CDC Analyze My Plate and Recipe Remix

CDC Analyze My Plate and Recipe Remix are interactive activities from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control aimed at curbing childhood obesity and promoting a healthier diet.  Analyze My Plate allows you to build a meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) and view categories such as total calories and fat.  In Recipe Remix, you can take an unhealthy recipe and change quantity and type of ingredients so that it becomes more healthy.

Language Lens:

• Analyze My Plate is a great way to review food categories, and bombard/elicit causals, conditionals and temporals- What happens when we add an apple?  You can also compare and contrast different plates!
• Recipe Remix would be a great followup in situations when you can cook with kids.  Choose a recipe and follow the site's advice, then use the cooking activity as a context for oral and written language.

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.

GlogsterEDU Week: Make your Glog Interactive with Links, Audio and Video!

For part 4 of Glogster EDU week (a.k.a. Thursday) here is a screencast covering some of the interactive features of Glogging: adding audio, video, and links to other web pages.  The audio/video aspects are ones that are very applicable to SLPs, as they allow us to work on listening skills and/or speech and language production in a manner that will be engaging to students!  Check out the screencast below, and learn why not all Schoolhouse Rock videos have stood the test of time.

More GlogsterEDU Week!

Today's post in this series on GlogsterEDU, an online "poster" creator, covers adding the "G" to your Glog- graphics and images.  In this screencast I show how to save an image from a webpage and upload it to your Glog in order to add visual support.  In the video, I touch on the issue of Fair Use of images, so here's a reference if you want to learn about that further.  The steps shown in this screencast can also be used for any online image (e.g. on a webpage rather than through Google Image Search) or any other image file saved to your computer.

GlogsterEDU Week Continues: Opening Your Account and Starting a Glog with Text!

To continue GlogsterEDU Week, a series of posts on the interactive "poster yourself" website GlogsterEDU, today I am featuring a screencast showing you how to set up an account, obtain student accounts (get 'em while you can for free, even if you don't use them), and start a Glog with text. If you are saying to yourself, "Glog?" a Glog is what you create with Glogster- basically a graphic blog.

Before we go on, I thought of two questions folks might have, so thought they would be good to answer up front.

1. Can you print your Glogs?  Not really.  The idea is that they will live online and you can get to them and display them anytime.   You could print out the webpage that the Glog is on, but I am not sure why you would want to.  It would take an enormous amount of expensive color toner, and would probably look cruddy.  Can you tell I am not a fan of printing?

2. Can you use GlogsterEDU on an iPad? No, because it is Flash-based and iPads do not run Flash.  There are some browsers that allow you to view Flash video, but this is actually a Flash-based interactive composer, so it would not work on an iPad. Let's see what develops there, I bet someday there'll be some sort of an app.

Sorry that the answers to both those questions were No-ish.

So, hope you enjoy the screencast below.  The focus is on getting started and using text boxes, one of the key ways you can make Glogster work for you as speech and language therapy.  Using text boxes, you and/or your students can add the language content to a Glog about any topic or theme.  I think Glogging is a great way to teach kids how to break a topic down in terms of text structure, using Glogster's text tools to create lists, sequences, descriptions, comparisons/contrasts, and cause-effect statements related to a topic (or just work on simple labeling and sentence formulation). Glogster is also a good avenue when you would like to step up kids' thinking beyond that "Knowledge" level of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Check out this list of projects that tap higher-level thinking (and therefore language) skills, many of which would make nice Glogster projects!

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!)

Please Take this Short Survey

Please help out my pal and #SLPeep Barbara Fernandes of Geek SLP by taking this short survey about your use of iDevices (iPad/iPod/iPhone) if you are a school-based Speech-Language Pathologist.  Barbara sends her thanks!

A Touch of Class

A Touch of Class is a simple, fun game challenging students to classify animals according to specific characteristics:

A little robot runs through after you make your choices, awarding or subtracting points based on what you missed. This activity will create a lot of discussion and suspense, aligning well with curriculum topics and strategies around descriptive schema.

Your Recommendations on iPad Cases?

We work with a population that often leads us to be reluctant to hand over our breakable things, such as an iPad. Especially when using apps that incorporate movement and, sometimes, shaking of said iPad. Susan H. inquired on the SpeechTechie Facebook Page:

I would love to know your thoughts on iPad cases. They seem necessary with the school aged population. Currently my case only forms an easel in landscape, but I would love it to do portrait also for those apps that don't flip. Also my case is taking a licking- Recommendations appreciated!

I am reluctant to offer a recommendation at this time, only having bought the original Apple iPad case. Which I am reluctant to recommend. It may be the one that Susan is speaking of, actually, and though I have used it very gently, somehow looks nothing like the picture here:

Instead, it looks like I regularly sneeze on it full-force (I don't).

I have heard really good things about The Defender (see review on Speech Gadget here), but it doesn't seem to be what Susan has in mind in terms of stand-up-in-portrait mode capabilities.  So besides recommending that Susan consult the TiPB store (a good resource associated with an independent blog about all things iOS), I am going to throw it out to you, SpeechTechies.  Do you have a case in mind for Susan (oh, and Susan, do you have an original iPad or iPad 2)?  Do you all have anything to say about cases in general?  Please provide links where possible.  Thanks!

"There's an App for That"

Check out this very clever number from Sesame Street, "There's an App for That"

If you are using iOS devices with your students, this would be great fun to share with them. As a language-based project, perhaps have them "design" an app, with icon and description (working on the descriptive element of function) and place it on a big "iPod" bulletin board in your office.