, the students can discuss their own reasons and react to opposing views. The language used during the exchange of reasons provides meaningful oral language practice. The discussion web does not have to focus on an issue found in the story. The speech-language pathologist can center the web around a related topic, giving students an opportunity to discuss issues of personal relevance. Discussion-web practice often begins with students working in pairs; one student then acts as a spokesperson and presents responses to a larger group, eventually leading to a whole-class discussion. When each pair is allowed to present only one reason to the larger group, students learn to prioritize and prepare for the final discussion.

Appendix E:

This was a tough week. The outbreak is still surging in Boston. It was a vacation week for us, but that of course didn't happen. The marathon didn't happen. Tuesday, it was announced that school is canceled for the remainder of the school year (expected, but still a gut punch, and we cried). Among other things. But we are healthy and working here, and have a lot to be grateful for. 

I was inspired by a video released by the Boston Globe on Monday and shared by a friend on Facebook: Here's the link.

We discussed this video in my groups as it prompts a lot of inferential and main idea thinking, and also is essentially Bostonian self-talk that serves as an Inner Coach Green Zone tool.

This would be an example of a discussion web you could use to provide a visual support for questions and responses- often writing down language and ideas helps students revise themselves and add on to what others have said as well. In Google Slides, shapes are your typable friend.



As always with Google shares, please don't request editing access. You can grab this slide for yourself by going to File>Make a Copy or File>Download as PPT

As an additional challenge/conversation prompt, I asked my group members to show the video to someone in their family and talk about it, and notified families about this in a follow-up email.

I hope this serves as helpful in its content, in its potential for use as-is over the coming week, and as an example of discussion webbing in response to a video.

Take them on a ride

Years ago the amazing Sarah Ward came to our department of SLPs and talked about schema. Common features define different topics e.g. animals all have habitats, feeding behaviors, adaptations, appearance etc. Ask yourself "What do all ___ have in common?" and you have a semantic map for describing any topic. I have done that lesson over and over and over.

Engagement is important at this time, and it's great to keep it fun and light. Why not take your groups to an amusement park? Virtually I mean, of course. Whether synched or asynched (watch video live together or put in Google Classroom), you can YouTube search POV rides and focus on Universal, Disney, whatever. Ask questions that prompt observation, description of the ride, links to the topic, comparisons to other rides. Since rides have topical schema you can link to other materials with the same context, e.g. this Expedition Everest Ride with something from this collection.




As always, review any video you plan to use fully. Rides are also a context for swear words.

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.

On obvious signs and "hidden rules..."

Presenting a video can be a simple use of tech that can establish context, provide visual support, engage students in discussion, and open the door to a related post-activity addressing language skills. A good example is this video which features about 100 unnecessary signs such as:

The video moves quickly, but pause as many times as you want! You can also screenshot to pick and choose signs you'd like to explore (perhaps a good move to work on functional reading). Some ideas on using the video:
-Metalinguistics: what makes the message obvious and unnecessary?
-Social Cognition: the video can be used to have students practice "thinking with their eyes" for the greater context of what makes the sign silly, as well as engaging in humor. Using signs in therapy activities is also a good way to introduce the related Social Thinking® concept of "Hidden Rules" (related to Dr. Brenda Smith Myles' Hidden Curriculum); there are many (more complex than shown here) rules that we need to learn through observation and experience in order to be successful socially.
-Narrative Language: Have students discuss or sketch stories depicting why someone thought these particular signs were necessary. This context would also allow for working on complex language and conjunctions like if, because, and so.

Fun with Mentos

A few weeks ago a colleague started a group session by having the participants guess what was in a bag- and it was apple Mentos. This reminded me of the goofy series of 90s Mentos (the Freshmaker!) ads like this one:




I realized there are a number of good language opportunities in this series and subsequently have had fun using it in groups of teens:
-Wordless materials are often a good opportunity for students to practice narrative language and interpreting nonverbals (my students needed some cues with this, so it was definitely in their ZPD)
-A number of the commercials show someone breaking a "hidden rule" (e.g. we don't block people in when parking), a concept applicable across the day in social cognitive instruction.
-Ads are always fun for having students figure out the main idea or advertiser's intent/implied message: What do Mentos have to do with the situation?

Here are some more:

The Lunch Date

The Broken Shoe

The Car Movers

Fresh Paint

Associated activities:

-Play Foo Fighters' Big Me, which parodies these ads. What's the same and different?
-Eat Mentos!
-Do the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment. Naturally you can't do this in your room so it's an opportunity to have students figure out where you can do it, and practice walking and chatting together with bodies in a group. One of my HS students did a great job of evaluating where we could stage it so that we would not distract any nearby classrooms who might see us out the windows ("thinking with the eyes," among many Social Thinking® concepts)

Visuals and Movement are Key to Science-based Language

This website is 7 years old this month! Wow, another blog-iversary! I am always grateful for the connections and opportunities that have come from writing here, as well as the sense that I am doing something to help students with social and language learning issues. Thanks for reading! I'm taking off for school vacation next week, so see you in March.

I meet with a middle school student weekly for language therapy, working on narrative and expository language comprehension, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (via Visualizing and Verbalizing® and other techniques). I try also as much as possible to incorporate his texts and assignments to make the time seem worthwhile to him, and to apply strategies to the academic contexts that are useful to him (and to keeping up his grades)!

We often choose science assignments as a context, as weekly he has to complete activities like reading a chapter and "taking notes." Applying expository text structures (list, sequence, description, compare-contrast, cause effect) and practicing his ability to talk through text features (e.g. headings, figures, photos, sidebars, captions) here have helped the student, as does the work of Fang (2012) who outlined how science texts have tons of:

-Nominalization (e.g. “failure, evaporation, safeguarding”) and technical vocabulary, so we work on making connections to known words and
-Complicated noun phrases to break down: “The conversion of stored potential energy into kinetic energy can also be harnessed to power homes, factories and entire cities.” What’s converted? Energy. What kind of energy? Potential energy. What else do we know about the potential energy? It’s stored potential energy. Etc.

Doodle Buddy is a great, engaging way to write out and break down words and phrases like the above.

Besides these structural strategies, my student has benefited from using tech resources that provide visuals to scaffold the meaning of these complicated science passages. A few I have utilized on-the-fly when I knew he wasn't "getting it" include:

BrainPop: If you have school access, this resource is the best. You can log in with school subscription to the website or app and check out a 3-minute animated video on just about any relevant topic.

TED-Ed: Like its grownup counterpart, TED-Ed embeds key science or social studies concepts in a larger, practical discussion, which can be good for making pragmatic connections. I'd recommend a quick Google search to see if there is a video that would visualize a concept, rather than searching the site. This is how I found this great explanation of models of light, which frankly we were both struggling with based on the examples in the student's textbook.

TED-Ed video showing light behaving as waves.

In a pinch, whiteboard-like videos like those available at The Science Classroom do a good job of making a topic more visual and showing movement (i.e. sequence) where it is relevant.

Fang's article is great to check out for applying strategies to contextual work with students, particularly adolescents:
Fang, Z. (2012). Language correlates of disciplinary literacy. Topics in Language Disorders, 32 (1), 19-34.

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:

Video Modeling and iMovie (Part 2)

In my last post, I reviewed (briefly) a meta-analysis (Bellini & Akullian, 2007) supporting video modeling (VM) and video self-modeling (VSM, the difference being that the student or students are included in the video produced to promote the use of the target behavior). In the study, the authors recommended the therapeutic technique of storyboarding targeted interactions before videoing students, which is also supported in literature describing interventions for social and executive functioning (Ward & Jacobsen, 2014).

The authors also highlighted the technical skill that was needed to produce and edit personalized videos. In 2007.

In 2015 (and for a few years back), it is not at all as hard to produce and edit video clips, because we have iMovie for iOS. Now, I originally taught myself iMovie about 14 years ago on the Mac, and it was quite a chore. After shooting video or compiling photos somewhere else, often a comparatively small but still clunky DV camera, you had to import the video (in real time) and use a complicated interface to edit it. iMovie for iOS (Free if you have purchased an iDevice after Oct 2013, otherwise $4.99) still has a bit of a learning curve--but the fact that you can shoot and edit by touch all on the same device goes a long way toward making these techniques accessible to our profession. Note that you can do much of the below on an iPod or iPhone as well, though the small screen will make it a bit trickier.

I had a great time with a group at Nova Southeastern doing an interactive demo session on iMovie recently--I'd like to make this a habit! As a group, we discussed the study mentioned above and decided on a task that I could be "prompted through," as an organizer recorded me and another gave me some cues when I "forgot" a step. We decided on something simple--pushing in a chair after leaving a table!

When you open iMovie, you begin by adding a new project, as in many other apps with the + symbol.  iMovie has this great interface where you can create a Movie Trailer, but in this case we select "Movie."

Once you have created a project, you can add video previously shot from your camera roll, or tap the camera to record directly into the timeline (the area used to build and edit the project). In this case we just added the recorded single clip of my being prompted to stand up and push in the chair!

Once the clip is added to the project, you'll want to navigate to any segment you want to edit, such that the play head (white line) is over the beginning or end of the segment. In this segment, the person to the side was giving me a verbal prompt we wanted to edit out. Be sure to tap the clip so it is highlighted in yellow, then tap Split. This creates two separate clips so you can simply edit the end of one or the beginning of the next, like so:

The beauty of editing in iMovie is that you can "trim" footage by moving the trim handle (yellow bar) to the left or right, which cuts or re-adds footage as you like. If you make a mistake, simply adjust--no need to start over. In this case, we moved the handle to the right until the video clip no longer contained the verbal prompt.

Proceed in this way to edit out any footage, including prompts or errors, so that students can see the situation going "as planned." iMovie allows you to do a lot more than this, and nice guides are here and here.

Like many iPad apps, your project saves automatically and you can return to edit it. Tapping on your project in the Projects area gives you many options for sharing: saving the edited video to the camera roll or publishing to YouTube, sending to Dropbox, etc.

I could spend a lot more time on iMovie, but hope this gives you a start!

Toons.Tv- a resource for visual contextual teaching

Toons.TV (on the web, accessible through Safari on iPad, free) is an engaging source of short animated videos useful for building narrative and social cognition skills. The website houses several seasons of the "Angry Birds Toons" series as well as spinoffs such as "Piggy Tales"--it also has selections from one of my favorites, "Shaun the Sheep." All of these series are wordless, and their language-neutral nature gives much opportunities to elicit storytelling from our students, as well as focusing on critical skills such as inference and identifying nonverbal cues, while in the context of topics of interest such as Angry Birds.

I have never floundered to find a quick "lesson" in an Angry Birds or Shawn the Sheep video; in addition to being a context for developing narrative skills such as setting description or retelling, a few I liked from Angry Birds specifically included (along with social cognition or specific Social Thinking® concepts):

Piggies from the Deep- use of humor, the 5-Point Silly Scale
Gate Crasher- flexible thinking, "thinking with the eyes" and "making a smart guess"
Gardening with Terence- talking about physical presence and what it means, making impressions
Do as I Say- "own plan vs. the group plan," humor, emotional vocabulary such as impressed, respectful
Just So- "important vs. unimportant," "Inner Coaching"
Hide and Seek- 5-Point Scales of Problems and the Social Thinking around hide and seek (perspective taking, cause and effect)
Treasure Hunt- "smart guess vs. wacky guess"

Videos such as the above can easily be followed with contextual play activities practicing the concepts or within the theme- for example, after the Treasure Hunt video we conducted an actual treasure hunt using verbal clues placed in different locations, which additionally allowed us to work on keeping our body in the group and other collaboration skills.

A resource I have found very useful in expanding my thinking about using video is SLP (and Ph.D) Anna Vagin's Movie Time Social Learning- she also has a book about using online videos called YouCue Feelings. Also see Tara Roehl's Pinterest boards around motivating contexts such as Angry Birds. I hope you find these resources helpful, too! If you discover other alignments between the videos on Toons.Tv and language or social concepts, please let us know in the comments.

I will be presenting in the Washington, DC area in September for the Center for Communication and Learning, LLC- hope to see some of you there! Click here for details.

Calming, Part 3

Incorporation of mindfulness techniques, regardless of instructional discipline, is a strategy that has more than emerging evidence. A systematic review of studies of mindfulness training for students and adults with developmental disabilities found significant effects on a range of areas, documenting reduced aggression and anxiety and increased social skills and academic performance (Hwang & Kearney, 2012). Many programs such as Mindful Schools are being implemented school-wide, teachers are being encouraged to practice mindfulness and leading treatment practices incorporate activities such as Yoga classes.

For our students who struggle with managing their own thoughts, and so are led in tangential/oppositional/anxious/dysregulated directions impacting their communication, mindfulness can be incorporated in small ways. Books, videos and audio files focused on awareness of and strategies around thinking can be very engaging, and also serve as language activities by virtue of eliciting descriptive and metacognitive language.

I highly recommend the Cosmic Kids YouTube channel for a start for short meditation activities for your young students. The Zen Den series are short, beautifully produced, visual meditations focused on a variety of calming thinking strategies. I have field-tested these with a range of groups, with great responses from both girls and boys. The fact that the clips are on YouTube makes a great connection to home, as meditation is meant to be done regularly, even for short periods of time.

Even if that carryover is not achieved, clips such as Master the Monkey establish a concrete connection and vocabulary for an abstract concept: our mind can be like a hyperactive monkey and we can practice strategies to keep it present:




Movies in My Mind presents a fun visualization exercise for which you can conduct a language-based debriefing after the fact: "What did you see on the other side of that door?"




Getting Wanty discusses a specific situation of wanting something in a store, but can be applied to many other situations involving "JustMe" vs. Thinking of Others and social behavior (see the work of Social Thinking®).



See also the great Yoga Adventures videos that put yoga in the context of settings and "stories," again offering connections to language activities and themes.

Hwang, Y, & Kearney, P. (2012). A systematic review of mindfulness intervention for individuals with developmental disabilities: Long-term practice and long lasting effects. Research in Developmental Disabilities. 34, 314-326

Create Narrated Slide or Video Shows with Videolicious

I am giving a session on Digital Storytelling in speech and language intervention at today's ASHA Schools conference in Long Beach, CA, and thought I would feature one of my favorite tools in this genre.

Videolicious is a simple video creator- it allows you select photos or videos from your photo library/camera roll and talk over them, effectively creating a narrated video. What a great language tool- and did I say it's free? It's freeness comes with two limitations- videos are limited to 10 minutes, and the saving process sends your video to the service's website (unless you follow the directions below).

Videolicious is really simple to use. You will first need to have photos or videos in your photos app- either shoot them or save images from the Internet (again, see the directions below to avoid violating copyright). Once they are there, select them by tapping them in sequence within the app:

You are then given the opportunity to record a "Selfie" introduction to the video (you talking to the camera). You can select the option of using "mic only" so that you or the student do not appear in the video. As you record your narration, you tap the selected images or videos in order to time when they will appear in your video. Thus, a narrated slideshow.

Language Lens:
-You can use Videolicious to have students (including adults) practice describing, sequential language, storytelling, persuading- whatever form of discourse you would like.
-Videolicious, as it records audio of one speaking, is also a nice tool to work on articulation, voice, and fluency.
-As your project in Videolicious can include video, it can also be used for video modeling, having kids narrative the steps to social or functional sequences.
-Many creation apps are more about the process than the product. Use the process to help students to plan their language using a graphic organizer or script.

BUT!
Videolicious, if used exactly as designed, saves the finished project both to your photos app AND the Videolicious website. This presents several issues:
a) You don't want to be sending video of your students to the Internet unless you have explicit permission.
b) If you saved images from Google Images, they were likely copyrighted. These are OK to use in any project that stays on your iPad in the app itself or if it is saved locally to the Camera Roll (this is Fair Use), but not to be republished to the Internet. You can use tools such as Flickr Creative Commons or other Creative Commons search websites to save the photos. You should still site them in some way, either orally within the video or by creating a text image (maybe with Doodle Buddy) attributing the image.

OR
...you can avoid publishing the project to the site by following these steps (given to me by a Videolicious support person):
1. Create your video. Don't tap Save.
2. Leave the Videolicious app and turn on Airplane Mode in the Settings app of your iPad. This disconnects your iPad from the Internet.
3. Return to Videolicious and complete the steps of saving the video. This will save it to the Camera Roll (Photos app) and NOT the site.
4. When saving is complete, tap the Share button (arrow coming out of the square) and Delete Video. It will remain in your photos app but then the app will not attempt to upload it when you turn off Airplane Mode.

5. Go back to the Settings app and turn Airplane Mode off.

This does seem like a lot of steps, I know. Nevertheless, this is one of the easiest and best apps I know of to make a narrated video, so I still highly recommend it.

"We Do Listen"-Animated Books about Social Cognition and Skills

The We Do Listen Foundation has produced some great books that are available both as hardcovers and free animated versions on their website.  The stories feature Harold B. Wigglebottom, who often commits a series of social errors and learns through them- thus providing a good context for teaching story grammar. In particular, "Harold B. Wigglebottom Learns to Listen" is a helpful additional context for teaching Whole Body Listening (a term originally created by Suzanne Truesdale and also discussed in Nita Everly's Can You Listen With Your Eyes and Kristen Wilson and Elizabeth Sautter's Whole Body Listening Larry books), and I like that the story provides an opportunity to discuss perspective taking as others notice and are affected by Harold's difficulties in listening. To further explore these concepts, see the work of Michelle Garcia Winner at Social Thinking®. The site's playable animated books and displayable/printable posters are also iPad-friendly.

Celebrate Speech with a "Silent Film"

Another way to promote the awareness of the importance of speech during Better Speech and Hearing Month (or other times) is to explore the idea of silent film. Many kids are unaware that there ever were films that have no sound, and any language-neutral visual can be a great context for having kids generate language. I found this treasure, "Unspoken Content: Silent Film in the ESL Classroom" just in a quick search about this topic.  The article describes how "The Painted Lady," available, like many films, on YouTube (or using PlayTube to cache if YouTube is blocked), can be used to target narrative and metalinguistic awareness.

I mention all this primarily because Google has recently unveiled a cool new resource: The Peanut Gallery. This website (you cannot access this on iPad, and it only works in Google Chrome) allows you to dictate language that will appear as "silent film" titles over any of a selection of over 12 old movie clips. The site uses Google's "Web Speech API" and is remarkably accurate. Just speak, and it will convert your speech to text within titles over the movie clip, which is then saved and shareable.

You can see one of my attempts at it here.

The Language Lens on this site, then, is that it provides you with many contexts to have students analyze situations (characters, settings, ongoing events) and generate narration related to this, which employs the interpretation of body language and emotions, as well as, potentially, metalinguistics such as sarcasm and understatement. 

You will need to insert test dialogue (e.g. "Action" or "Oh no!") just to make the film proceed at first, so that kids get the context and can plan dialogue for a second or third try (or more), as improvising may be too difficult without your scaffolding.  

Common Core Connection

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.

Appy-Picking Month: Videos App

The Videos app that comes pre-installed on your iPad as part of iOS is one that you might want to "pick" for use of videos in your therapy.  This video shows you how to move videos from iTunes to this app, and also another way to bypass blocking of YouTube so you are able to show selected videos from your iPad.

iPad Essentials: Working around the Barriers to YouTube Access

YouTube scares a lot of people, who rightfully worry about its Wild West of content and the often pragmatically inappropriate and soul-crushingly rude comments left in response to videos.  It is not a resource that kids should really be allowed to explore without boundaries.

At the same time, I do think it is a shame that so many school districts have chosen to block this and other resources rather than teaching kids to use them responsibly, and holding them accountable for when they don't. Doing so prevents educators from accessing many videos that have educational and language-enhancing purposes (see a previous post on this here, if you want specifics). YouTube also has a "channel" just for teachers, and blogs such as The Kid Should See This provide great examples of videos you can use to elicit language.

Unfortunately, if your building blocks access to YouTube or does not allow you access to wifi on your iDevice, your YouTube app is pretty much useless while in that zone. However, there is a way to access those particularly choice videos for therapeutic use, it just takes a few steps and some forethought. Here's what you do.

1. Identify a video of interest and while on a computer (not your iPad), copy the video's URL:

2. Go to KeepVid in your computer's browser and paste in the copied URL and hit Download at the end of the blue bar (not the giant red download, that's a ubiquitous ad, LOL):

3. Wait for the potential video files to pop up and download the MP4 by clicking on it. Again, ignore the giant Download button:

4. This will download the YouTube clip as a video file to your computer, usually to the Downloads folder. Now to get it onto your iPad. Open an email account that is accessible on your iPad (added to your Mail app. Accounts can be added to the Mail app using the Settings app under Mail, Contacts, Calendars). Gmail accounts work well for this process. Attach the video file to an email and send it to that account that you can access on the iPad. This may take a minute.

5. On your iPad, while connected to wifi, check the email account and locate the email. Tap the video icon in the email to download the video to the iPad. Then, tap and hold to bring up the option to save the video:

6. Now, go to your Photos app.  The video will be saved there (not in the Videos app, which is for iTunes content), and you can play it whenever you need to, regardless of YouTube blockage or wifi connection.

[Edit: You can also import/drag your video file into iTunes on a computer, plug in your iPad (you don't need to sync), and drag that video as displayed in iTunes onto the iPad icon in the left sidebar.  The video will then appear in the Videos app.]

A couple of caveats:

-Videos take up space. You'll want to be aware of this, and delete from your iPad if necessary, as well as from your email account and computer.

-KeepVid is Java-based. If you run into trouble with it, try running a Java update (through Software update on Mac or by Googling "Java Update" on PC). Also make sure your browser is updated or KeepVid might not function correctly (see part B here).

-This process will not work if the YouTube user has disabled embedding and downloading.  

Happy Work-arounding!

MadPad

MadPad is an app that has received a lot of press in 2011 and was available free for some weeks as the Starbucks App of the Month (I do occasionally wander into Starbucks); the app is a creative outlet for "remixing your life." Essentially, what you can do with MadPad is download or create "soundboards" for your iPad or smaller iDevice (there are different versions, MadPad HD is the iPad one, priced at $2.99, the iPhone/iPod version is currently $.99 and adequate even on the iPad for the purposes I describe below). I find myself struggling to describe what this app actually does, so check out the video demo of creating and playing a "set" below.



That car set actually comes with the app and inspired me to tell you about it.  The creation of sets is as simple as it looks within the demo (note, not so simple on the cameraless iPad 1), and there are also "hundreds" of sets you can download easily through the app, including sound/vid combos within a grocery store, arcade, train, coffee shop, and zoo.  How could you use MadPad in speech and language therapy?

Language Lens:

• At its core, MadPad is a dynamic and multisensory way to present items in categories or break wholes into their parts.  Think of the car demo above and the parts demonstrated: hood, door, window, tire, handle, keys, ignition, emergency brake, glove compartment, horn, brakes. Use the available sets or make your own, which would be a...
• Great functional and pragmatic project for a group.
• MadPad aligns well with curriculum areas including science units on the 5 Senses.
• The items in sets could also be easily mined for articulation targets.

If you end up creating a set, please let me know!