Haunt the House

Many games meet the FIVES criteria for being highly interactive, visually supportive of language formulation, and geared toward addressing "Speechie" objectives such as categorization, sequencing, and interpretation of body language. Some additional factors I take into consideration are language neutrality (does the app work like a wordless picture book as a context to elicit language) and pace/timing (can the action be stopped by pausing or taking the iPad away for a moment to discuss?).

Though this is almost too late to make it useful for Halloween use (you can of course continue the app into the following week for "Halloweeen season"), I wanted to feature the app Haunt the House ($1.99)! Sort of a stepped-up version of Toca Boo!, this app has you act the role of a ghost attempting to scare people out of various settings including a village, mansion and train. The ghost can "possess" items in each room, prompting predictions about object function.

Using apps such as these with students is a good opportunity to target executive function and Social Thinking® applications around monitoring time and turns. My students yesterday posed that a fair turn would be 6 minutes! We limited them to 1-minute turns (with a timer) and then asked "how long that felt" to play or wait for a turn--it's plenty. The timer or clock can then be faded or facilitated for independent use.

We used this app with several pre/post activities:
-A mini lesson about "thinking with the eyes" and physical proximity (body in the group). You know you are being successful at scaring residents when they "notice" the object's movement with their eyes, and the best strategy is to move to rooms where people are present.
-From memory, I asked my students to create a map of the house, thereby targeting the story grammar element of setting and the executive function skill of mapping a space one is to navigate (see the work of Sara Ward and Kristen Jacobsen). I scaffolded by placing a few "anchor" rooms on the map so the students had a model of how to sketch, as well as a place to start.

Toca Boo- Currently Free and Full of Fun Scares

This is partially a repost from last year- Thanks Smart Apps For Kids for letting us know that Toca Boo is Free for a short time- please click through to the App Store from their site to support them.

This highly interactive app allows you to play the role of a "ghost" and wander a darkened house scaring members of a family. Seems a strange concept, but it's loads of fun.

Have you ever played hiding games with kids who proceed to hide themselves or items in plain sight? This illuminates, pun intended in the context of this app, problems around perspective taking and "thinking with the eyes" (see the work of the folks at Social Thinking®). In Toca Boo, to achieve a maximum scare, the ghost needs to avoid the family members' flashlights and hide in hotspots (e.g. under the covers of the bed or in a box) or behind furniture. Watch the trailer below:




The process of coaching students to effectively scare the characters will give you the opportunity to model and elicit if/then and causal language, as well as target spatial and positional concepts, in addition to the social cognitive ideas mentioned above. The app provides a good context for building the category of rooms of a house as well.

Do use your judgment of the trailer to consider which of your students would like this app, and whether it might be too scary for some. I do think they go a little far in having you scare (and knock over) the comical older man with the cane. I admit I laughed at this, though (America's Funniest Home Videos being a guilty pleasure of mine)! Toca Boca as always does a good job of discussing the ideas around the app in the "For Parents" section of the app, but I'm a believer in a little scare, suspense or humor being a great context to get kids talking.

New idea: try following this app with some dramatic play, perhaps filming with your video camera an "unsuccessful scare" vs. a "successful scare," at the same time targeting the sequential language of hiding and popping out and some feelings vocabulary.

Notes adds simple but powerful tools in iOS 9

The new operating system for iOS devices, iOS 9, came out several weeks ago. It's always a good idea to wait a while before updating (remember, all updates are free) so that Apple can work out the bugs that often persist past the "beta testing" phase. At this point, several updates have been released to iOS 9, so I'd say you are safe to update. That said, you'll want to follow some steps to ensure your update goes without issue. Cult of Mac always provides a nice guide to these updates- please see this link for information on which devices will run iOS 9 and how to update.

I do a lot of observation and consultation as an SLP, and notetaking apps are essential in this process. I have often recommended Evernote for notetaking, and still do- it has some great features including cloud storage (so I just use student initials, creation of notebooks, and audio recording).

However, the simple Notes app that comes as part of the operating system received a nice upgrade with iOS 9, and I have been revisiting it in the last few weeks. Notes now allows you to:
-Create Folders to organize notes (like notebooks in Evernote)
-Insert photos in notes
-Create a sketch in a note
-Make a note into a checklist

Each of these features makes Notes a more interesting tool when working with or for students, and also simplifies recommendations around assistive technology, as students can now do more with the operating system itself as opposed to downloading a separate app that requires an account.

As an example, I recently observed a student I work with who is struggling in math class, particularly with the word problems presented at the beginning of each period. Having a peek at the process gave me a sense of the language level of the problems, and how the student approaches them. I noted the student went right to setting up an algorithm to do the calculation and had trouble understanding what the problem was asking. Using Notes I quickly typed out the problem and collaborated with a supporting teacher on a visual "story" of the problem and how sketches might be used to support the language and mathematical thinking both in our sessions and in class. Doing this in Notes gave me a sharable record of the visit, without having to deal with any paper (a bonus for me)!

To find out some of the other education-related features of iOS 9, check out Tony Vincent's great update on the new operating system.

Links of Interest

Hi Folks,

Some news and links of interest I wanted to share with you.

On October 15-16, I am slated to present a two-day workshop sponsored by Mark R. Hammond Associates in Portland, Maine with Nathan Curtis of (famed Telepractice Training Center) Waldo County General Hospital. The information on the workshop, "Integrating Technology for TherAPPy and Education," is at this link.

On October 23, I will be presenting "'Outside the Box' iPad for SLPs- Apps Through Language/Literacy Lens" for the Central New York Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The brochure is here.

I have published a number of columns for ASHA Leader, linked below:

September 2015, Just Google It! Google offers simple, free tools for sharing, organizing and interacting with student materials 

September 2015, Your Students, You and the Tube!: Need a visual for any context? YouTube offers a “social” solution. 

August 2015, Up Where the Air is Clear (Apps for ASHA Convention) 

And for Mindwing Concepts' Blog:

Create Visual "Explanimations" to go with your Expository Lessons (Using Educreations app to explain ideas)

Bring EPIC! Contexts to your use of Story Grammar Marker® (Story Grammar and the EPIC! E-Books app)

Vocabulary and Story Grammar Marker (combining the World's Worst Pet- Vocab app with SGM and Social Thinking® Lessons

Happy Reading- hope to see some of you at a conference soon or at ASHA (check the planner- I'll be there!)

Author is a paid consultant to Mindwing Concepts, Inc for creation of blog content. Social Thinking is based on the work of Michelle Garcia Winner (see socialthinking.com)

Toca Life Apps and Contextual Therapy

Following up on my last post on the "Toca Life" open-ended sandbox-style apps, I recently read a "Clinical Focus" article in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and thought it shed light on how these apps (and others) can be used in context in therapy. Fey, Long, & Feinstack (2003) sought to outline "Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation for Children With Specific Language Impairments" with research tie-ins relevant to all ages, but particularly for ages 3-8. This is a great article for any SLP or language interventionist to read, but I wanted to present it with ideas related to the principles being used in context, in particular the features and content of the Toca Life Apps.

So, the principles and some ideas:

1. The basic goal of all grammatical interventions should be to help the child to achieve greater facility in the comprehension and use of syntax and morphology in the service of conversation, narration, exposition, and other textual genres in both written and oral modalities.

This principle asserts a general philosophy of intervention, but for me speaks to the kind of functional communication that can be elicited through conversation and play around an app such as Toca Life: City or Toca Life: Town, and the student's greater enjoyment of communication situations hopefully as a result of that intervention.

2. Grammatical form should rarely, if ever, be the only aspect of language and communication that is targeted in a language intervention program.

The authors assert that students with grammatical impairment rarely have this as their only communication problem, and that grammatical intervention alone does not always impact other areas of deficit. Toca Life apps allow for targeting of multiple goals including categorization (say, in the store or home), sentence formulation and storytelling in the context of the app.

Looking for a healthy meal, the man can lay out or collect different fruits and vegetables in the Toca Life: Town store.

3. Select intermediate goals in an effort to stimulate the child’s language acquisition processes rather than to teach specific language forms.

An example given in the article is the targeting of nominative case pronouns as a class rather than individually.

Have a party in the Toca Life: Town or City loft apartment to emphasize what I, you, we, and they are doing.

4. The specific goals of grammatical intervention must be based on the child’s “functional readiness” and need for the targeted forms.

i.e. Pick targets in the child's zone of proximal development that reflect a pragmatic need for their use in daily life.

5. Manipulate the social, physical, and linguistic context to create more frequent opportunities for grammatical targets.

6. Exploit different textual genres and the written modality to develop appropriate contexts for specific intervention targets.

This is where I think such apps provide a great tool. Of course we should manipulate low-tech contexts for language targets, but apps that have many open-ended contexts make this manipulation quite easy. AND they serve as a different "genre" to work from, along with picture books, one of my other favorite tools.

Toca Life: City has a world of contexts. Just think of all the action words that can come from a theatre!

More specifically regarding the manipulation of contexts, the authors indicate:

...making a peanut butter sandwich could be an excellent activity for a child working on negative forms. Instead of typical ingredients, however, the clinician might have on hand things like noodles, cheese, dog food, or even a pencil, as ingredients for the sandwich. Such unlikely choices will create opportunities for sentences like, “You can’t eat that,” “That wouldn’t taste good,” or “We don’t need noodles/cheese/hot dogs.” When the proper ingredients are used and the activity has been completed, recapping the entire process can create numerous obligatory contexts for the target forms in a very short time. 

Clinician: “We used/ate/needed peanut butter. We also used cheese.” 
Child: "No, we not use cheese.” 
Clinician:  “Right, we didn’t use cheese. What about dog food?”

Note that Toca Life: Town's cafe lets you complete "recipes" (see the wall or here). Silly items to prompt negative forms can be used from the cafe itself or brought in characters' hands from other locations.

7. Manipulate the discourse so that targeted features are rendered more salient in pragmatically felicitous contexts.

"The most straightforward way to increase the salience of grammatical intervention targets, especially grammatical morphemes, is to stress them by making them longer and louder and producing them with more dynamic pitch changes."

Don't put her IN the bed! She should be OUT of bed. 

The kids are playing cars BECAUSE it is fun.

8. Systematically contrast forms used by the child with more mature forms from the adult grammar, using sentence recasts.

Re: the above scene- 
Adult: What happened?
Child: The girl eat the cake.
Adult: Yes, the girl ate the green cake.

9. Avoid telegraphic speech, always presenting grammatical models in well-formed phrases and sentences.

10. Use elicited imitation to make target forms more salient and to give the child practice with phonological patterns that are difficult to access or produce.

#9 is a good reminder, and #10, noted as an "intrusive" practice for social interactionists, is described to be effective in situations where targeted forms are used pragmatically and contrastively, for example, prompting "Say, 'She will play the game,'" followed by "Say, 'She played the game,'" after the action is performed in the app.

As a context clinician (it's what makes it fun!), I really appreciated the authors' references and examples in this article. Check it out for more information.

Fey, M. E., Long, S. H., & Finestack, L. H. (2003). Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation for Children With Specific Language Impairments. American Journal Of Speech-Language Pathology, 12(1), 3. http://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(2003/048)

Toca Life: City Adds Screen Recording

Toca Boca, long one of my favorite developers of contextual digital toys, has added a powerful feature to one of their already very useful apps- Toca Life: City ($2.99 for iPad). The Toca "Life" apps allow you to move characters around interactive environments; in this app, that includes a loft apartment, theatre, food park, hair salon and mall. Characters can pick up and interact with objects in each setting and even move from place to place with objects as you act out dramatic play sequences. These features in Toca Life: City have been enhanced with the addition of screen recording-- this captures the movement and records audio as you and students speak in order to create an animation. The animation can be immediately replayed, but also saved to the camera roll for later review or even sharing!

After rehearsing or storyboarding a "scene" with your students (further emphasizing your language and social targets), just tap the film icon in the upper left corner and begin recording.

Though the Toca: Life apps (see also Toca Life: Town) provide great opportunities to target play skills, cooperation and social cognition, and language targets such as sentence formulation, microstructures such as verbs and pronouns, as well as overall narrative, the screen recording feature can make this work more salient, with auditory feedback on student performance.

That this feature was added recently again underscores the importance of running and reviewing the contents of your app updates, which can be done in the App Store app Updates tab which provides text descriptions of changes within apps.

Do We Have a Subscription to...(Part 2)

In the last post, I discussed how the beginning of the school year is a good time to acquaint yourself with any technology resources offered by your school district, as many do not realize the benefits subscription-based services can provide.

While BrainPOP, described in the last post, is accessible by an affordable monthly subscription even if your school doesn't have it, ExploreLearning's Gizmos are more of a district investment. I would, however, encourage individuals to check it out via the free month trial, if only for exposure for how interactives connect with language. ExploreLearning (accessible also via a new iPad app once you obtain the trial login) provides interactive activities called "Gizmos" that show the sequential, cause-effect, and conditional relationships in science topics (e.g. tides, flower pollination, forces). The activities are open-ended and meant to be constructivist and inquiry-based, leading students to ask questions and draw conclusions, which is facilitated by printable "Student Exploration Guides" for each Gizmo. Again, I'd encourage you to check it out or take advantage of it if your school offers the service (my middle school did). If you save the guides, the language-based questions provide a good model for questions you can ask when using interactives such as the free ones available at BrainPOP GAME UP or learningscience.org, as well as for apps such as MarcoPolo Weather. Overall, this type of interactive provides a visual contextual support for you to target objectives around description, sequencing, and cause-effect, while providing students (particularly upper elementary, MS, and HS students) additional review of classroom topics.

ExploreLearning's Gizmo on Tides and its Exploration Guide prompts knowledge-activating questions, observation and cause-effect statements about the relationship between the moon and tides, and would be useful when students are studying topics such as Earth, Sun and Moon.

Do we have a subscription to...? (Part 1)

I hope you have all had a great and restful summer! I had one for sure, with great trips to Cape Cod, England, Ireland, Scotland, and the Los Angeles area...hence the quietness of the blog.

An important question you can ask as you start your year pertains to the accessibility of certain education-based services that you may not have thought of as relevant to language instruction, but definitely are useful! Many school districts or schools invest in such subscriptions to bolster the resources of the schools, and you may have overlooked that email reminding you of their availability. I am speaking specifically of resources such as BrainPOP, Reading A-Z and ExploreLearning. So ask your librarian or IT Specialist!

I have long discussed BrainPOP as a useful tool for SLPs and language teachers. BrainPOP (gr 3+) and BrainPOP Jr. (K-3) are catalogs of short curriculum-based animated videos, featuring Tim or younger Annie along with their robot companion, Moby. Both resources are accessible on the web (at BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr.) and through free iPad apps: BrainPOP Featured Movie and BrainPOP Jr. Movie of the Week. Limited free content is available on the apps and website (which also features terrific links between movies and educational standards, as well as educational interactive games, many of them fodder for language activities). If you have a laptop available, the website has also added this terrific make-a-map activity allowing you to easily construct a semantic map to show the connections between the language and concepts in the specific film. Your experience will be vastly improved if you have a subscription as you will be able to use more films to "sync" with the classroom curriculum or review topics you know your students have been covering in class.

Image via brainpop.com

What exactly does BrainPOP have to do with language instruction? Thought leaders in our field such as Barbara Ehren encourage us to use curriculum touchpoints (no, not all the time, not necessarily at the same time as the classroom, and not as tutors or curriculum specialists) as a context for working on students' language goals. BrainPOP makes it easier to set that context, while engaging the student. You could follow up a BrainPOP movie with:
-creating sentences from a wordsplash you create as the movie is playing
-using graphic organizers that emphasize expository text structures
-vocabulary work with tools such as the Expanding Expression Tool
-making a collage with PicCollage emphasizing sentence formulation, abstract categories, and description of the topic.
-among many others...

BrainPop has an eye toward expository language, often presenting elements of the topic as visual lists, sequences, or cause-effect relationships.

Check out BrainPop, and you can always subscribe for a fairly low cost within either app. Make sure you know how to turn off recurring in-app-purchases.

O*Net Online- Help Students to Look Forward

O*Net Online is a resource introduced to me by a vocational coach and I have found a number of uses of it since then. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, the site features career interest questionnaires and lists of skills, work activities, and equipment for different professions.

Skills needed for Video Game Designers:

The site is therefore a great tool for working with older students (MS, HS, young adult), for designing specific language activities that will facilitate buy-in, insight and development of their professional goals.

I recently shared with a colleague whose student was resisting "coming to speech" and she was able to discuss with him the communication skills needed to succeed in his desired occupation, which helped him build rationale around their work. She then included video clips from YouTube about the job, which provided further visual support and context to work on language. 

The site is accessible at the link above and works nicely on computers and mobile devices.

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.

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!