Chateau Meddybemps

Chateau Meddybemps is a rich site with many activities you might consider in teletherapy, particularly for young students and for those you are experimenting with incorporation of interactive websites. Activities on this site might be ones you screen share and have the student observe the visuals and verbalize choices, or offer many opportunities for remote cursor control. For students who need buildup of skills in using the mouse in therapy, there are simple mouse skills activities. Also, there are a number of PDF based printable "activity centers" that you may be able to use for play on both sides if you've got willing parents.

Check out the Super Menu for activities like this one in which students can organize a zoo, thereby targeting naming, animal sounds, describing and using causals.

Creating a make-a-scene in Google Slides

Make-a-scenes are like Colorforms, for people who remember those. They present a setting, and allow for choices of elements to put in the setting. They therefore can work on thematic vocabulary, categories, syntax such as verbs, present progressive or causals, or on several levels of narrative- descriptive if choices are just items in a setting, action sequence if actions, or reaction sequence if more initiating events/problems.

Pic Collage has always been my go to for this, but if you want to involve some simple interaction in a teletherapy session, try with Google Slides. Even if you are using Google Hangouts Meet you have the potential to share the Google Slide file with the student so they can choose elements.

Here's a short video showing some tricks on creating a Make-a-scene in Google Slides. Have a good, safe, and as-positive-as-possible weekend.

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.

Repost: Geoguessr works well for group conversations/collaboration/inference in teletherapy

Reposting this one from January 2019 as in the context of readers needing resources for distance learning and teletherapy. Geoguessr lets you play one "game" a day for free.

Geoguessr is a web-based game that plops you into an unknown place so that you can attempt to guess where you are. The game incorporates Google Street View and allows you to "drive" around by clicking the arrows; you can also click and drag on the screen to take a "look" at the surroundings.

Students then use a map interface to zoom in on a continent and country and make a guess. The game then reveals the location and how far off you were in terms of miles.

This game can be used to work on academic language and a number of other skills:
-recognizing geographic features, continents and countries
-distance concepts and measurement
-"thinking with the eyes" (looking for clues ala Social Thinking®)
-pretending together via taking roles in "driving" (in teletherapy, have participants tell you how to move while using screen sharing)
-persistence and self-talk

Many locations don't feature a ton of context so it is helpful to find a sign, look at the landscape, where cars are driving and perhaps use a web search to get some information about where one might be.

A participant at a workshop asked today if you can restrict yourself to say, the USA or important landmarks. No, but that gave me an idea. This game uses Google Street View which is accessible via Google Earth (via Chrome browser or the iPad app, just click on the little person icon and drag onto the map). You can certainly structure your own version of the game by placing students in Street View into a location that is more contextual or near a landmark, and instructing them that they can only use the arrows to figure out where they are!

ASHA Webinar Free through ASHA Learning Pass

About 3 years ago, Nathan Curtis and I did a webinar for ASHA, Apps and Web-Based Materials for Telepractice. It is now offered through ASHA's Learning Pass, which they have made free through July. This post serves to notify readers of this opportunity offering .15 CEUs, but I am also receiving a lot of questions about it, actually a lot of the same two reasonable questions, so I wanted to provide a quick link to those answers. Also some of this would be useful even if you haven't seen the webinar

The webinar being 3 years old, some info and resources are out of date or no longer available.

In the webinar, Nathan provides great information on how to use simple tools such as PowerPoint (see also Keynote and Google Slides). He refers to available quick videos (one created by the equally brilliant Amy Reid) now up at:

How to make authentic materials in PowerPoint (with several examples)

Using animation and making templates in PowerPoint

Nathan also discussed work that WCGH had done in task-analyzing websites such as PBS Kids, I also used this as a model for a recent post on ABCYa. A visual was provided as a model of how their staff did this in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is no longer available, and PBS Kids has changed significantly since then, so that many activities are no longer there. My suggestion if you are interested, you can view the list (please do not request access, File>Make a copy or File>Download to save your own copy), the links are not clickable but you can Google to see if the activity is still available, like this:

In any case, the list provides a good model of task analyzing to build a library of possible activities.

Vooks is another great resource for books, context.

Vooks has produced beautiful, slow-paced video animated books, and offers a free year to educators (quite a snarky teacher video there, lol). The selection of books looks great and many are titles I have in my library of picture books. There is a process to request free access but I was approved quickly. The titles also have lesson plans with activity suggestions, ideas for questions and vocabulary cards. I definitely recommend Vooks for your toolkit; you can share books in sessions through screenshare.

Interactive Use of Mobile Apps in Teletherapy

This trick could give you the option of using mobile apps interactively in a teletherapy session. Worked for me. As we know, we can allow viewing of, say, iPad apps by Quicktime on Mac (here's a link on that, you just don't ever have to click record, you can simply show the screen) or wireless mirroring. But students would not be able to manipulate the app even through remote control (the iPad/app appear on the screen, when we click on the screen on the app nothing happens, so when they click on it on the screen nothing happens, you still have to touch the iPad to interact with it, QED).

I was inspired to check out the possibility of Android Emulators a few years ago by the brilliant Megan Sutton and this post. As she describes, these take some experimentation. I have downloaded some of the 3 emulators she lists and they have not worked on my Mac, or did, then didn't. Currently Bluestacks works great for me, and I describe in the video below how I have used it and several Android apps in teletherapy sessions. This requires setting up a Google Play account (basically your Google account) and attaching a credit card to it as you do your Apple ID. No, any apps you have purchased in the Apple App Store will not transfer- you'd have to re-purchase as Google Play apps. So try this if you really like the idea of using some of the apps you love that are also available on Android (you can look that up in advance in the Google Play Store to see if you should even bother). And as in the video, I'd recommend:

-try free apps first
-test this out with someone you can test remote control with on Zoom or wherever
-assume the risk- if you pay for apps and then say, Bluestacks stops working, theoretically you still own the apps like with Apple, I just can't guarantee anything.

So, use this trick for apps you would love to use interactively (for me Pic Collage and Toca Apps) and don't go nuts with purchasing.

View the video

TinyBop Schools' Interactive Models

I have long been a fan of the TinyBop interactive apps for iPad. These smartly designed visualizations of "systems" are fun to use, linked to important curriculum topics, and language-neutral, so lots of talk can come out of them. They have ported them to web form as TinyBop Schools and made them free for the next several months, so I would highly recommend checking them out. In teletherapy these would provide for great interactions especially if you are sharing cursor (remote) control

Each model comes with a handbook. These are important to explore because the TinyBop models are so language-neutral that sometimes you don't know what they can do! The models also have journal and graphic organizer activities that are ideal for language therapy. 

An activity I'm doing this and next week in Google Earth

I'm long past processing that April School Vacation Week isn't happening. We all have bigger fish to fry, right? But here in MA it is always a rite of spring that brings the Marathon and some momentum leading up to the end of the school year...all that unclear as well.

However, we can simulate. Some of you know I am a Google Earth nerd, from way back when it was an application to download and you had to take a two-day class to understand it. Now, it's much easier. In Google Chrome, just launch Google Earth (or Google it); you can also use on iPad. But, Google Earth being so visual and interactive, it makes a great tool for telepractice. Consider using Google Earth for traveling to locations and working on descriptive language, situational awareness or the story grammar element of setting.

The activity I am doing is to have group members give a "tour"- could be a place they have gone to, are planning to go to, just want to go to, or even their neighborhood. I provided one- roughly main idea of place, 3 details and a story- as a model in groups. As a scaffold and also so that the activity makes social sense we talked about how a tour is a kind of conversation (thanks Anna Vagin for this and Conversation Paths, one of which I modified below- you should go purchase her amazing product on this, see a video here).

Students were given the roles of asking questions or making comments during or after my model tour and then I asked them to:

-use "future thinking" (see work of Ward/Jacobsen)
-think about a place to give a tour
-look it up in Google Earth and make sure it is searchable/navigable for an overview (main idea) and 3 details (places within it).
-think of a short story of your experience.
-at group you will verbally tell me where to go.
-please do not spend more than 10-15 minutes preparing for this
(this sent in email to parents)

Here's a video showing some of the navigation controls in Google Earth in Chrome which you can also find by, well, Googling! Typing a ? when in Google Earth will also display the shortcuts.

A Visual Support for Expected Social Teleconference Behaviors

I created this mostly as a support to parents in reviewing some "expecteds" needed for individual or group teletherapy, given some clients we have had who have challenges with these. Some of the language is based on Social Thinking® concepts and also the whole body listening paradigm originally written about by Truesdale.

Here are links to the visual as a simple PDF (click download) or Word (editable) file. Please do not ask for permission for the file, simply download and use as you see fit.