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?

Advice for Medical SLP Newbies part 3

It's Kristin.

Well, if you've been following the blog, you kow that a few new SLPs or grad student readers have asked some specific questions re: how to get things started. My previous post covered "Planning." This one's going to be about carrying out the session itself. Hope it helps! Feel free to add your own comments and advice!

The Session: I personally like to start sessions by asking a few questions first.  Before I just jump in and start drilling them I want to see how they've been since our last session, how they're feeling, if they think speech therapy is helping, if they understand what we're working on, if they did any
"homework assignments" I gave them, etc.  This may seem obvious, but sometimes it's easy to skip this stuff when you get into automatic mode.

Then as we get going on our therapy tasks, I try to remember that if I'm bored, so is the patient.  I like to keep things interesting and meaningful for them.  I let them know what we're working on and why.  I try to switch activities every 10 minutes or so (but that can vary depending on their attention span).

Well, that seems really brief, but many of the other things I thought of mentioning seem too obvious and boring: taking data, dealing with different personalities or family.  Comment if you think I'm missing anything!

Merry Christmas!
XOXO,
~K

What a long crazy trip its been

Well, again I don’t know if you missed me or not, but I’m back and it has been one heck of a ride. I’m sure that there are some of you out there that have no idea what I’m talking about.

I decided to take up the challenge from National Novel Writing Month otherwise known as NaNoWriMo  to write a novel in one month, thirty days, with at least 50,000 words.

I started the first day, just me and my computer starring at each other, no ideas were coming to mind, nothing was flowing, but then I started typing and I just kept going. The story kind of created itself as I went along. I had to have plenty of brain storming sessions and discussions with my wife, but the story seemed to come out the best when I just kept writing. When I just let is flow and gush out. Maybe gushing wasn’t the best word right there.

Did I make it? Did I finish the challenge of 50,000 words? Well, those of you who follow me on twitter already know.

Yes and no.

I ended up with a word count yesterday of 83,100 words, so yes, according to NaNoWriMo I made it. And no, my story had not yet been concluded yet. That was my main goal, to have a completed first draft of my novel. Having had written over 150 word document pages means I have quite a bit of this novel written. Yet every good book needs three components, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Mine seems to be lacking that last part. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to get there, but I’ll keep trudging along, just not at the same crazy intense pace that I have been doing for the last 30 days. I told my wife yesterday that she has permission to nag me to finish this. I give you all the same permission.

Speaking of my wife, she is invested. She deserves me to finish this silly project of mine because bless her heart she has read every single word that I’ve written. Yup, every single word, if you can believe it. And not only that, she’s let me write while taking the kids, doing dishes, putting up with me talking about nothing else, etc, etc. Yes, my wife deserves a trophy I dare say. She has been wonderful while I have been putting myself through this literary madness exercise. I love her for it. Well, I loved her before it as well, but I love her even more.

I can hear the whole lot of you yelling from your computers and fancy smart phones as you are reading this.

“What the heck is your stupid book about??!!???” I’m sure some of you used even more choice language than that.

Well, what I thought it was going to be about in the beginning has evolved. I’ll tell you some things that it’s about, but don’t expect it to make sense.

It entitled Harvest Wind.

It’s about a teenage boy coming to grips with his stuttering disorder.

It’s about a young blossoming teen romance. (Yeah, I especially didn’t see that one coming either).

It’s about a murder mystery.

It’s about a people, a city, who live dual compartmentalized lives in a dream like world completely separate from their reality when they are awake.

It’s about a people fighting for survival.

It’s about a young boy coming to believe in himself as he tries to find his place in the world.

Is that enough to confuse you at least? The book took so many unexpected turns as I was writing it. There were many moments while I was writing that I laughed out loud by what one of my characters said or did. There were other times I could feel the love sickness that often times infects the hearts of those who are young. And there were times that I felt heart broken at the things that had happened. It was seriously an emotional roller coaster, not just feeling all the feelings of the main characters of my novel, but I also had all of the feelings of inadequacy come at me at times. There were several times throughout the month that I was attacked by, what the NaNoWriMo people call, my “inner editor”. This evil little thing often told me that my writing was crap, that this was a stupid idea, and that I should just call the whole damn thing off. I mean seriously, what was I thinking anyway? I got myself down several times thinking about the heap of rubbish that I attempted to call a novel in progress.

It very well maybe a big heap of … rubbish, but at least I proved that I could nearly write a novel in 30 days (over 80,000 words strong!). And if I can write a novel in thirty days I can do just about anything. Such as write a blog post at least once a week! Ha!

I’ve already had several people ask if they could read it. I want to at least finish the first draft before letting anybody touch it, but then I really need some people who have a good editing eye. Right now the book is untouched, riddled with inconsistencies and typos. I hope that some of you will please read this and help me make it better. If you would like to read a draft of this to help improve it, email me at pathologicallyspeaking (at) gmail (dot) com and I’ll add you to a list. Don’t hold your breath as to how long it might take me to complete the first draft. It feels like it still needs at least 10,000 more words, its kind of hard to tell.

And yes, I totally plan on doing this again next year, but I hope to enlist some friends in real life and on the web, to join me in this crazy challenge. Maybe you could join me next November.

Thanks for letting me ramble on this topic. I promise to shut up about it for a good year or so unless I really just want to tell you guys about one thing or another.

Now back to your regular scheduled blog program.Yes, I'm actually going to be writing about speech therapy stuff again.

A little bit more for the brand new SLP's (aka: advice for the Medical SLP Newbies-- part II)

It's Kristin here.

So, one of you commented after our advice posts that you are even wondering about some of the basics- how to plan a session, "run" a session, take data and write reports.  I know that can all be overwhelming when you're in grad school or just entering your first internship or first job.  I thought I could say a little more on that for those who are interested. And you veteran SLPs- feel free to add to this in the comments.  You know Bob and I love comments and feedback.

I work in a Rehabilitation Unit in a hospital.  I mainly see adults with neurological issues.  Bob- maybe you'll want to address a more pediatric version of some of the stuff I have to say. :)  No pressure! 

(Let's assume that the initial evaluation is done here and I'll start with the first session after the eval.)
 Planning:  I think the most efficient way to plan for a session, is to look at the patient/client/student's (okay, from now on I'll just say patient) goals and decide what the priorities are.  Maybe they have 7 goals, but which one is affecting their communication or life the most?  In my case, swallowing often comes first.  Then speech and language.  Then cognition.  In the schools, maybe it's a specific phoneme, or glaring syntactical deficit, or a pragmatic/social issue that's causing him major social problems.  Then there are those secondary goals that can wait a bit- like why start the session focusing on /s/ when the student can't even form clear sentences?  In my world- why start with memory tasks if the patient can't even name words?  Anyway, I think we may have a tendency as clinicians to start with the tasks that are the most enjoyable to work on, or that we feel the most skilled with, so you gotta watch out.

Let's stop there for now and I'll address other topics in my subsequent "Newbie" posts.


Thanks for reading,
~K

Where Did Bob Go?

Howdy peoples,

I bet you’ve been wondering, hmm, were did Bob go? If you are anything like me, if something doesn’t come up in your google reader it just doesn’t exist. So, you’re most likely not very concerned. If you aren't then you can stop reading right now, if you are concerned though (and I love you for it!!) then continue.

Well, I’m not writing jack this month because I’m writing too much. Make any sense? Of course not. If you know me well, you should know that I rarely make much sense at all. But there is a very good reason for this nonsense.

It’s November, which is National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo, if you follow me on twitter, then you’ve seen my frantic tweets about the event already (on both accounts @speechbob and @aoirselvar), as well as updates on facebook (poor confused dave). This year I have decided to throw in my lot with those crazy people who are attempting to write at least 1667 words a day in order to meet the grand old goal of 50,000 words by Novemeber 30th.

It’s been fun, but everything else in my life has been put on hold. Including writing blog posts, playing video games, catching up on my DVRed shows, feeding my cat (did I mention that I recently got a cat?), personal hygiene… you name it.

But today is November 13th, and I’m at 28,000 words already! I’m more than half way there! Woot! But only problem is that my novel is more than half way done. I’ve actually set my goal for 70,000 words, which I hope to eep out a decent story.

My story? Well, it’s a fantasy story about a boy name Praxton (yes I stole this character from previous writings, but he’s nearly completely different. Like a different dimension Praxton, in a different world, etc). I’m actually pretty happy with what I’ve written so far, I’m worried about letting the masses actually read the book, but if really really want to read the book and help me revise it, email me at aoirselvar (at) gmail (dot) com. I won’t even send anything out until I’m done with draft one, after I let some people at least get rid of all the many typos.

Anyway, I have spent much too much time writing this blog post. And in order to save time so I can write more on my NaNoWriMo, I’m just going to put this post on the three blogs that I write on (Pathologically Speaking, Casual Huntering, Blog of Bob & Lindy, even though the have nothing in common and I write on some of them more often than others.

Everybody have a great day, and I’ll see you in December.

My new commitment

Hey all!  It's Kristin posting.  Sorry we've taken a short blog-bbatical!  We're really still here, just got a little swamped for a sec.

I got a comment from one of you (thanks Brenda!) recommending an /r/ program when I asked for help with that neighbor kid's /r/'s.  I went to research it a bit on Twitter and realized I am missing out on this whole SLP twitter world out there.  Bob, you are obviously totally SLPeeps savvy, but I am now jealous and I want to be a part of it.

Yes, I have a twitter account, but I don't really use it.  I don't fully understand how Twitter works, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.  (Examples:  Why do people's twitter names have the @ symbols and how does that help you find the person, as opposed to just searching for them without the @?  Why can you only see fractions of conversations, even when you expand them on the right?  Etc.)

Well, I am going to post and check my Twitter account at least 3X/week.  I am going to post about SLP stuff and if you wanna follow me its apparently @ and then my name kristinm333.  :) 

Hope to see you there.  Hope we can get good ideas from each other.  And for heaven's sake- we need blog comments.  Come say hi or add your 2 cents or something!

XOXO
~K