Student Quotes

I was cleaning my office yesterday in anticipation for having someone take over for the next two weeks. Yes, we are about to have that baby. We are scheduled to go in to the hospital in a couple of hours, but we may not have to induce with how close my wife's contractions are.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a couple of post it notes where I had written down things that I had different student say. I only have a couple, but I thought they were worth sharing.

Student: Do you know how to do the monkey bars?

Me: I use to, but I've forgotten in my old age.

Student: When I'm 60 I'll still know how to use the monkey bars.

This wasn't a "ha ha" quote some much as I thought it was insightful and nearly poetic. It came out of the mouth of a kindergartener.

The next quote came from a third grader. We were discussing how to be prepared in emergencies, and I was being silly. I asked them how prepared they were for the upcoming zombie invasion. This is what the kid said with complete seriousness.

I know I'm prepared because I can do a sweeping toe kick.

You don't need much more than that.

I'll keep you all updated on the baby front, I'll be writing tweet updates when I have internet access.

Best Speech Therapy Blogs

Check it out guys!  We were able to be featured in this site (Online Education Database) as one of the 20 Best Speech Therapy Blogs out there!  We are so proud.  Go check it out, will you?  Also, note that we added this site to our side bar. 

http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/20-best-speech-therapy-blogs


XOXO
Kristin

App Review: Speech with Milo: Verbs

Hey there, this is Bob.

I'm not sure if you guys are ever know who's writing when you first start reading one of our blog posts. I guess the topic is often a dead give a way. You're never going to see me writing about swallowing or aphasia. If the post is about working with preschool or elementary kids you can almost be sure that its me, but the confusion might still be there. So, just in case... this is Bob.

Along with our iPhone/iPad app lists I wanted to do some app reviews, and I have some catching up to do.

I wanted to start with a nice little app called Speech with Milo: Verbs. It costs $2.99 on iTunes, one of the cheaper speech therapy apps on the market. It's a universal app that will work on both the iPhone and the iPad (dear app creators, we love universal apps, please do more!). Its geared for younger children, from toddlers to 1st grade. Yet, I've tried it with 4th graders and it was surprisingly well received.

The concept is simple, Milo (the mouse) demonstrates actions for the kids. There are short little animations for each action word. It's extremely easy for the child to navigate themselves, sometimes they switch to the next action word before you would like them to though. Milo ends each action with a "ta da", he's very proud of himself after all.

There are great ideas in the therapist and parent instructions. You can use this to help teach vocabulary or grammar. I love it for grammar, its easy to target different syntax components. If you are working on present progressive you ask, "What is Milo doing?". If you are working on past tense you can ask, "He's all done. What did Milo do?". You can pick and choose which words you would like to work on in the options. And you can turn the music off (I wasn't a big fan of the music).

 

The animations are engaging, they keep the kids attention much better than action cards do. I can keep preschoolers on task for a whole session with this app! I have also found that its hit with my students with autism. If you are doing any language therapy with you kids and you have an iPhone, iPodtouch, or iPad then this is a must buy, especially since the price is less than a value meal.

The creators of this app have recently released an app specifically for prepositions. I have yet to get my hands on that one, but if its anything like this app then its probably well worth it.

You can learn more about Speech with Milo at their webpage.

Are there any apps out there that you would like us to review? Email us at pathologicallyspeaking (at) gmail (dot) com.

AAC Assessment

It's Kristin here!

So I am in the middle of trying to design an AAC assessment that will work for the patients in the ICU here at the hospital.  Any suggestions for things to include of specific tests you like?  Also, does anyone remember the old "Lifespace Access Profile?"  They don't print it anymore and I am desperate for a copy.  If you have any clue or an old copy you'd be willing to send or fax me, email me!

Posts in the making:
All the iPad Apps that an SLP should have! (an update of my previous and now very outdated post)
Medical SLP newbies parts 4 and 5
My favorite AAC devices - a review.
How to implement AAC in a PT/OT session - my ideas
and
A trach/vent post...details TBD.

Thought for the day:  If you don't love what you're doing- you're in the wrong profession!  What we do is fun and amazing.  Change your perspective or your setting, it's never too late.

Thanks for all your comments- we love 'em!

XOXO
-Kristin

Just so you know

Just so you know, I haven't been the best at keeping on top of things, but here I am with my list of excuses:

1. Netflix
2. I'm behind on my IEPs as usual (need to go schedule a couple of them right now).
3. Kids are sick.
4. I'm sick.
5. Baby boy is due on Feb 18th, trying to get ready for the new arrival.


Kristin can come up with her own list of excuses. Unfortunately Netflix might be one of the worse offenders, but our life is a little in turmoil. But I hope to write more soon.

Language Therapy using Dropbox

I think we’ve already gotten to the point that we can agree that the iphone and/or ipad can be useful in therapy. There are numerous apps that you can use with more coming everyday. If you don’t have one of the devices, I would strongly suggest you look into it. Yes, there are great in therapy, but there are other ways they can be useful as well. You can keep track of your schedule with them, set alarms, use voice recorders, etc, etc. There are endless possibilities.

What I wanted to write about today is about a nice little trick you can do with your iphone/ipad for therapy that might not have occurred to you.

I use my ipodtouch for articulation therapy all the time now, but not so much for language therapy. Well, there are language therapy apps out there. I love the kindergarten.com apps for vocabulary and conversation for my younger students. I also often times use precentally to help me keep track of data when I’m doing student directed play therapy, and I just need some place to keep data. That’s what I use on my device for language therapy, but I know there is a lot more out there available. I'm not going to get into listing them all in this post, but if you look up speech language therapy apps on google or in itunes you are going to find a lot of things you can sort through.

One of the problems with the language therapy apps out there is that they rarely do exactly what I would like. Recently, I had a thought as to how to make language therapy material on your iPhone or iPad very easily. And guess who much it will cost you. Nothing! It’s free! Can you believe it!

It’ll take some set up, but if it’s worth it to you to have therapy materials on you so you can use it on the fly, then its worth it. Now you have to still create the materials  or the ability  to make them. This is simple enough if you have Boardmaker, Writing with Symbols, or even a regular old word processor. Any software that you can program and insert pictures will do.

So, say you want to make a simple picture of an apple. I like to use google image search (but be careful how you word things, you never know what might come up).



Now you've found your perfect apple picture. In a word file I inserted the picture and labeled it.



At which point I then saved the word file to "My Documents" in my Dropbox folder (I'll get into dropbox a little more here in a second). Then I was able to pull this up on my iPodtouch (I'll get a picture of the iPad on here once I can get my hands on one).





















Okay, to get started with this plan you need to sign up for Drop Box (click here for a link to it). Don’t worry its free. Dropbox is an automatic backup software that syncs with whatever computer you’ve install it on. So, if I have dropbox on my work computer, I save some Boardmaker boards that I’ve been working on then it will automatically be saved on my home computer (where I also have drop box installed). The second I come home I can pull up the same file and continue to work. Any computer you have it installed will automatically sync those files. You could also have it on your lap top, and there is an app on the iPhone and iPad. Essentially, it’s like having a virtual flash drive with you on the computers you use. My wife and I use it all the time. It’s great for moving items over that wouldn’t fit in a standard email. You can also share folders with other individuals. We share a folder with my mother-in-law so that we can exchange pictures of our children with her. We just drop them in the dropbox folder and the automatically start uploading on my wife’s parents’ computer as well (in the shared folder).

You can get up to 2 gigabytes for free. They will try to sell you upgrades, but in my humble opinion, it’s not worth it.

When you save a file from your computer it will then be visible on your iPhone/iPad when you are connected to the internet whether that be via wi-fi or by 3G. Now, you can select a file as “favorite” and then you would be able to have access to that file while being off line, which is an important feature for those of us with iPads and iPodtouchs who don’t always have the luxury of having instant internet. Why the whole world doesn’t have wi-fi coverage everywhere, I just don’t know. Come on people, the internet is a basic human right! Well, maybe not.

Anyway, you cannot edit files that are on your iPad/iPhone, only view them. But that’s okay, that’s really all that I want anyhow. So, you have your friendly boardmaker file and/or your very nice word processor with access to google image searches. You can put a word list, a social skills story, sequencing pictures, basic concepts, or whatever you want. Now save these items to your drop box, go onto your iphone/ipad and selected the items as favorite. Now you can pull those up on your mobile device anyway you want. You now have your own custom made mobile therapy materials on your iphone/ipad. Not that you could have easily printed those pages out and carried them with you where ever you went, but I’m all about taking less therapy materials around with me if I can help it.

Some of the software out there save to a very specific format that dropbox can’t read in the iphone/ipad app (I’m looking at you boardmaker). There is a very easy solution. There are numerous PDF creators out there. PDF files are documents that adobe acrobat readers can read. It’s a pretty universal format that is used frequently, and dropbox does recognize it on their iphone app. The way most PDF file creator software works is simple, just print the document, but selected the PDF creator as your printer and instead of printing the file, you save it as a PDF file somewhere on your computer, preferably your dropbox. Click here for a list of software programs that can create PDF files.

Well, there you have it a cheap way of toting language therapy material around with you, actually this could work with any different types of therapy. You make specific word lists for articulation therapy. You could make fluency therapy material mobile so you could get out of your office to do generalization activities. You could make board games (if you bring your own dice) with you to the preschool room. Granted I think this would be more effective on the iPad than anything else. And, yes I still don’t have an iPad, but I got my headstart teacher on to this. I don’t really think she’s seen the full potential, but then she stays in one room unlike us speechies.

So, go ahead and try this and tell me what you think. Let me know if you have any questions about getting it all set up.

Half Way, Hang in There

It’s around half way through the school year. They come and go so quickly, it’s unbelievable. The students grow up so quickly; they are in fact a few inches taller now. You probably have had more progress reports to write, or will soon. Those are always a joy. If you are anything like me, you likely have a few straggling referrals if not more. And the IEPs… Even though you are half way through the school year, you are likely only 1/3 of the IEP meetings that you need to hold (with a third of those due just in the month of May – how do we always end up doing that???).

Even though you have so much left to do, you are half way through another year. Boy they seem be getting shorter every year, don’t they? They sure do for me. Time just keeps speeding up and it feels like my grip on the handle bars has been loosening every year. I just keep on trying to hold on for dear life.

I have not been the best blogger as of late. I don’t know if I just got burned out of writing during the month of November, or what? But I’m going to try to be better to at least check in, write something somewhat useful/interesting once a week (my late New Year resolution). We’ll see if I can stick to it. I also want to attempt to spend time improving myself as a therapist. I think I have the tendency to get bogged down so much with paper work that I don’t give myself enough time read the journals or try to learn new therapy techniques.

Sometimes I believe it’s good that the New Year begins in the middle of our school year. It gives us an opportunity to set some goals right when we need them, when we’re in the thick of things. So, I give you all permission to write some late New Year resolutions before the end of January. Maybe you want to be better at keeping on top of the paper work or you want to improve your fluency therapy skills. Whatever, just take the opportunity if you haven’t already to think of someway that you can improve as a therapist.

And hang in there, did I mention that we’re half way to summer?