MindWing Concepts Blog

Recently in the Mindwing Blog I featured the Story Patch iPad app, which allows students to create stories according to provided structures or from scratch, resulting in a text and picture-based booklet.

I wanted to follow up that post with a different digital storytelling app that provides an easy means to create and publish dynamic animated stories with spoken audio and music! The app I speak of is Toontastic (an absolute BARGAIN at $1.99), whose creators at Launchpad toys have sought to bridge the gap created when students who primarily express themseves through play are suddenly expected to write stories (i.e. that gap we call “First Grade”). Toontastic uses the iPad’s multitouch interface and a play-like context beautifully as students are guided to create as many scenes as are needed to tell their story. The app would be a great tool to use in order to teach narrative elements and organization using Braidy the StoryBraid™, Story Grammar Marker™, or the Mindwing Autism Collection and their associated manipulatives and story maps.

Here’s a visual tour of Toontastic for you:

Toontastic comes with an audio explanation of story structure that can be easily aligned with Story Grammar Marker®, as can be seen above. You can choose to create five different scenes in your animated movie, or just stick with one!

Choose a setting, then Character “Toys” to put into action! You can also draw your own settings and characters.

Character Toys themselves can be custom colored, then tapped and dragged around the screen.  Tap Start Animation and the app will record as you move the characters and speak to provide an audio narration and/or dialogue. The app will then play back your animated scene!

For each scene, you can pick a music soundtrack that corresponds with the mood of the situation, connecting actions with internal responses of the characters.

When you are done with as many scenes as you’d like to create, tap Done and you can give your movie a title and genre, and share on ToonTube, Toontastic’s online community, if you’d like.  The story is automatically also saved within the app.

Students will be excited to publish to ToonTube, where others can interact with their film by “liking” it.  ToonTube also features model animations that would be a great context for story mapping of others’ creations using the SGM and other tools!

I recently had the opportunity to chat via Skype with Andy Russell, one of the creators of Toontastic.  If you have a few minutes, it’s an interesting conversation about the background of the app, its creators’ sound belief in social interactionist (Vygotskian) language learning, and future plans for the app and Launchpad Toys.

I hope you’ll check out Toontastic- it’s a great app to add to your narrative toolbox!

Sean J. Sweeney, MS, MEd, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public school and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blogSpeechTechie: LookingatTechnologyThroughaLanguageLens and one of the editors of TherapyApp411.

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ThemeMaker, Mindwing’s expository companion to Story Grammar Marker, helps children break down and produce the more challenging expository text that becomes central to learning as they advance through the grades! I have found that children are more open to working with expository text once they learn that the familiar SGM icons can help them along the way! While each ThemeMaker Expository Text Map (e.g. List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast) is helpful on its own, kids need to be moved toward understanding that ALL of these structures are contained in curriculum discourse and text!

That can seem like an overwhelming task, but it becomes manageable and fun using a recently developed and FREE online tool, GlogsterEDU, a site that tells all students to “poster yourself!” What is a poster, really, but a display of information that utilizes these key expository structures? Using GlogsterEDU, you can choose and research any topic with your students using ThemeMaker maps and icons, then create a “Glog” with pictures, images and graphics, text (structures!) links, and even recorded audio and video if you wish! How to do all this? Well shoot on over to SpeechTechie, where we are wrapping up Glogster Week, a week of posts featuring examples of how to use Glogs in Speech-Language and other interventions, as well as how-to screencasts showing each step of how to use this (again, FREE) resource. If you’re catching up later, you can just click over to see all the posts regarding Glogster.

How do the ThemeMaker icons work with text structures? Well as I mentioned, they can be used to explore any topic, so I thought I’d present you an array of structures that explore GlogsterEDU itself!

And for a specific example, please check out this Glog I created with a student. D. was studying continents, so we used ThemeMaker Maps to research and break down information about Earth’s land masses, then had a blast creating this Glog (be sure to roll over the Glog to find our links)!

I hope you will consider GlogsterEDU a fun and helpful context to use Mindwing’s tools!

Sean J. Sweeney, M.S., M.Ed., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public schools and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blog SpeechTechie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens, which won the 2010 Best New Edublog Award. He can be contacted at sean@speechtechie.com.

Click Here to View Expository Text Structures and Glogster

Click Here to View Glogster

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I am going to open this post with a language sample obtained from a fifth grade student in 2006, an attempt to retell an episode of the series Full House.

And um something that happened was when this girl named Michelle and this guy Jesse, it was Michelle’s birthday. And Jesse and Michelle got stuck in a gas station and she missed her party.
And um they were there all day, but then finally it opened the next- no it opened a lot later. So um they went back to the house and they had their party and she got an elephant and she got to ride it and all her friends and she got, she felt better. And that’s it.

I collected and analyzed many samples like this over my years in the school setting, narratives that clearly attended to character, setting and “Kick-Off,” but lack cohesion, complexity and maturity due to their reliance on a simple action sequence structure. Do you have a lot of students like this?

I really began to understand how to help students with this type of narrative (who comprised a good chunk of my caseload, and still) when I first worked through Mindwing’s A Day in the Park Student Activity Booklet (and its accompanying lesson plans in the Talk to Write, Write to Learn manual). Many students sort of get stuck at the action sequence level, and don’t generalize the structures needed for a reaction sequence (character, setting, Kick-Off and reaction to the kickoff) or more advanced episodes that detail character responses, feelings and plans, along with complex sentences that link these story elements. A Day in the Park helped me see how I could break down these levels of formulation for students, and as a result I was able to identify other activities that could provide additional practice and skill-building.

One of my favorite recent discoveries is the Zimmer Twins website (based on the Qubo animated series), which allows you to make animated stories from pre-created starters or from scratch! The starters are naturally complex in structure and work really well with Mindwing’s Story Maps as you help students complete the story on a higher level of narrative organization. I found the site to be a great context to focus on moving students from an action to a reaction sequence; here’s one reaction sequence movie I created with a group. Before you get nervous, I can tell you that the Zimmer Twins site is really simple to use!

First, you can view the story starters and pick one that will work for your students.

After clicking “Make Movie From [your chosen title],” you can simply click, drag and modify the rest of your story.

By clicking on the elements in the sentence, you can change character, setting, and other features of the clip. Word and thought balloons can be modified- just click and type. The tabs allow you to add different elements such as actions, reactions and feelings!

Click here to see another way I finished the starter “Surprise!” I hope you enjoy Zimmer Twins, I know the kids I work with really did. Here’s a great tutorial on using the site if you’d like more information before diving in. Be sure to create a free account when you start using the site.

Sean J. Sweeney, M.S., M.Ed., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public schools and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blog SpeechTechie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens, which won the 2010 Best New Edublog Award. He can be contacted at sean@speechtechie.com.

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Using the holidays as a context for language interventions can be tough, as it’s important to be inclusive of all cultures and celebrations. From a technology perspective, there just aren’t many great interactive resources about the Festival of Lights (anyone want to make some)? Gingerbread, however, while associated loosely with Christmas, is probably fair game in the public school setting!

Now, while websites with excessive, distracting ads are often something I rule out as a potential therapy resource, sometimes sites that are actually a giant, yet somehow unobtrusive ad can be great. This can be said for Sprint’s The Gingerbread Man with Everything site, a simple interactive you can use to decorate a fabulous cookie. Its relation to story grammar will become apparent when you click to browse the gallery of characters from fireman to cheerleader to vampire (it may be hard to explain to your students what the emo gingerbread man is all about, but we have faith in you).

You can download Google Sketchup here, and the Gingerbread House Template is here!

Give it a try- Google Sketchup is pretty easy once you get your feet wet. However, if, understandably, you find it a bit daunting, check out Karen Ogen’s list of interactive web-based gingerbread house creators, another nice context to work on description. Have fun and Happy Holidays!

Sean J. Sweeney, M.S., M.Ed., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public schools and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blog SpeechTechie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens.

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