Responsive Face

Responsive Face is an applet from NYU's Media Lab.  The interface allows you to explore facial expressions with your students by selecting different facial actions, which can of course be linked to emotions.  Thanks to Alex Laufer Lobo of Dramatic Pragmatics for sharing this resource with me.

Language Lens:

• Students with social cognitive deficits lack emotional vocabulary and ability to read nonverbal cues.  Creating lessons with Responsive Face, perhaps in a larger context such as exploring emotions in a book, video or real life event, is a motivating, interactive way to explicitly teach what different facial expressions mean.

The Garden Pizza Place

The Garden Pizza Place is one of my favorite interactives that relates specifically to curriculum topics. Designed by 4H, this site has kids experiment with different amounts of water, sunlight and fertilizer to grow a large plant.  This site is a perfect example of how easily we as SLPs can incorporate curriculum concepts, build language skills, and apply principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) all at the same time.

Language Lens:

• The activity targets the abstract category of "plant needs" and causal and conditional sentence structures all over it!
• I created a tracking sheet that kids could use to monitor the decisions that led to successful growth, providing further visual support for sentence formulation, as well as practice using a graphic organizer.

Fake out!

A popular way to teach kids website evaluation skills is to present a "fake" website and apply certain criteria to determine if it's a credible site. This also would be a nice thing to target around April Fool's day. Try this one:

Language Lens

• The site is quite texty, but you can use the humorous mockup pictures to convey the main points with your students. The first section of the text would be a great context to use a description graphic organizer and break down the absurd "information."
• Try going through the site using a website evaluation protocol like this one.

Secular Easter?

I am not sure about Easter as a topic for public school SLPs. You decide.

I also don't love Primary Games as a resource; their site is infested with ads, BUT there are a few good activities there. The Easter Basket Dress Up game is a cute click-and-drag interactive you might want to check out this week.

Language Lens

• Print out the page (before arranging) in color and this would make a great barrier game for two or more younger students, targeting object naming, size, color, and spatial concepts (Put the big yellow chick behind the purple Peep, etc).

Creeptastically Fun!

Some resources that are quite clearly ads can provide some terrific interactivity and learning potential. One of these is Old Navy's Supermodelquin Supersearch. The site allows you to mold yourself as a mannequin, select clothing, accessories, a background, type of script and a "line" to say in a virtual ad. You can download a screenshot of your model, use an email address to enter your ad into a contest and save it online. I have always found this ad campaign spooky and annoying, so it is nice to know that something good can come of it! This site might be up just for the length of the contest, so I would try it out soon...


Language Lens:

• Essential descriptive skills and categories can be targeted with the face/body "molding" process as well as selection of clothing and background settings.
• The site would be great fun with a pragmatic group as a sharing activity (probably if you have multiple laptops available) and also hits on topic maintenance as students get to create a "line" that flows in the conversation of the other mannequins.
• The site allows you to rate other "ads", tapping some evaluative and discussion skills.

Ready for April Fool's?

Like so many other examples of my probably convoluted thinking about language resources (in which things that are supposed to be used for x can be used for y) Improv Everywhere is not really about April Fool's Day, but can be used to talk about it. In preparation for some possibly fun lessons this coming week, I wanted to feature the blog of this theater troupe, whose goal is to stage "missions" that cause "scenes of chaos and joy in public spaces." The troupe edits all their missions into short, bite-size bits of video hysteria, along with wonderfully detailed and visual breakdowns of the preparation and execution of the missions, most of which are totally clean. I would avoid missions like "No Pants Subway Rides," especially with younger students, but fully recommend "Slo-Mo Home Depot," "High Five Escalator," and "Spontaneous Musicals." Watch them all the way through in case I missed something, though! Check out the blue sidebar for links to all the missions. Here is one of my faves, Grocery Store Musical:

Language Lens:

• The Improv Everywhere videos would be great to present to students as a saboteur strategy and see if they can describe the context.
• Each mission is a nice opportunity to work on concepts such as expected and unexpected behaviors, perspective taking, sequencing (with use of the mission breakdowns) and use of humor.
• Try completing a setting map for any given video- what is the place like and what do you usually see happening there?
• The Unthinkable character Wasfunnyonce from the Superflex curriculum would be a great point of comparison- Why are these missions acceptable use of humor? What changes would make them not acceptable? (lots of if statements here!)

A picture is worth a thousand words...

This is nothing revolutionary, but a good tech tip nonetheless. At the private practice I have worked in for some years, we do a lot of email communication and updates to parents. As one can imagine, writing an email update on the activities in a session can be very time consuming. Recently, I sought to cut down that (essentially unpaid) time I was spending, and also to make my updates more useful to parents and clients by adding more visual content. Attaching or inserting a picture cuts down on amount of text I need to type to explain the activity, and has the added bonus of being a visual that can result in a helpful conversation between the parent and client after the session. I ask parents to show the picture to their child and prompt him/her to explain what happened in the session.

At first, I planned to bring my digital camera to each session to facilitate this plan, but then chided myself, "Helloooo, you always have an iPhone with you!" The quality is adequate, and I don't need to remember to charge the darn camera, remember to bring the camera itself, or deal with a cord or iPhoto. I simply forward the message to my own email, download the file, and insert it into a parent email from there. Overall, I have recieved good feedback from parents, and perhaps saved myself from a painful typing injury.

Here's an example of a good update photo, illustrating a lesson on whole-body listening. Thanks Amanda Citrin and the kiddos in her group for creating this poster:

SLPs and our clients' communication online

With regards to yesterday's post, it is worth discussing how SLPs' expertise in the nuances of communication can help our students and clients as some of them venture into the world of social networking on sites such as Facebook. With some teen groups I have worked with in private practice, Facebook has come up a lot and we have explored the use of it as a social tool and its benefits and challenges. In our discussions with parents the other day, it was interesting to hear one mom describe how Facebook has really helped her son with AS in some situations. His being able to thoughtfully explore some communication with peers online without having to worry about the fast-paced nature of verbal conversation, or nonverbally getting into the same space as potential friends in the hallway, etc, has assisted in "breaking the ice." Of course, parents and everyone else worry a lot about the potential for bullying online as well.

In the public school setting, it is easy to argue that Facebook and sites like it have nothing to do with school and therefore have no place in therapy contexts. However, things that happen on Facebook can spill into the school setting in both positive and negative ways and affect our students' academic work. So, clinicians could choose to be reactive, and launch some instruction based on what s/he is hearing in pragmatics groups, or proactively, our high-functioning teen students could probably use at least a few lessons in these areas. Parent involvement is key with these topics, and the "expected and unexpected behaviors" (concept, of course, from Michele Garcia Winner's work) or Hidden Curriculum (Brenda Smith Myles) should be shared in consultation with parents to promote their discussions with their kids, and parent permission might even be a good thing to obtain.

What do you think? Have you conducted any instruction in social networking etiquette with your students? Comments and thoughts welcome as always.

Yeah, I don't know what half of these sites are either- but often the rules are the same!

You can read a portion of Brenda Smith Myles' Hidden Curriculum at Google Books. I would encourage anyone to buy the whole thing or one of her Page-a-Day Calendars.

In case you didn't see it, here is our little Google Docs presentation on the topic, also posted yesterday:

Google Docs as a collaborative tool

This weekend, my friend and colleague Katy Fleming, CCC-SLP and I were asked to lead a discussion on the topic of "Special Issues of the Cyber World for Children with Autism." The circumstances were such that we didn't have a lot of lead time to prepare a presentation, and we didn't have a pre-built one. I find that Google Docs can be a key tool in these situations- although it lacks some of the features of PowerPoint, you can easily use the Google Doc presentation tool to create a series of slides for such occasions. The great thing about Google Docs is that multiple people can work on a presentation at the same time, while only one version is saved in your account. This eliminates the need to email versions back and forth, compile your work and cross-check changes. Although we of course spent some time chatting about the content and logistics of our presentation, Google Docs allowed us to minimize the synchronous time we needed to get together to build the presentation. SLPs are often asked to share our expertise with our own or other departments; using Google Docs presentations can cut back on the labor and time spent getting those talks together.

Here's a portion of our presentation- more on the content of our talk tomorrow...




Technical Notes:
It is very easy to access Google Docs by creating or using an existing Google (gmail, etc.) account. In Gmail, simply click on the Documents link at the top of the page. You can get started with a presentation by simply clicking on Create New>Presentation. The interface works much like PowerPoint.
From your main Google Docs page, you can check the box next to your document, then select Share and invite collaborators via email.
Your presentation, while open, can be downloaded under the File menu as a PowerPoint file if you would like to add more advanced features such as transitions and animations.

Looking after the Dog

Interactive Whiteboards in classrooms are a popular tool nowadays, and many of the resources available to support their use are wonderful for students with speech and language issues.  Looking after the Dog is a nice interactive featured on a whiteboard resource site from the UK--I think I will be revisiting the site to explore further.  The activity can be a little repetitive (and alarming--this dog frequently needs to go to the vet to get a big shot!) but I have tried it with kids and they loved it.

Language Lens:

• The activity is a perfect context for sentence construction with when and because- We know the dog is thirsty because he is drooling!
• This would lend itself to open-ended questions before the activity to elicit language (What do we know about dogs?  How do we take care of dogs?) and some dramatic play with a stuffed animal dog after the activity.
• Social thinking instruction on the theme of "guessing someone's plan" would go well with this activity- we need to read the dog's body language to respond appropriately.