MindWing Concepts Blog

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...

Wicked has become an almost-too-inescapable cultural juggernaut thanks to tie-ins with everything from Xfinity to the OPI nail polish (Ozitively Elphaba) that my ugly toenails will soon be sporting. However, I’ve been a huge fan of the musical since its arrival in 2003 and have been happy to capitalize on my knowledge of it with some of my students. In any case, students’ interests, including current movies, can provide great context for story analysis (macro), as well as many micro targets from vocabulary to social cognition...

From twinkling lights and festive decor to excited students counting down the days, there's an undeniable energy that fills the classroom this time of year. As teachers, SLPs, specialists, and parents, though, the holidays often come with “double dip” feelings of—joy and stress, combined with the hustle of balancing lessons, holiday events, and end-of-year tasks. Amidst it all, it’s easy to feel like you’re racing against the clock. But what if you could slow things down just enough to create meaningful holiday-themed learning experiences?

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...