November 25, 2024
April 29, 2024
March 25, 2024
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...
February 26, 2024
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...
January 29, 2024
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....
August 03, 2023
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...