Technology

The American Speech‑Language‑Hearing Association (ASHA)’s CRISP Committee (Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice) has developed a series of nine modules on evidence‑based and best practices assessment, which would serve as a great self-guided study activity as we think about the fall! The site, hosted on ASHA’s Teaching, Learning & Research (TLR) Hub, grabbed my eye since it relates to narrative as a critical aspect of any speech-language assessment, and in particular, MindWing’s tools for supporting these processes, including Story Grammar Marker®...

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...

This past ASHA Convention in Seattle, my friends and colleagues Meghan Graham and Caroline Brinkert from Boston University discussed the importance of language sampling in supporting student growth, specifically in preschool. They also described barriers to language sample analysis, including time investment and clinicians’ uncertainty and lack of confidence in their skills for this kind of assessment. Truly, the time factor was always a big deal. Recording, playing, and rewinding cassette tape recordings, as we typed out a sample, gave way to doing the same with digital recordings on our phones and iPads, saving little time. AI transcription utilizes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, which is based on language and learning models that interpret human speech and convert a recording into text.

Lately, I’ve been coming back to an oldie-but-goodie resource, SCRIBBLENAUTS (“Remix” version available for iPad or iPhone for $.99 with tons of content, other options explored below). Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where players can type in upwards of 20,000 nouns, even with adjective modifiers, to bring in objects that help solve stated problems within the scene. As such, it provides an open-ended “sandbox” with a range of stories solvable with actions and elaborated noun phrases. I like to think of Scribblenauts as a series of mini-lessons, one of those 5-10 min “rewards” for students that are actually language therapy activities...

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...

In this 4th and final entry in the Summer Study Series for 2024, we will circle back to the expository side of language. Teresa Ukrainetz has always been one of my go-to experts on a number of aspects of discourse, and literally wrote the book on “Conceptualized Language Intervention.” It was with some excitement that I discovered her recent article, “Evidence-Based Expository Intervention: A Tutorial for Speech-Language Pathologists” (2024).