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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...

This month we will look at a study using play contexts to build narrative language. It’s notable that since the publication of this 2020 study, “Believing in Make‐Believe: Efficacy of a Pretend Play Intervention for School‐Aged Children with High‐Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder,” there have been some significant shifts in our field’s focus towards neurodiversity-affirming language and approaches. For example, we should avoid stigmatizing labels such as “high-functioning”...

Escape rooms are popular diversions in real life and are inherently story-based through their varied themes. These experiences wrap language and visual cues into fun problem-solving situations, but can be pretty difficult to simulate in educational and intervention situations. Digital formats make this much easier! Check out Hooda Math’s huge variety of free escape games—my favorite selections are the US State and National Park collections. These are always a hit with students and, though on their surface seem simple point-and-click games, offer a lot in terms of general language and tie-ins with expository text...

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...

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)!...