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Blabberize, a web app that allows you to add a talking “mouth” and recording for any picture, is a great tool for developing all kinds of organization and oral language skills. I recently used it with students in conjunction with a Setting Map from It’s All About the Story to develop descriptive skills and the concept of setting.  After having students pick a favorite setting, we located a visually supportive image of the place using Google Images.  Students completed a Setting Map and described key elements such as Location, Function/Use, Areas/Parts, etc.  We then downloaded the image, logged in to Blabberize, added a mouth and integrated the notes on the Setting Map into an oral description.  The example you can view here is one created with an individual student; you can always keep it shorter if you have a group!...

Valentine’s Day approaches! It’s a great time to target students’ understanding of feelings as described in It’s All About The Story, Book I of Mindwing’s Autism Collection! The Feelings icon is, of course, a heart, a common symbol of this holiday. You can use this book’s introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), or Feelings in general as emphasized in the Story Grammar Marker program, along with the two resources presented in the screencast below, to develop students’ narrative language and perspective taking abilities. The screencast describes how to use a resource that almost everyone has access to- Microsoft PowerPoint- and also provides an overview of an interactive poetry generator. Having students make a Valentine for a special person in their lives can be an important way to show they are “thinking about” others and use some great language skills...

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 themselves through play are suddenly expected to write stories (i.e. that gap we call “First Grade”). Toontastic uses the iPad’s multitouch interface...

At the elementary school level, we all can attest to seeing students who, narratively, get stuck at what we might call the “andthenandthenandthen” stage. The official name for this stage is the Action Sequence, and it is comprised of Characters, Settings, and a series of Actions with little variation in conjunction use. These students benefit from structures and contexts to move them into using to more complex story elements and cohesive ties such as when, because, and so. Mindwing’s narrative maps, particularly the Reactive Sequence and Abbreviated Episode Maps can provide that structure: (*Maps can be found in the Story Grammar Marker® Teachers’ Manual and the Talk to Write, Write to Learn™ Teachers’ Manual )...

In the Northeast at least, February means school vacation week, and who doesn’t like Disney? Disney’s parks are based on its countless characters and, of course, narratives, and the company recently released a FREE iPad app that allows children to explore Disneyland. Disneyland Explorer (iPad only) provides a touch-navigable visual environment allowing kids to visit a huge variety of themed settings (Adventureland, Critter Country, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and so on, and that’s only in Disneyland proper) as they tap to reveal additional photos, videos and music. The app is naturally designed to lure tourists to Disney’s parks, but in the process it provides a primer in the element of Setting, providing a context for clinicians to develop students ability to describe locations, themes, and even genres...

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a recent trend in educational design, and involves presenting students with real-world contextual tasks that relate to curriculum areas. PBL is a great approach for Speech-Language Pathologists and Special Educators to employ as our students benefit from having their learning relate to personally relevant and functional content. To learn more about PBL, watch this great video from Common Craft. One tool that has been integrated as a kind of PBL is the “Webquest,” a set of web pages that outline a task and provide web-based resources for its completion. Webquests are not new, and teachers have been developing them for some time. There is a particular Webquest that I wanted to share with you in this post, particularly because it is one you could use in classroom, small group, or even individual language therapy while integrating Story Grammar Marker® and Thememaker® tools in the process...

On the heels of Autism Awareness Month, I wanted to highlight a product that provides a terrific complement to use of the Story Grammar Marker® for treatment of social learning and narrative deficits for students with autism spectrum and related disorders. You Are a Social Detective is a CD-ROM product (compatible with Mac and Windows systems) created by Michelle Garcia Winner of Social Thinking® in conjunction with the folks at Social Skill Builders. The program is based on the popular comic of the same name, which provides a visual primer on basic social thinking concepts such as expected and unexpected behaviors and their effects on others, “thinking with the eyes,” and making “smart vs. wacky” guesses. Many children on the autism spectrum require explicit and consistent teaching of these concepts and coaching in their application across the school day...

The arrival of the iPad has presented us with all kinds of opportunities to boost the engagement factor for our students. In many cases, students will be more engaged in what we would consider “paper and pencil” tasks when we “app-itize” them utilizing some of the tools available as free or cheap apps. For example, in recent posts on my blog SpeechTechie, I discussed how the iBooks app could be used to excite students about printed materials and also present PDF files that are often provided with published intervention materials (you don’t need to read those posts to understand this one, but they provide some related information)...

‘Tis the season! No matter what one’s religious beliefs are, the holiday season involves giving, and this is a context that is ripe for critical thinking, description, perspective-taking, and social scripts.  It can be quite difficult to engineer learning situations in which children are giving each other actual gifts, what with the need for stores, money, and the fine-motor aspects of wrapping.  However, technology can cut through some of that sticky tape for us and provide us with a virtual-gift-giving activity!

I first learned of the Gift Wrap App (FREE for iPad)...

April is Autism Awareness Month, and here on the blog we wanted to showcase a connection between Mindwing’s tools and interventions that target social learning for children with autism!

Over the past year since its release, I have found The Incredible Flexible You™ Curriculum Set (Volume 1) by Ryan Hendrix, Kari Zweber Palmer, Nancy Tarshis and Michelle Garcia Winner and published via Social Thinking® to be an invaluable teaching tool! Targeted to early learners—preschool through 2nd grade, but adaptable to older students requiring basic social learning lessons—the curriculum set aims to develop key social cognitive concepts through stories and play. The five storybooks that come with Volume 1 set the context for many lessons and play activities as the main characters, Evan, Ellie, Jessie and Molly, learn and demonstrate the core concepts in the set...

The book that my friends and I are reading in July for our Book Club is the best seller Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I am only a couple of chapters in, but the first few sentences in this book struck me, because this passage exemplifies the idea of authors’ ability to create “movies” in their readers’ minds.

"The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming — an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell. But she didn't mind the heat or the littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was the most exciting city in the world" (Susann, 1966). The author used many senses to describe the setting; how the heat felt, what she saw and heard and smelled. Susann also used figurative language and personification (“angry concrete animal”) to create a very vivid mental image of New York City...

Narrative seems to be “having a moment” in research circles, with a number of recent articles being published related to the why and how of developing storytelling skills. One of the most exciting pieces is “Classroom-Based Narrative and Vocabulary Instruction: Results of an Early-Stage, Nonrandomized Comparison Study,” (Gillam, Olszewski, Fargo & Gillam, 2014) detailing a study primarily conducted by Utah State University and published in Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools (and available to ASHA members in full text here).

This study com-pared the results of narrative and vocabulary instruction via a traditional versus an experimental approach in two first grade classrooms...

In working with SLPs, teachers, other professionals and graduate students around the myriad ways I find Story Grammar Marker® useful in intervention, I often emphasize how narrative is at the crux of language functioning and social cognition. This post will explore this idea with an eye toward the concept of situational awareness, an area we can look at as critical for many of our students with social learning challenges--an appropriate topic for May as it is Better Speech and Hearing Month!

In their article, Social Learning and Social Functioning: Social Thinking's Cascade of Social Functioning, Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke describe how awareness of situations serves as the foundation of interactions. Social functioning can then be considered a "cascade" of additional skills such as self-awareness within a situation (and understanding of one's own possible role in the ongoing situation) and abstracting and interpreting the ongoing language and actions of others.

Some years ago as an SLP in the elementary school setting, I was informed by a colleague of Isabel Beck’s revolutionary approach to targeting vocabulary. In the book Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Development, co-written with Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan, the authors describe a methodology for building vocabulary revolving around key principles...