Introduction: SLPs, Context and Technology

While working in the public school setting for the

past 10 years, I developed a specialized interest in
the integration of technology in speech and
language interventions. I am referring to technology
not so much in the AAC sense, but rather to help
build and present contexts to students, much like a
clinician would use a storybook. This booklet is
designed to present a framework for using
technology as the friend that it is- a friend that helps
you implement context-driven therapy sessions that
engage students and move them toward their academic goals.

So why is context so important? As public school Speech-Language Pathologists (for

whom this book is primarily designed, though the principles presented may assist
those in other disciplines, settings, or those who work with other populations) our
clients are actually students, and our role is to assist them in accessing the curriculum
by building their language skills and use of strategies. To facilitate their success, we
need to incorporate the topics, concepts and activities they struggle with in the
classroom setting, while keeping a strategic focus (Ehren, 2000) and avoiding acting
as a tutor or aide. In Contextualized Language Intervention, Ukraintz stresses the
importance of SLPs knowing "how to systematically scaffold learning within a whole,
purposeful, complicated activity" (Ukrainetz, 2007, p. 2) rather than focusing solely
on discrete skill instruction.

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Why turn to technology? Despite many clinicians feeling naturally nervous to start
dealing with the learning curves associated with technology, once steps are made in
that direction, technology can actually make the job of an SLP a whole lot easier.
Presenting context to students is simplified greatly by using interactive web activities
and simulations that would be cost- and time-prohibitive to develop in a traditional
manner. Additionally, clinicians will find that students are hugely motivated to learn
while using computers, and that employing technology does not mean the clinician is
taken out of the equation. Rather, there is much scaffolding to be done when
technology is used to present a "purposeful, complicated activity."

Take for example, the Forces and Movement activity from the BBC Schools Science
Clips website. In this activity, students follow steps to interact with "objects" onscreen
in order to demonstrate concepts around forces and movement. Clearly, this is a
complex activity whose context fits right in with early-middle elementary science
curriculum. However, when the task is analyzed, this activity also is quite language-
based, with a number of
embedded skills and targets
appropriate for a language
session. Many students

receiving school-based SLP

services would be unlikely to
be able to complete this
activity accurately and discuss
it meaningfully without the
SLP's scaffolding.

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Choosing Classroom Activities

In selecting activities appropriate for language

interventions, I apply certain criteria that I would
like to call the FIVES framework. When looking
at a web, software or hardware resource, it is
helpful to consider these five factors:
Free—Is it free or nearly free? This isn't always an
excluding factor, but most public school SLPs don't
have much of a budget!
Interactive—Does the site use technology well to provide opportunities for students to
make decisions, perform actions, and possibly create, or does it mostly consist of text?
Visual—Using the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), does it provide a
multisensory experience that our students' classrooms might lack, or that bears
repeating?
Educationally Relevant—Does it relate to topics, skills, or strategies that mirror or
enhance classroom content?
Speechie—(a cutesy term, I know, but it fits...) when a task analysis is done, does the

activity target language goals specific to the students' Individualized Education Plans?
A resource that meets all these criteria is The Jamestown Online Adventure by History
Globe. While many students may have missed key details of the story of the early
settlers when it was presented auditorily or through readings in their classroom, this
activity allows them to make decisions from the colonists' point of view and
"experience" the results.

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The clinician's role is key in helping the students navigate the steps of the activity,
repeat and rephrase key points (especially in the texty sections) and process the
implications of their decisions. The Jamestown site could serve as a context for many
activities that target language goals; one example is using a graphic organizer to
track key details. An example of a graphic organizer that I created to complement
this site is linked here. Give it a try!

Does it Have to be Free?

I am not going to spend a lot of time elaborating on why we want educational

resources for a public school setting to be free (or mostly free). As a school-based
SLP, some years I felt lucky to have a materials budget of $50, which might buy you
an activity book, and definitely would not go far towards buying software, web-
subscriptions, or equipment. Sometimes you have to endure a modicum of advertising
to access the site (if it’s obtrustive, I generally rule it out), though in some cases a site
that is essentially a big ad can present some great language-learning opportunities

(see Old El Paso’s El Tacodor Games). That said, some software, apps, or web
subscriptions are definitely worth paying for, even more so if you can secure a grant

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or district allocation (Brainpop is a notable example). I should close this section by
acknowledging that SLPs sometimes have a difficult time even getting their own
computer to use with students. If you travel between schools, the schools may not feel
they owe it to you, and your department may not
have the funds. I would say you should lobby,
lobby, lobby for the necessity of your having a
laptop, for all of the reasons outlined in this
booklet. In the event that you do not succeed, or
need to wait, I would say buying one (even a
cheaper or refurbished one) to use with students
is one of the best investments you will ever make.
And if you do private therapy after school, well,
then, it’s a write-off, isn’t it?

Why is the “Interactive” Element of Technology So Important?

Much of what this booklet referrs to are resouces that could be used in students in
direct therapy, rather than drill-and-practice activities better relegated to completion
in the classroom or with a paraprofessional. To clarify what I mean by direct
therapy, I am referring to what would be on the sections of the Individualized
Education Plan that outline the time you will spend conducting or facilitating therapy
with the student, whether individually or in a group. This is an important distinction to
make, because there are certain technology resources that would be great to set up
as part of a student’s program, perhaps under your consultation services, but would
not make much sense to use in direct therapy (Some examples of these quiz-based
resources include Earobics or certain commercial flashcard-like programs,often on

CD-ROM). If the student can guide him/herself through the activity without your

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scaffolding, or with only the supervision of a teacher or paraprofessional to remain
engaged...well. An important principle of using technology is that it probably
shouldn’t count as direct therapy if the instruction is really being provided by the
computer.

This is where the I in FIVES- Interactive- can help us to make good technology-based
choices for our direct therapy. True interactive resources differ from quiz-based
technology in that students are given more room to make choices, solve problems,
and to make mistakes that your scaffolding will help prevent or review, so that it is a

richer learning experience. Interactive resources also tend to be more deeply rooted
in an educationally useful context, and ideally move at a pace that allows you as a
clinician to “get a word in”- whether to model language, question, extend, and of
course to provide a pre- or post- activity that emphasizes language targets. Let’s take,
for example a resource that is indeed Free, Interactive, Visual, Educationally relevant,
and Speechie- Earth Sun and Moon- An Interactive Learning Experience.

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I have always considered the concepts involving the relationship among the earth, sun
and moon as planetary bodies to be pretty abstract, and not quite suited to the 2nd
grade curriculum where this unit is placed in my district. After an engaging and
thankfully brief and forgiving arcade game, students are able to navigate their rocket
to the earth, sun and moon and use
key strokes and mouse movements to
make things happen! The activity
creates a strong visual experience that
helps kids move beyond the simple
knowledge that “Yep, we’re on Earth”
to understand some of the larger
scientific concepts. In the classroom
setting, I have seen kids left to their
own devices to complete this activity
and then be largely unable to articulate what any of it meant. However, with
discussion facilitated by the SLP throughout the activity, kids can be scaffolded to use
more complex language to produce some wonderful descriptions and connections.

Visualizing the Abstract

So what about the V, those visual elements that can be so critical for our students who
spend a good deal of time in classrooms missing key points of auditory instruction?
It’s clear that resources such as Earth Sun and Moon- An Interactive Learning
Experience are not only interactive but highly visual. Technology is a great tool for
making abstract curriculum elements visual for our students. It also provides visual
supports that assist us in scaffolding students’ production of all those things we put on

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their IEPs- vocabulary, complex sentences, discourse. To take another example, for
students studying U.S. Geography who have never been outside of their own state, a
resource such as Sheppard Software’s USA Puzzles provides tons of pictures--and
interaction with pictures--that will likely leave students with valuable associations when
the activity is complete.

Technology can also be a good tool for us to use to create materials for students that
bring challenging concepts into reach. With the advent of Web 2.0- the “Read/Write
Web” in which we don’t merely read webpages but can actually publish to them with
ease- many creation tools are at our fingertips! Some of these might be too
complicated to expect a student to use, but we can certainly navigate them, with a
little practice. One good example of this type of creation resource is Pixton, an online
comic creator. Pixton is in the vein of Kerpoof, but gives you much more leeway in
customizing your comic to emphasize body language, facial expressions and other
aspects that might be useful in a pragmatic language/social thinking skills group. I
recently used Pixton to create a set of comics to introduce the concepts of expected
and unexpected group behaviors (See Michelle Garcia Winner’s work) to a new
group of students. My goal was to use the visuals to help the students verbalize what
they saw in the pictures, which would then serve as a working list of expected

behaviors for our group. See Appendix II for a sample of the comics we discussed.

Isolating the specific behaviors depicted was challenging for these students, and they
did indeed benefit from cues such as “Think about his word balloon, then look at
hers.” In the end, however, we did have a nice list that came from more of a
constructivist activity than if I had just told the kids what I expected, and more of a
visual (and fun) activity than if we had just generated them verbally. If you are

interested in Pixton, check out the great tutorial here.

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Educational Relevance and Interventions

Another way technology can assist us as

SLPs lies in its power to infuse connections
to classroom content into our sessions. This
is the E in the FIVES criteria for selecting
good technology resources for our
interventions- Educational Relevance. Our
students receive our services specifically
because their speech and language
impairments affect their progress in the
curriculum- IDEA says this must be so. So
although we need to build their basic skills-categories, following directions, among
many others- it makes sense to be building skills while using classroom materials as a
context. We all resort to commercial SLP materials that may not always have a lot to
do with our students’ classroom content. This is necessary given our extremely busy
schedules and the need to focus intensively on specific skills. However, I always
consider it important to at least touch on the classroom’s major units (not every unit!)
and construct language enhancing activities within these contexts.

This becomes easier when we become familiar with the state and/or district academic
standards, usually available online (the pretty-good MA DOE website is one
example). These standards are broad and can be overwhelming, but like everything,
we can take them a bit at a time. I always find it striking how language-based the
standards are; IEP objectives could not only be aligned with state standards, in many
cases you could use the actual standard as an objective!

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Now, when we consider using academic content as our context for some sessions, it
may become uncomfortable to envision ourselves drilling facts and running simple
tutorials with our students. Here is where it can become important to “keep a
strategic focus” (Ehren, 2000- again, what a great article!) and to use the activities to
develop strategies such as notetaking, using graphic organizers, questioning,
consulting word or conjunction banks, etc. Technology makes it easier, though,
because there are many interactive websites that align with curriculum standards,
keeping our students engaged while minimizing our material preparation time.

Below is a brief (I could go on and on about this) list of standards from my district
(Newton, MA) and state, linked to fun activities that are language-enhancing and
relevant to the standard.

Grade 1 Describes adaptations that allow various organisms to survive in their

habitat

Grade 3 Understands that land and weather affected Wampanoag, Pilgrim and
colonial food, housing, clothing, celebration and activities

Grade 5 Describes characteristics and interrelationships in an ecosystem

Grade 7 Recognizes that every organism requires a set of instructions for

specifying its traits

Grade 10 Shows connections… between particular historical events and ideas

and larger social, economic, and political trends and developments.

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What is “Speechie?”

The FIVES criteria- so far we talked about

the benefits of resources being Free (or
nearly free), Interactive, Visual, and
Educationally Relevant- can be useful for
our own thinking as well as to justify our
use of a resource, should that need arise.
So, I will wrap this booklet up by discussing the last and possibly most important
factor, that of how the activity targets speech and/or language skills and strategies. I
used an S at the end of the acronym to call this factor “Speechie,” a convenient term,
though I have some issues with its cutesy qualities!

What makes an activity Speechie, then? As I have mentioned previously, we want to

look for activities that are more broadly related to speech and language skills, that
provide a context so that clinicians can scaffold the emergence of skills in our
students. Often, technology-related activities that specifically zone in on speech and
language skills (e.g. CD-ROMs from commercial publishers) can be completed by
students in a self-paced manner, providing valuable practice, but sort of taking us out
of the equation. To keep ourselves in the equation, we can select resources that are
not really labeled for “Speech,” but are Speechie in that we can structure the activity
and engage students in developing the wide range of skills and strategies that are
laid out within IEP goals and objectives.

Locating Speechie activities requires us to do somewhat of a task analysis, looking at

the activity through a language lens. Of typically written IEP objectives, does the

activity provide a context for students to do any of the following?

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 ● Follow verbal (written or auditory) directions or sequence steps to complete a
task?
● Comprehend story- or information-based language and discuss its elements
(e.g. “main ideas and details”)?
● Organize elements into categories, describe, define or create associations?
● Generate complex sentences or discourse (narrative or expository)?
● Use discussion, balanced-literacy, or problem-solving strategies (e.g.
inference)?
● Apply selected academic strategies (e.g. note-taking, use of graphic
organizer)?
● Respond verbally so as to use accurate articulation, voice or fluency strategies?
● Utilize social interaction or social thinking skills to complete a task?

This is a broad and limited list, but gives us a frame of reference to look at a resource
and see how it might be considered Speechie. One of my favorites is the BBC’s What
is Weather?. This fun site allows students to view humorous animations describing all
the elements of weather (temperature, precipitation, etc) and then complete
interactive activities that apply the presented information. Clearly, weather is right on
target in terms of being educationally relevant, but bringing the clinician into the

equation is what makes this resource Speechie. Some things the therapist can do to
elicit skills include:
-Asking the student to verbally describe what they saw in each of the (basically
wordless) animations, to bring about a definition of each weather term.
-Modeling and eliciting complex sentences about the animations and activities
“Ohhhh, I see, WHEN the wind was moderate...”
-Moderating turn-taking and sharing elements if the student is completing the activity

with a peer.

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-Questioning, reviewing and rephrasing the geographic and weather-based
information in the Clothing activity (as well as eliciting predictions about what kind of
clothing might be needed
on the trip).
-Having students track
results of their guesses on a
graphic organizer in either
the Clothing or Sport
activity.
-Creating follow-up activities
that target the content and
language skills (e.g.
weather journaling).

In this portion of the activity, students review weather information about a country,
then guess what sporting activities you could do there in a given season.

Conclusion

The FIVES criteria is just one tool clinicians can use in analyzing and integrating
technology resources into your therapies. For more examples of resources that meet
these criteria, follow me on my blog, SpeechTechie.

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Appendix I: Five More Examples of FIVES Resources

Resource: Brainpop site and App

Free? “Featured Movie” and “Movie of Week” (Brainpop Jr.) are free,
others w/school or indvidual subscription.

Interactive? Quizzes for each movie, Jr. site has more interactives such as
games and writing activities.

Visual? Brainpop’s animated movies provide many visuals to illustrate

vocabulary and concepts. Movies can be paused to emphasize
visuals.

Educationally Directly aligns with state standards (with pages showing exactly
Relevant? how, and directing users toward movies that address specific
standards by state).

Speechie? Movies are organized, simplified explanations of topics; great

context for using graphic organizers and teaching expository
text structures such as list, sequence, cause-effect.

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Resource: Lego Creative Builder

Free? Completely

Interactive? Drag-and-drop interface to “free build” or build objects

according to a model or plan.

Visual? Allows students to visualize spatial concepts.

Educationally With regards to early learning standards, social development if

Relevant? used as a barrier task.

Speechie? Key spatial concepts, skills at following directions and

cooperating can be addressed with this resource

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Resource: Sites using Google Earth plug-in: Monster Milktruck and Globe
Genie.

Free? Completely.

Interactive? Sites allow you to teleport to a specific spot on Earth. Milktruck

is a driving activity; use controls to move. Genie lets you click
and drag to view the location.

Visual? Both sites offer highly visual way to explore geographic

locations.

Educationally Can be used in conjunction with geography units (e.g.

Relevant? continents, cities and states).

Speechie? Key spatial concepts (right, left, forward, backward), descriptive

skills and schema can be targeted with these activities.

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Resource: Edheads Weather Activities

Free? Completely

Interactive? Kids are presented with a challenge to re-create lost weather

charts by following directions and using drag-drop interface.

Visual? Visual representations of weather conditions and chart

conventions.

Educationally Weather is a continuously repeated unit in science curricula of

Relevant? elementary-middle school.

Speechie? Great context for following directions, using weather attributes

and categories, geographic concepts.

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Resource: Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab

Free? Completely

Interactive? Quiz follows listening exercises

Visual? No, but largely auditory activities can be completed using

visualization strategies as prompted by clinician.

Educationally Some topics relate to curriuclum areas, relevant to standards

Relevant? around listening and discussing.

Speechie? Wonderful resource for addressing deficits in auditory

comprehension (students who score poorly on CELF’s
Understanding Spoken Paragraphs or Listening Comprehension
Test), using strategies such as visualization, key word
generation. Pre-Listening activities prompt helpful discussions,
category item generation. Quiz results provide measurable
data.

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Appendix I: Social Thinking Comic Created with Pixton

References

Ehren, B.J. (2000). Maintaining a therapeutic focus and sharing responsibility for
student success: keys to in-classroom speech-language services. Language,

Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 31, 219-229.

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 Ukrainetz, T.A. (Ed.). (2007). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding
Pre-K-12 Literacy Achievement. Greenville, SC: Thinking Publications

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