Early

Continuing on an artificial intelligence (AI) track this month, I was curious recently whether any tools have surfaced that specifically relate to creating stories. Creating a story about a timely, curriculum-related, or personally relevant topic is, of course, an activity that can create a great context for analyzing the result with Story Grammar Marker^® and applying its icons to language mapping. AI tools are also fun to play around WITH students and can be used metalinguistically with prompts to the tool to use specific story elements...

Escape rooms are popular diversions in real life and are inherently story-based through their varied themes. These experiences wrap language and visual cues into fun problem-solving situations, but can be pretty difficult to simulate in educational and intervention situations. Digital formats make this much easier! Check out Hooda Math’s huge variety of free escape games—my favorite selections are the US State and National Park collections. These are always a hit with students and, though on their surface seem simple point-and-click games, offer a lot in terms of general language and tie-ins with expository text...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, of course, one of the hottest topics in technology these days. Its recently emerging abilities are producing a mix of excitement and anxiety for the ways that it is disrupting education and other fields, but like many technology developments, it should be viewed as a tool. You may not know where to start, but one path is using ChatGPT’s free tools along with prompts that can help you plan narrative language interventions. ChatGPT is a chatbot from OpenAI (owned by Microsoft) using generative AI, which is a form of artificial intelligence that can create text, images, video and other media...

Looking for narrative structure in varied places will yield you many TOOLs! This includes sources such as games, current events, interactive websites, and of course, videos. In this post I want to expand upon the great work of Dr. Anna Vagin, who several years ago co-presented a webinar with Maryellen Moreau on the power of using animations for social and language learning (still available for free here). A quote from this webinar resonates strongly: Jerome Bruner (1986, 1996) referred to narrative thinking as a capacity to “read other minds”; “to make accurate inferences about the motives and intentions of others based on their observable behavior and the social situations in which they act. Narrative thinking is the very process we use to understand the social life around us,” take perspective and to construct situation models...

I have been serving an adjunct role at Boston University for 5 semesters providing supervision to graduate students in their first clinical experiences in the in-house clinic. One of the routines for the semester is to teach and use processes for obtaining baseline and post-treatment data. It was by equipping students in this manner that I discovered the availability of the CUBED, along with the previously mentioned SLAM Cards. The CUBED is a “family of screening and progress monitoring tools” that includes a huge package of graded story samples (levels K-8) with narrative language listening and reading materials and measures....

As many narratives could tell us (think of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as an extreme example), just because something “has always been done this way” does not mean it shouldn’t be questioned. This month we’ll turn that concept into thinking about standardized tests, too-long THE> determining factor in whether students do or do not receive speech and language interventions, particularly in the public school setting. Without inserting my POV too much into this topic, let’s keep the Summer Study Series focus and take a look at the recent review article published in Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, A Critical Analysis of Standardized Testing in Speech and Language Therapy (Nair, Farah & Cushing, 2023). The authors recount the history of speech and language intervention as dating back to the Middle Ages, with recognition of speech disabilities and efforts to remediate seen in cultures such as ancient India...