Apps and online resources for OT's and SLP's

Kristin here.

I found this cool site with awesome tools for Occupational therapists, and many of them also apply to SLPs.

http://mastersinoccupationaltherapy.org/2011/40-best-online-tools-for-occupational-therapists/

it includes a hearing test app, AAC apps. etc.

Also, if any of you are interested in a job in the school system working with teens just 4-5 hours a week, very flexible hours, let me know!  (SLC, Utah area ~3300 South.)  I can get you more info- my friend is looking to hire.

~Kristin

My iPad/iPod SLP starter guide...

It's Kristin here. 

SLP's:  Do you have an iPad for therapy yet?  If not, many school districts are getting grants or starting new programs to purchase several of these relatively inexpensive devices for the SLPs.  Someimes you don't know what you can get until you ask for it!  And putting it on your gift wish list so you can get your own is a great idea too. 

Well, I know a good chunk of our posts lately have been iPad related, but don't get discouraged yet.  Soemtimes we like to post about what we're into, and we are both having lots of fun with these new "toys."  We'll be posting on other SLP topics soon enough, I swear!

So here are a few of my thoughts on getting started:

• Right off the bat make sure you ahve "MobileMe" set up in case you lose your iPad.  VERY IMPORTANT!  I had a personal experience where this saved me!
• Create an iTunes account.
• Browse the Apps Store to see what's hot, what on sale, what's under the "Education Category," etc.
• Read the info on the "updates" before you actually upload them.
• Set the restrictions so that in-app purchases are disabled.
• Enable "triple click" under settings which allows you to turn the screen black and font white, zoom, and get voice over for the blind.
• Import your work calendar into the iPad calendar- awesome!
• Download the iPad starter guide and iPad user guide to the iBooks app (free!)
• All classic novels are free too!
• Download lotsa apps, practive them, and categorize them for ease of use.
• Use the double click feature often to clear out the apps you are not using which slow you down.  Here you can also freeze the screen so it won't flip to different orientations when you rotate the iPad.  Also adjust screen brightness here as needed.
• If you don't have Angry Birds, World of Goo, Cut the Rope- download them already!  Get with it, SLP!  :)
• Other must haves: Pandora, Penultimate, Fruit Ninja, Talking Tom, iRiddle HD, Pulse, DropBox, Facebook Friendly, Nightstand, WeatherBug, Pocket Pond, Zombie Trailer Park.
• I'll do one more post with all my favorite apps for therapy next time!
• Get a protective screen cover so you can wipe it down with disinfectant.
• Get a case to protect it and help prop it up for clients.
• Also consider a keyboard or stylus!

Of course, if you don't have the iPad- get the iPad 2 instead (I'm jealous!).  The iPad is now cheaper by a couple hundred bucks.  The iPhone and iPod touch are also cheaper and also awesome (but iPad is nicer in a therapy session for visual purposes if you have the option...)

Any thoughts from you readers?  I'm sure there are SO many experts by now!  Got any other suggestions on getting started?  Any other favorite apps I may not know??  (I'm obsessed.)  :)

XOXO,
~Kristin

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.

My iPod Touch in Therapy

I recently purchased the new iPod touch 4 (as I have mentioned in yesterdays post), which I had been saving up for for several months. In the last couple of weeks I've started using the iPod touch at work. I even purchased a few SLP apps for it. Its been great and it has helped immensely. I wanted to review some of the benefits to having an iPod touch or an iPhone as an SLP.

First off, there are many speech therapy apps that I'd rather go over in separate posts. Nonetheless the ones that I got are great. I got Pocket SLP, Artikpix, Percentally, and a ton of the free kindergarten vocabulary apps from kindergarten.com. I'm only started to get a feel for these different apps. I'm still trying to figure out how they fit in with my therapy. When I have had a little more time to get a feel for them I'll give reviews later on.

Okay, so first of all, having my schedule at my finger tips has been so helpful. Many of you know that I work at a year round school. You don't know what scheduling is like at a year round school until you've been there. You see, the kids still get there summer time off, but its dispersed through the year. There are 4 tracks of students with one track being off at all times. That means that you always have a different group of kids at school. I have students on all four tracks; and yes, my schedule changes every three to four weeks. I never know for certain who I'm going to see for therapy any given week. Now I have my schedule with me via google calendar that I can check at any time, with the students name, grade, track, teacher, room number, etc. I love it. I have a different google calendar assigned to each track of students. And I can decide which calendars I view. So, now when there's a track change, I simply turn off one track and turn on the other.

The new iPod touch also has a built in microphone (which they haven't had before) which any speech therapist would fine useful. You can also keep the mic on while running other apps. So, you could do artic probes on the device and record it at the same time. Next time you sync your device your speech sample will be backed up on your computer you can then  take that recording and burn it to a CD and put that in the student's file.

The new iPod touch also comes with a camera on the front and back that can take pictures and be used to create videos. There are lots of different things you can do with these resources. Not that we haven’t ever used a camera before, but now it’s just a tad bit more accessible. I like the idea of being able to make a PECS card out of anything in my room in a quick hurry. Also, the video (along with the digital recorder) is a great way to give the child feedback. I’m sure there are more things you can do with this, but I can’t think of anything else at the moment.

I’ll talk about specific apps, as I mentioned above, sometime in the near future. With that in mind, most of the therapy apps have some kind of data tracking mechanism. That is reason enough in my mind to run out and buy one of these things. I’ve sometimes said that I feel like can do one thing very very well, but my brain doesn’t always do too well with multi-tasking. The nice thing about letting the little device to assist in data tracking is that you can pay more attention to the therapy, helping the child, expanding language, have more in-depth discussion, etc. When it comes to artic you just press a button if they got the sound right or not, then at the end it’ll give you a percentage, which some apps will let you email, copy/paste, or even put into a spreadsheet. Can I tell you how much cleaner my therapy notes are going to be? Yeah, I’m pretty excited about that too.

Did I mention that this thing plays music? Yes, so you can pop that in while you’re doing progress reports late into the night to help maintain your sanity (something I did last night actually). I suppose you already know about that feature, considering the fact that it is an iPod after all.

And if you didn’t know, the sky is the limit as apps are concerned. There is an app for just about anything. I tried to keep this post to stick with the speech therapy related stuff, but I also have apps to help keep track of my exercising (which is easy to track at the moment because it’s not happening). I have a nifty budget app. I can keep my guitar tuned with an app. You can read ebooks, browse the web, watch TV shows, etc etc. I haven’t even mentioned the games that I’ve purchased for the app. Way too much fun is packed into this little device.

Now, just to note, I can’t connect to the internet while I’m at work, which is just as well because my therapy stuff I can do offline. The iPod Touch can only connect to the web when you have an available wi-fi network to connect to, but iPhones would still be able to connect. I just wasn’t willing to pay the extra money for the 3G network, and I don’t have my cell phone with AT&T anyway. If you must be connected to the web at all times, you might want to spend the extra money for the iPhone. However, its been fine doing therapy without it.

Kristin has recently posted a list of potential apps for the iPad (I started to write this before I knew what Kristin was up to, funny how that works). Most of your iPod touch / iPhone apps will work on the iPad as well, but there are a few greedy programmers that have separate versions which would require you to pay twice if you want it on both devices. Maybe its not greedy. I don't know, but I do love the fact that many apps are for the iPhone and the iPad, meaning you only have to buy it once. I wanted the iPod touch first because I wanted to use it as a personal organizer, something you can keep in your pocket. My pant pockets aren't quite big enough for the iPad. With that being said, I really really really want the iPad now, especially for therapy. It would be much better for those little preschoolers to share (kids tend to gather around, pushing others aside - at least that's what my kids at home do). If you plan on buying on iPad, I suggest that you wait just a little bit.   In about three months they are going to release the 2nd generation iPad. It's rumored that it's going to have a camera, retinal scanning, and be overall a better device. At least that's the going rumor.


If you use a device like this in your therapy, I would like to hear about it. I'm always looking for new and better ways to do therapy, and I'm a little bit of a tech-geek.