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I have long had an interest in how technology can provide context within our interventions, much the same way a storybook can provide context.  In this approach to intervention, MindWing's tools have served as essential structure to help my students break down language, (as used with a website that provides information, for example) or organize and produce language (when used in conjunction with a creative “Web 2.0” resource that allows students to save and publish work). To focus on this latter "bottom-up" strategy, I suggest you check out Kerpoof, one of my favorite resources for its versatility and ease of use.

Kerpoof* is a free, interactive website recently acquired by Disney and is basically an online version of Kidpix Studio. Kerpoof's interface allows you to choose a background, characters and other setting elements, and add word/thought balloons and caption boxes (sounding promising?). You can create, share, export or print the resulting pictures or multi-picture story sequences...

We have previously discussed the potential of the incredibly popular game Minecraft for developing narrative language skills through the use of Story Grammar Marker^®. At that time, I had described the game as potentially too complicated to use as an actual tool in activities, but I have since rethought that. The iPad version ($5.99) will allow you to create a simple “world” (use the Creative mode) and the building interface is easy to learn, operating much like LEGOs. As a result, spaces can be used to scaffold language for describing settings. Minecraft Education, on the other hand, offers a specialized, structured collection of Worlds you can use for both narrative and expository language. The software is available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 account and usable on a laptop, desktop, or again on the iPad...

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...

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...

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!...

You have probably heard chatter about the potential and possible pitfalls of AI in educational contexts. This month- a simple way to harness the possibilities of AI image generation. Generative AI has been around for many years but has only been recently been made widely available to the public via a variety of webtools. This kind of artificial intelligence is called “generative” for its ability to use growing neural networks to create content, such as novel text, imagery or even music and video. ChatGPT is a recent tool which responds to prompts to create text, and I recently blogged about its usefulness in generating problem solving scenarios–also useful for targeting story elements. Along with ChatGPT, Microsoft’s OpenAI offers DALL-E, an image generator which is able to create pictures from “natural language,” as opposed to code. This is most easily accessed through the Bing Image Creator, a simple tool that develops images from scratch (not search)!...

June has at this point busted out all over! I know I am wrapping up my school year work while many of you may have been lounging for a few weeks, I hope. For this month’s entry in our Summer Study Series we are diving into the strong connection between narrative language and social learning. But speaking of Summer Studies related to narrative and social development, don’t miss MindWing’s Summer Course: Social Communication with SGM^®: Social Emotional Learning, Language Processing, & Pragmatics—July 25 & 26, 2023! While from a few years back, this month’s article presents terrific and easy to implement ideas for the PK-primary school level. Let’s delve into “Using a narrative- and play-based activity to promote low-income preschoolers’ oral language, emergent literacy, and social competence” from the Early Childhood Research Quarterly (Nicolopoulou, Cortina Ilgaz, Brockmeyer Cates & de Sá, 2015)...

We have previously discussed in this blog the importance of the “GIVE A STORY TO GET A STORY” technique. Described by Hadley (1998) in her wonderful article on naturalistic language sampling, and linked to other resources, conversational mapping involves providing a story about your own life which can help elicit the same from your students. This technique provides a great model and also a pragmatic context for narrative intervention, no matter the “size” of your story. Recently, I had a rather big story to share with my students. After many years of trying, I made it through the audition process to compete on Jeopardy!...

The article discussed this month interested me in particular because, although in private practice and university settings currently, I have a long history as a school-based SLP. As my caseload grew, I found huge value in forging partnerships with teachers to deliver a portion of services in their classrooms with co-led lessons, or simply taking the lead for 30 minutes a week. The teachers appreciated my efforts to tie in with curriculum topics and also providing them with tangible strategies they could carry over with students to support their language development.

SLP and social educator Anna Vagin has provided a wealth of resources that overlap wonderfully with MindWing’s methodologies in narrative language development. Through her website workshops, and terrific FREE mailing list, she shares connections to fostering conversational language, using engaging contexts such as games and animations to build social cognition, and recently, a new perspective on using visually supportive cognitive/emotional scales. Scales are a tried-and-tested tool for expanding thinking, linked to counseling approaches such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Motivational Interviewing (MI)...

Barnett’s stories are playful, visual, and funny. Whether it’s the humor in Oh, No! and Oh, No (Not Again), or the adventure and irony of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, these books present many narrative and expository opportunities with Story Grammar Marker^®, Thememaker^®’s expository maps, and, of course, visual tools such as magnets and digital icons. What sets many of these books apart is the way they use visual cues, nonverbal behavior, and subtle character plans—a perfect match for SGM^® icons that help students recognize story structure and the “landscape of consciousness” (characters’ plans, mental states, and feelings)...

Sketch and Speak works like it sounds, scaffolding students’ use of pictography, or quick sketches, to visualize details of an expository passage, followed by their oral description. This process has terrific synergy with MindWing’s methodology and materials, particularly ThemeMaker, as structural comprehension approaches (i.e. ,analyzing List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and other structures) go hand-in-hand with developing understanding of the expository content. In fact, MindWing’s Expository Maps go so well with this strategy, they can literally be used as the space for it.

Happy Summer! Each year we set aside these few months on the blog to explore some recent research articles and literature that have relevance to MIndWing’s tools and narrative and expository language supports. This month we check out the first of a two-part article discussing game-based learning (GBL), a popular approach for engagement in classrooms, which can be found at Getting Serious About Games: Exploring How Game-Based Learning Is Used in Education and Therapy. The piece has many points that relate to how games can be used as a language and learning context...

In this Autism Acceptance Month, it’s more important than ever to hear the voices coming out of the neurodiversity movement and those of our students themselves. With many autistic individuals growing up and sharing via social media and other channels what has and hasn’t worked in their education, we have some affirming shifts that we can make, for sure. One angle that I always try to take is incorporating my students’ interests in sessions. This helps our activities to be engaging and context-driven, but also incorporates client values, a pillar of evidence-based practice. A teenage client of mine has shown a burgeoning interest in rock music and The Beatles in particular. It occurred to me immediately that many Beatles’ songs tell a story, so that was a great place to start. One of the key things I love about technology is that it can make context immediately available...

Among the tech resources that can be helpful in narrative intervention are those that let you make your own story. Content creation apps and websites, often called “digital storytelling” tools (search Pinterest for many examples in this genre), provide great contexts for speech, language and literacy skill development for their ability to visualize story elements in cartoons or images. Digital storytelling tools can be employed in parallel with Story Grammar Marker^® manipulatives, icons, and maps in a variety of ways: You make it: Create a product that you can “unpack” the story elements of with students, with SGM^® playing a key scaffolding role, of course. We make it: Co-create with students by allowing them to make choices to construct a story, with you handling parts or all of the actual tapping or clicking to move things along. They make it: Often facilitated with you providing a model...

As a (mostly entirely) telepracticing Speech-Language Pathologist during these weird times, I have found fostering narrative language in my students to be an even more critical intervention area than before. From providing opportunities to help students escape into stories, to helping them share their thoughts and feelings on school and home, current events and relationships, the Story Grammar Marker^® has been an essential tool in therapy. In this post, I will describe some tech-based applications of SGM^® for you to consider during the pandemic. Even with, and perhaps, because of the prevalence of remote learning, students are feeling isolated and likely having fewer opportunities to tell their stories and gain connections with others. In group therapy, we spend time letting conversation “breathe” and scaffolding connections. One way I have worked on this is to blend the new Conversation Paths product by Dr. Anna Vagin, CCC-SLP with Story Grammar Marker^® Icons to tackle multiple narrative and social-cognitive goals. Conversation Paths is a pack of editable conversation-scaffolding visuals (PowerPoint) targeting the building blocks of conversation: “4 Starters” (initiation strategies), comments, questions, and others.

MindWing’s icons for narrative and expository language can make conversation about any TOPIC a strategic and scaffolded one. Last month I recorded a free webinar with Maryellen (Technology Tools to Engage Children in Science & Social Studies During Distance Learning Sessions) on expository text structures (ThemeMaker^®) and using MindWing’s icons in context with technology resources. In this post, I’ll be giving some examples of expository-embedded resources online that can be used in teletherapy sessions. By expository-embedded, I mean resources that don’t necessarily say one, another, also, or first, then next, but can be used to form conversations and reviews with structures like List and Sequence. Take for example, Google Earth. This now-web-based interactive globe allows you to simply search and navigate in order to provide tours, and what is a tour but a LIST (or SEQUENCE) of places within a main idea or overall location...

MindWing has made its digital icons available at low cost to assist us as we are providing distance learning and teletherapy during this COVID-19 crisis (surely one of the biggest common kick-offs we have experienced). In this post, I’ll be outlining some what-tos and how-tos with the icons; if you’d like a longer visual overview, I recorded a webinar (Intersecting Story Grammar Marker^® with Technology and Telepractice: Distance Learning During this COVID-19 Crisis and Beyond) with Maryellen on April 1, 2020 and the recording is available for free on the site. The Digital Icons downloadable is a PowerPoint (PPT) file that can also be opened in Apple (Mac)’s free Keynote application or uploaded to Google Drive and opened with Google Slides. PPT files open automatically in Keynote, but let’s tackle that Google part first...

In last month’s post (ASHA Wrap-Up, Part 1), I outlined one session from Orlando’s 2019 ASHA Convention that I was involved in, and promised a part 2! For this post, I am going to focus on resources I presented in an additional installment of “Pairing Picture Books and Apps for Contextualized Language Intervention,” a session I have been privileged to present over the last several years, with varying themes. In this session, given the proximity to Epcot, I thought it would be fun to highlight the ways that picture books and apps can be used to “Show Them the World (Knowledge),” meaning work in context to develop both Social Studies and general world or semantic knowledge. In all of my sessions on this topic, I have always emphasized the potential for both books and apps to provide context to develop both story grammar and expository text structure, modeling of course, with Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^® tools and visual graphic organizers. Both macrostructure and microstructure can be emphasized when reviewing the story or information presented in a book or app, along with other skills...

Following up on last month’s Tech Tuesday post describing some narrative and expository teaching tools within Google’s G-Suite, this month we’ll look at some Google resources to visualize setting (and more)! Google Earth has long been a great tool for language development, as it is a searchable, interactive globe allowing you to zoom into an aerial (3D) image of any location, as well as offering Street View interactive imagery and text descriptions. Google Earth previously existed as a complicated downloadable application but now is available as a web version in the Chrome browser, as well as a simplified free iPad app...

I previewed last month that this month’s post would discuss some of those exemplar pairings specifically. Before we crack some books and launch some apps, a word about analyzing contexts. For both books and apps, it can help if they have what I like to call a “Speechie” quality. You can read more about this along with the FIVES criteria (Fairly Priced, Interactive, Visual, Educationally Relevant, Speechie). Breaking down the Speechie part, we can ask ourselves if the book or app is a context for speech and language development: • Does it have a narrative structure that can be used for intervention, considering Story Grammar Marker^® or Braidy the StoryBraid^® as a tool (this includes apps that allow you to make your own choices such that a story unfolds)? • Does it provide or allow you to interact with informational language...

Technology, as always, can help us bring contexts to the table, including the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Here is an updated list of tech-based visuals and interactives that can be used to elicit narrative and expository language using Story Grammar Marker^®, ThemeMaker, MindWing’s narrative and expository maps, magnets, and the SGM^® iPad App (still on sale through November for $14.99 in celebration of ASHA Convention). Epic! Books for Kids: This terrific resource offering free educator accounts and a huge variety of e-books (readable on iPad, web or Apple TV), offers some great contexts when you search for “Thanksgiving.” Among these are P is for Pilgrim: A Thanksgiving Alphabet (Crane/Urban), an alphabet book for all ages. Consider using this book to explore two different settings: past and present...

For this month’s Tech Tuesday, I will be discussing the use of a phenomenal and versatile app, Pic Collage, which can be used to make storyboards for books that can be analyzed as Complete Episode Narratives with use of Story Grammar Marker^®. Pic Collage has long been a favorite of mine, and I have written about it previously and presented with MindWing Concepts on its uses.  It seems that every time I sit down with a student, I find a new way to use this app! Pic Collage is a free app that is available for both iPad and Android devices...

As the MindWing blog has been focusing on using chapter books for older students, in conjunction with narrative and expository development tools, this Tech Tuesday post will also! In this post, we’ll take a look at technology resources that facilitate your access to chapter books. These strategies will enable you to use chapter books more easily as contexts when developing students’ sense of story and informational text structures with MindWing’s Story Grammar Marker^® and Expository maps. Naturally, we’d be conducting educationally relevant interventions even if we selected our own texts for lessons. For example, take this Common Core Standard for 5th Grade Reading...

As stated so well in It’s All About The Story, Book I of MindWing’s Autism Collection, “Tuning into one’s own Feelings as well as the Feelings of Others is extremely problematic to children with autism. The book provides visual flip charts, discussion prompts and an introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), as well as ways to move beyond those Universal categories to more advanced feelings vocabulary—all of these resources give SLPs a great place to start...

Maryellen, Sheila, and I have had many conversations about how almost any context can be put into story form with Story Grammar Marker^®! On the flip side, we know that it takes practice and linguistic flexibility to consider what “fits” as each story element, though I often also say that you can’t really do it wrong. There are many ways to tell a story. As the holiday season is upon us, I was thinking about the variety of cultural and religious (or both) observations that take place around this time, and how they tie into the observation of the winter solstice...

McCabe and Rollins (1994) perfectly describe the value of model stories in their article on eliciting narratives: “In spontaneous interactions, you have to tell a story to get a story. Almost everyone has experienced awkward silences in social situations. No one can think of a thing to say. However, the minute one person launches into a tale about locking keys in his or her car or leaving lights on in a parking lot, virtually all others in the group share a similar incident that happened to them.”

If Google’s Arts and Culture website can be taken as a model, it seems like artificial intelligence (AI) is rejuvenating the interactive website. For some years there was a wealth of interactive websites that allowed for making choices and creating stories, but these seem to have faded with the retirement of technologies like Flash, and also by the redirection of priorities through the pandemic years. Check out Google’s growing library of games for some hope for this form of instructional technology. Sparky is a great one to start with. In this activity, you create inventions by combining everyday objects. Begin by choosing a purpose for the invention—food, music or travel—then allow your students to use their imaginations and collaborate…

I have often thought that although assessment materials—including SLAM (School Aged Language Assessment) cards offered by the Leaders Project—offer great baseline or progress monitoring tools, it would be great to have something similar for treatment. I have been continually impressed by the materials the graduate students I work with at Boston University create with Slides Go, so I wanted to tell you about this great resource! Slides Go is designed to provide Google Slides or PowerPoint templates, generally to adults making presentations. Sounds boring, right? HOWEVER, the templates include adorable cartoon-like sets that are very appealing to young students...

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...

from Google is a tool that was created “just in time” (in tech-talk) for the pandemic. Of course, these events thrust us into new ways of working with our students from a distance. Jamboard’s simple whiteboard features simplified remote, tech-based clinical interactions, such as solidifying ideas with pictures and making thinking visible with sticky notes. Jamboard was released in 2017 as a business-brainstorming tool and had started to make its way into educational circles more widely when the unthinkable happened: schools and clinical settings needed to shut down. Throughout the pandemic, it was an invaluable tool, one which I wrote about here in conjunction with the use of MindWing’s Digital Icons. But like some emergency practices, it has continued to be extremely useful. See the linked post above for some nitty-gritty how-tos on using Jamboard. In this post we are going to focus on a specific application of creating parallel stories. The practice of using picture books in speech-language and literacy interventions is well established, as it can provide a context for teaching narrative structure (with Story Grammar Marker^® of course) and microstructure such as syntax and vocabulary targets...

It’s hard to believe that this is the last entry in our 2022 Summer Study Series as we are entering the final act of the summer. For that matter, consider all we do to regulate ourselves around these transitions (Lifehacker article): being able to label how it makes us feel, and applying thinking tools and activities to help ourselves adjust. Like all humans, we have varying degrees of success in navigating these emotional waters, which is the subject of this month’s post. The article “A Multimodal Comparison of Emotion Categorization Abilities in Children With Developmental Language Disorder” (Bahn, Vesker, Schwarzer & Kauschke, 2021)...

Though it should be a 12-month goal, this April—during Autism Acceptance Month—it’s important for us to be making strides toward considering what and how our students want to learn. Doing so gears us toward aligning with the client values aspect of Evidence-Based Practice and with implementing therapies that are responsive to neurodiversity. In this way, it’s helpful to consider the flexible aspects of tools such as Story Grammar Marker^®, so that we can show and affirm with clients that there are many ways to express ourselves. I recently was completing a lesson and activity with a group of middle school students about a topic I consider to be critically important right now: RESILIENCE. Resilience is in many ways wrapped up in narrative language because of the role of how we relate our own experiences (stories) to ourselves...

In a little deviation from what might be considered “high” tech this month, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the role of play in language interventions. Play is closely connected to narrative, as we often use story components to structure our play. I recently presented at ASHA Convention providing a “Play on Words” (click here for the handouts), and discussed a variety of playful contexts that can be used to target language (including narrative) and social learning. In particular, cooperative games with a shared goal and no real “winner”— except the group—can be used to target many communication skills...

Halloween is always a holiday that can be leveraged for engagement (and stories!) with our students. We hope you will add these three resources to your list to “harvest” annually! Through the pandemic telepractice-fest and beyond, I have enjoyed capitalizing on the trend of escape rooms for intervention activities. They make a great collaborative activity and encourage students to “think with their eyes” (ala Social Thinking^®) as they look for clues. Escape “rooms” from HoodaMath contain a brief “story” introduction--why you are trapped there, a Kick-Off, and what you need to plan to do to get out! And what is an escape activity but the exploration of a Setting? Use MindWing’s Setting Map to teach the language underpinnings of describing a setting. In particular, escape games are great for helping students to label the parts of a larger setting...

MindWing’s Digital Icons were first created in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency in order to offer access to tech-based material creation while many professionals were struggling to implement teletherapy as best we could. As you may know, the icon sets offer easy copying and pasting of the icons (including Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy the StoryBraid^® and Thememaker^®) into various “blank slate” resources. This allows us to use word processors (Google Docs/MS Word), presentation tools (Google Slides/PowerPoint) or whiteboard software (Smart Notebook) as powerful narrative and expository teaching tools.