SpeechTechie- Technology, Apps and Lessons for SLPs and Teachers who like Words

Explore.org

2025-09-26T12:50:00.001-04:00

I find CBS Sunday Morning to be my first step in calming any Sunday Scaries, and this week they presented a lovely story on the website explore.org, which provides a large variety of nature webcams. The founder explained that he feels passionate about connecting people to nature as a kind of mindfulness tool.

I agree with that, and have written about webcams before, but this week's Fat Bear Week is a good time to check in. Put that on your calendar if you missed it (you have until 9/30 this year), but it is a celebration of the bears preparing for hibernation at Katmai National Park, and having kids vote and justify their reason is a good therapy activity.

I found this week with a number of learners that visiting explore.org was a good way to practice making choices, regulating through calming content, describing setting and action for narrative language, and tying into academic skills in science and geography.

Helpful Literature on AI and SLP

2025-09-18T17:04:00.001-04:00

I was recently asked to do a training session for Ventura County SELPA on AI applications for SLPs- it was a great time! In addition to talking through many examples of how to use ChatGPT for content generation useful in therapy and workload functions, including imagery, along with other tools, I had done a literature review on ethics and AI in speech and language pathology. Along with ASHA's literature and other journals, it seems there had been only a handful of studies or peer-reviewed articles on this important topic! But I found a great one: Stench of Errors or the Shine of Potential: The Challenge of (Ir)Responsible Use of ChatGPT in Speech-Language Pathology (Hanna & Yana, 2025).

That title! Go ahead and read us to filth so we don't make big mistakes using AI!

The authors provide a great summary of errors they have witnessed in clinical settings, and I summarized it further in the session:

The article is behind a journal paywall but perhaps use your university connected folks to get a look at the whole piece.

This was an enjoyable, compact 3-hour session we did remotely, with lots of interaction with the clinicians. If you have any interest in the session for your district or group, please let me know (sean at speechtechie dot com).

Lifetoon for story creation

2025-05-27T17:18:00.000-04:00

Lifetoon is a fun entry in the range of generative AI tools being offered to us-- it creates a comic from your text/image of a character(s) and description of a story. It does require an image for character creation but you can just use a Googled image based on a character description. You can use yourself of course, but I would avoid uploading images of students into an AI.

I very frequently use this very 70s personal narrative as a model for teaching a complete episode with Story Grammar Marker®. Yes, it's true- I once fell out of a moving car and my mom, driving, failed to notice. I ran this through Lifetoon and it did a fairly good job of rendering it as a comic!

Lifetoon is a good tool to experiment with! Comics such as these could be useful for visualizing the plot of a chapter book or a historical event, curriculum concepts, social scripts and social or executive functioning problem solving situations.

Subscribe to First Five

2025-05-22T09:54:00.001-04:00

Edmorrow's First Five is a great free resource that comes to your mailbox each school day and provides a set of resources (primary and secondary versions available) related to social and emotional learning. These include, among other activities, a meme (often animated) that can prompt narrative responses, conversational questions for connection, a quick connect debate question, and a contextual self-regulation rating scale. Previous days are archived, so you can use any you choose, and the site also provides a great daily brain game using Wordwall that targets sorting of topics like US States to crops and Star Wars characters to light or dark side. These resources would be great for both individual and group therapy, so check out this site from these professionals focusing on restorative practice and counseling.

Emoji Kitchen

2025-05-09T17:21:00.003-04:00

Emoji Kitchen is an example of a simple website that SLPs can leverage for a variety of purposes. Pick or search for one emoji on the left, and combine it with one on the right, and you'll get a mixture, like this one of angry corn:

Emoji are a fun way to use our tweens' and teens' interest in texting, chatting and tech in general to discuss a range of emotions, associations, and also figurative language, as many can be used to represent something else.

I used this in a group as a simple "add a thought" social engagement activity- what combo do you want to see? You could also add a storytelling component connecting the new emoji to how it would come about! What ideas do you have for Emoji Kitchen? Let us know in the comments!

An Actionable Idea for Magnetic Poetry

2025-01-18T17:36:00.001-05:00

My sister has started a fun family tradition of playing games after Christmas Dinner. This year she rolled out Ransom Notes, in which each team is given an array of magnetic words, a tray, and a situation for which to construct a message. Hilarity ensues as all work to craft sentences with limited vocabulary. Though I don't yet have the game, I realized this could be translated to readily available magnetic poetry interactives online such as the original. The game description gives you a number of starters that could be used in a therapy session, such as "Explain to a child how giving birth works" (I wouldn't use that one but some other school situation, like a dance) "Tell someone you've clogged their toilet during a party" and "Ask a child in the airplane seat behind you to stop kicking." Also, here's a great way to use ChatGPT: ask it to create a list of embarrassing situations for teens, and voila, you've got a whole slew of game prompts.

ASHA Presentation on Games and Playful Activities in Therapy

2024-12-13T15:28:00.002-05:00

I was pleased (but tired!) to be part of ASHA Convention 2024 in Seattle, where I was invited to present a short course with Drs. Ellen Cohn, Erik Raj and Yao Du. The topic was Telepractice, Tele-Gaming, and Tele-Play: Low to High Technologies, and linked here is my portion of the talk with the slides if you have any interest! Many of the resources discussed can be used in-person as well.

"Here" and narrative interpretation opportunities

2024-11-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

The movie Here comes out this week, reuniting Tom Hanks and Robin Wright with their Forrest Gump director Robert Zemekis. The movie is said to be experimental, with the camera fixed on one area to show a nonlinear story/stories that happen in a particular space across a broad range of time. Here is based on a comic and then graphic novel by Richard McGuire; both would be useful for reviewing with teens but the original comic is located, well, here. I could see this as useful for an activity in story mapping, BrainFraming (or other sequence graphic organizer), or timelining the events shown.

What can we learn from a Pokémon?

2024-10-18T11:39:00.001-04:00

This is a question I am often asking my groups that are interested in Pokémon!

My theme here of leveraging student interests (and Pokémon) is not new but I count as an alignment both with the client values prong of EBP and neurodiversity affirmation.

To that end, a quick techie find and a couple tips. This website has archived images of Pokémon cards over many years. It is searchable so you can look up a specific character but I have just been looking through random sets for the fine print description at the bottom (oh, my old eyes!). These descriptions are helpful not only for the terrific Tier 2 vocabulary but also for opening your students up to social analogies.

I screenshot the card, put it on a Google Slide like so (screenshotting again the description and enlarging it) and use the good old "we talk, I type" strategy (kids are strangely engaged by watching you type). This allows us to explore topics and tools that I link to strategies like Zones or Autism Level Up, or both. Indeed it does not serve Drampa to destroy his whole environment!

Create songs on a topic

2024-04-12T10:12:00.005-04:00

Suno AI is a fun tool which will generate a song for you if you provide a simple prompt, such as a genre and topic. Sign in with your Google account and you can create a number of songs for free, and they are easily sharable by link.

I first played around with Suno by musicalizing a funny story (at least funny to me and my friends). Last year when having a gathering to watch Eurovision, I had a full fridge of things for the party. My friends discovered that I had put (briefly) a defrosting ham for Mother’s Day the next day in a pan on a shelf below a table in the kitchen. So I’ve been teased since then about “floor ham.” I told Suno to “make a pop song about ham left on the floor.” That was the entire prompt, I didn't need to write any lyrics, but Suno has a custom mode where you can have more control over what ends up in the song.

Suno created this song. Seriously, it's a bop. I do apologize to any vegetarian readers.

Suno also created a fun song about nouns for me which I used with a student. The web or mobile version (just go to the website in your browser) will also display the lyrics to the song. Suno is a fun way to add engagement to any curriculum topic or to play with narrative language.

Tailoring and Modifying ChatGPT Results to Create Quick Content

2024-04-05T10:31:00.001-04:00

Last month, ASHA Leader featured a helpful article, Using ChatGPT to Create Treatment Materials (Price, Lubniewski, Du) providing great examples of prompts to ChatGPT for creation of sound-loaded paragraphs. Key to the article is the idea that what is returned will need to be filtered through your clinical expertise to create a usable material.

I have found that this process is still "quick." Recently I have been using a student's interest, in this case, cooking shows, to work through comprehension of paragraphs. We use strategies such as noticing and breaking down elaborated noun and verb phrases and also visualizing, with light application of the Visualizing and Verbalizing methods (structure words and digital squares in place of the "felts"). Though Lindamood-Bell provides quite a bit in terms of content with visual imagery for free, I have wanted to cater the content more to his interests and use subjects like Ina Garten.

Here you can see that the original return contained too much complex vocabulary, so you can use the chat aspect of the tool to continue refining. After simplifying the vocab, I asked it to detail a specific recipe like lemon chicken, then needed to ask it to simplify again, and ultimately did some editing when I pasted it into a Google Slide for a more usable experience.

You can see the full progress of my chat with ChatGPT here.

Goblin Tools

2024-03-08T16:09:00.001-05:00

Working with teens and young adults and interested in showing them how to use an AI tool that helps them be more independent? As this free (and committed to remaining free) site proclaims, "goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult." The site is powered by generative AI, specifically OpenAI's large language models, which basically means it can understand and produce prompts written in natural language. It currently features:

Magic To-Do: enter a task and tap the magic wand to have it broken down into smaller, manageable steps, along with the option to estimate time for each step and the task as a whole.

Formalizer: enter casual language to get a suggestion of more formal language (or a wide variety of "tones" in a drop down) e.g. for writing an email.

Judge: receive feedback on the tone of inputted text

Estimator: stand-alone tool providing estimate of time for a task

Compiler: "compile my brain dump into a list of tasks"

Chef:

Here's an example of a task I put into the Magic To-Do (please don't ask why I have to do this task):

I hope you find this tool useful for your students, clients, maybe associates, partners or spouses, or yourself!

What's the Hoopla?

2024-01-19T17:31:00.000-05:00

Within sessions I strive to achieve what we might call media balance, using a variety of materials including hands-on, paper, and digital. If I feel the plan involves too much tech, I try to adjust. This has been a helpful model in supervising graduate students too. At the start of each semester, I encourage each of them to make sure they get a library card and visit the local library to practice identifying actual books they can use in therapy sessions. A library card is also essential for the resource I want to highlight here: hoopla!

hoopla is an extension of public libraries' digital resources (note: I speak as a Boston Public Library patron and this may not be available to all who read this- check with your library or their website!). Of course, Overdrive/Libby are great for digital books that sync to your Kindle app (I use on iPad or Mac), but I rediscovered hoopla entries recently when looking for books on my library's website. hoopla has a wide range of picture books, many on SEL topics from authors such as Julia Cook or Bryan Smith:

I have a learner who really gets into these books, posing great questions. Some SEL books can be a bit black and white, but with our teaching we can infuse nuance and neurodiversity-affirming approaches.

hoopla also has a range of short movies created from picture books, which can be terrific for media balance, engagement, and providing animation which creates narrative and interpretive opportunities.

I hope you find your way to hoopla!

GratiTools (and say hi if you see me at ASHA2023 in Boston)

2023-11-16T08:40:00.001-05:00

During this time of year, we often do the obligatory lessons about gratitude that go well with the thanksgiving holiday. From a language perspective, practicing gratitude involves reflecting, listing and describing life events, so it is a therapeutically relevant context for sure. However, I always emphasize that there is science behind it for self-regulation, and we should try to practice it all year round! Here's a good video to detail those points.

If you have students that need an engaging angle, Mr. Thankful made me (and them) smile. While the gratitude here is over-the-top, it provides a view of what the practice writ large looks like. At the end (2:02) there is a bit of religiosity, so stop it before that to avoid this particularly in public school settings.

As I have been writing about AI tools, thanks to Tony Vincent of Learning in Hand for sharing this simple tool that generates a thank you letter based on a simple list, which would make a great writing activity in the coming week.

Also, I'm at ASHA this week in my hometown- please say hi if you bump into me. I will be presenting in a MasterClass on innovations in telepractice, MC27: Telepractice Innovations: Current, Emerging, and What We Wish For. There is an additional fee to attend, but I will be sharing my slides here following the session.

Have you done the Connections?

2023-11-03T11:50:00.001-04:00

...is something my husband or I says to the other at some point every day since the spring. At that time, the New York Times added a daily puzzle that I thought was uniquely designed for SLPs and our love of categories as a foundation of semantics.

Connections is free daily via the web on whatever device, and also now is in the NYT Games app (I do subscribe as I have gotten in the habit of doing at least Sunday to Wednesday's Crossword). They explain it best:

And today's puzzle:

With Connections be careful of what we call in quizzer parlance "Pavlovs"- you are conditioned to jump at them. It can be tricky as one item may seem to go well with one group but actually a different category can be constructed.

This can be a great activity for older clients or students as you can encourage forethought- eg let's think of at least two sets of 4 items before submitting any. You can also provide a growing schema that builds metalinguistics
-Straightforward semantic category
-Figurative language or idioms
-Words that are part of a phrase e.g another word goes before or after them all
-Group that works best if you say it aloud (hint for above)

It can be a good idea to do it yourself on one device and then show it to the client on another, where it is reset, so you know how to cue. There are a variety of daily posts that provide hints, such as Mashable's.

And most importantly...you can also make your own! Think of targeting reviewed vocabulary or concepts! Check out this one I made last Friday when a certain album came out, and click Create to make your own.

Using ChatGPT for Lesson Planning Ideas

2023-09-29T11:45:00.002-04:00

I have posted here recently on the therapeutic uses of Generative AI for language activities, and have recently been impressed by the results of using it to obtain modifiable content useful in sessions. ChatGPT is great at coming up with elaborated lists. I am working with a student on self-advocacy in the community, an an example prompt to ChatGPT is as follows:

Not necessarily usable as a read-through with a student, but certainly a place to start in thinking about role-playing situations.

With another student, the need for intervention in social problem solving has been recently highlighted. The student benefits from a hook, and is very into the pop/rap artist Lil Nas X. While the artist's racy content would never be a good context for our work, the student is allowed to listen to some songs at home, and the artist could certainly be useful as a kind of shell of a story. An activity I am conducting is teaching the basics of problem solving using language structures such as OR, i.e. "we could do this OR this." See the books on problem solving by Shure.

Searching on Chat GPT, I originally obtained a list of too-mature problems e.g. Nas is harrassed on social media because of his identity as a queer artist. Modifying the prompt with "kid friendly," I received a delightful set of problem solving scenarios.

Again, these are usable with some creative modification. The outfits scenario, for example, could be solved with a drawing activity of creating several outfits. My student is not so into drawing, so we are using Pic Collage's new online web editor (pick blank canvas) along with a separate tab search-copy-paste for Google Image PNGs (no background as in the rainbow skirt) and the "remove background" feature.

We are doing a similar activity for a client I supervise who has a big interest in Sonic the Hedgehog!

Finding Categories Everywhere

2023-08-24T16:42:00.005-04:00

This summer I became addicted to the New York Times' new Connections puzzle. I enjoyed each morning tackling this often-tricky categorization activity and comparing results (or sometimes providing or receiving hints) with my husband. I've always thought of categorization as one of the most important skills--it's how we organize information, and much expository text takes on a list structure--and our literature backs this up. Approaches like the EET also use Green-Group to target describing by category, among other attributes. We can be explicit with our students (see Ukrainetz' helpful RISE acronym) and teach that categories are important ways to organize and describe words and information.

ABCYa provides a wealth of categories through its activities- you just have to look for them.

Take Dress for the Weather- here you've got an engaging activity which contains both weather conditions and clothing items. Take screenshots of relevant items and paste into Jamboard and you've got a followup sort for repetition of the concept, category and skill.

You can practice contextualized language intervention by locating a narrative picture book about weather, dogs and weather, or weather and clothing and target another skill within the same topic.

Here's five more categories you can target with ABCYa:

Bandemonium: musical instruments

Find the technology: electronic devices

The Five Senses

Make a House: Parts of a house, building materials

Seasonal Shuffle: seasons, months

I'm sure you can identify many more opportunities from this site.

Music LM

2023-08-17T10:56:00.001-04:00

Proceeding from some ideas about the role of music in speech-language therapy (and social coaching), back in the spring I did some activities with MusicLM. This tool is available from Google's AI Test Kitchen, which is free, though you currently have to sign in with a personal Google account and may have to wait a short while to be approved. With Music LM you "Describe a musical idea and hear it come to life." More specifically, type an activity, setting, situation, style, mood, or specific musical instruments, and it will create several examples for you.

The language and/or social interaction can come in through providing schema with the above italicized connections to music, using this as a conversational "add a thought" type activity, and allowing flexibility- as maybe your clients will think of possibilities that fall out of these categories. You can also be more structured and gear a lesson around, say, emotional vocabulary.

Sing!

2023-08-04T15:47:00.003-04:00

The title of this post is both an encouragement and some specific features I wanted to let you know about!

You first of all probably know singing is a hobby for me and a self-regulation strategy. My husband and I have been back on our BS and adding to our playlist monthly.

There are good resources and research for using music in speech and language therapy, and we of course know that for many of our students it is supported by the client values prong of EBP (a natural motivator and therapeutic avenue for those of you working with older clients as well). I've written before about using music for figurative language and narrative.

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, they have recently added features they call Sing, including synced displayed lyrics (think literacy as well) and volume control for the vocals within lyrics. Meaning you can have the student(s) sing along with the artist, or be the artist on their own.

This video shows how:

For the karaoke singers like me or those working in professional voice, did you know it is also pretty easy to change the key of a song? Why would you do this? Let The Honest Voice Co demonstrate:

@thehonestvoiceco Replying to @willow ♬ original sound - The Honest Voice Co.

As to how, however, that's easy. I currently use the app Anytune to do this. If you have the song purchased from iTunes and downloaded to your phone, you can simply import the song to the app and change the pitch or tempo (which may help with processing or speech production):

Below the soundwave on the left are tempo controls and on right is pitch

Gartic Phone

2023-07-25T12:09:00.004-04:00

Over the spring semester, in several of my social learning groups, we were experimenting with games that allowed for association, storytelling and humor (essentially the same skills used in improv games, which I also like to use non-digitally). It was helpful to use some free versions of games as opposed to the excellent games offered by Jackbox because a) I could hand over the reins to graduate students practicing independence and b) the students could perhaps use the games at home with family or friends at no charge and c) the varied ways the students needed to "join" the game allowed for practice in situational awareness and self-regulation.

I found many great examples (and yes, some less-great) from this post on The Gamer, but I wanted to highlight Gartic Phone here. Gartic Phone is a "telephone" type game in which players label drawings successively in increasingly silly ways that become removed from the original meaning. There are a variety of ways to play including creating a story, such that it is worth revisiting over multiple sessions, and it is easily playable in 10 minutes once kids get the hang of joining. I often use bit.ly to shorten the URL for joining for games like these. Remember that these games can be worth spending time with pre-loading game-play "moves" that will help everyone to feel successful and/or revisiting results (I often screenshot to remind them of what went well).

High quality digital resources for narrative assessment

2023-05-20T10:48:00.003-04:00

I am just wrapping up another semester supervising graduate students at BU's Academic Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic. In gaining baseline and post-treatment data, I am always steering them to look through the narrative level at microstructure aspects (e.g. complex sentences). For several semesters, we've been using the excellent resources at Columbia University's Leaders Project and their School Aged Language Assessment (SLAM) cards. These are easy to use and provide a criterion-referenced measure as well as a good simple language sample. Digitally, these are also all available for free at Boom Learning (search for Leader's Project). I recently noted some versions for preschool students including stories for prediction, and look forward to trying these out.

I am not sure why I am finding this image amusing. That's just me, I guess.

I did a recent assessment also where I incorporated the CUBED, which provides free language assessment measures including narrative-- these are from the team who created the Story Champs® program. CUBED materials have been created for PK-Grade 3 and consist of a paragraph-level verbally presented story and range of assessment activities (e.g. retell, vocabulary description, and personal narrative prompt). The forms of the CUBED make it simple to provide a view of story grammar and complex sentence formulation.

What's Going on in this Picture?

2023-04-21T08:40:00.001-04:00

Any tech resource that is simple, reliable, with content worth more than one visit, and that will tie in with instructional strategies is one to save on your list. Such a thing is the New York Times' What's Going on in this Picture? The site provides a weekly Interesting Image and instructional tips.

You can consider using this content with:

-Instruction on story grammar, as each picture can be used to form a story

-Visualizing and Verbalizing® strategies

-tie-ins with forming inferences and Social Thinking® concepts such as Thinking with the Eyes

-Thinking Routines such as those outlined here

The content here is also great for many age levels including adults!

A Quick Activity with Chat GPT

2023-04-14T17:07:00.000-04:00

I have been doing clinical supervision at BU for a few semesters now. It's such a rewarding experience to work with the graduate students in their first clinical in-house experiences. I have a student who is working on a lot of semantics and language-based literacy activities with her client, including teaching story grammar as an organizational structure. We have been talking about building activities in context with pre-book and post-book activities, and her client is interested in planes and aviation. I suggested to her this book and this activity: what 10 words do you think ChatGPT will come up with that go with ___ (in this case, airport). The process of asking them to predict what the AI may say is an associative activity, and then the results will likely bring about new concepts and vocabulary.

See one of my favorite articles, The Magic of "Once Upon a Time": Narrative Teaching Strategies for more on pre-, during-, post-book (or other context-based) activities.

DALL-E, an AI image creation tool

2023-03-09T15:31:00.005-05:00

Having been certified in Visualizing and Verbalizing® years ago, I've always found it an essential tool in my toolkit. Scaffolding students toward creating a mental image gestalt, guided by a schema of structure words that aid in descriptive details, is a process that has been useful across reading comprehension to conversation and even executive function (i.e picturing oneself performing a task).

These skills will continue to be important, but imagine if you have a tool that can combine a few elements and create an image you can see. That's a powerful bridge to this process! Also, I recently learned of aphantasia, which affects the ability to form mental imagery. Supporting other means of learning through visuals affirms this element of neurodiversity.

Check out DALL-E, another tool from Open AI, which allows you to enter a descriptive term to generate a range of corresponding images. DALL-E provides many examples which favor modes of art, for example, line drawings, digital art or watercolor, but you can also use fairly specific descriptors and vocabulary. A client for whom I identify vocabulary targets from his Pokemon interests, for example, is perfect for this kind of search using the words dual and region:

I'm sure SLPs can think of many more creative ways to use DALL-E, such as a series of images demonstrating basic concept words. If you have one, please let us know in the comments.

ChatGPT- maybe a series?

2023-02-03T10:58:00.002-05:00

You probably have heard of ChatGPT, a free Artificial Intelligence chatbot that you can ask for all sorts of information. Yes, we have concerns about it being misused in academia, and I know it may be already blocked in your school building, but thought it would be worth exploring in this space. Ditch that Textbook (one of my faves) provides an exploration of it here, along with suggested classroom uses. For a specific SLP take, check out Bonnie Singer's post here.

For an initial idea on how ChatGPT can be useful in language intervention, let's consider vocabulary- which can be helpful to put in context! I have a student whom I see individually, though these ideas can be incorporated in groups. He loves Pokemon and comes each week with a card he has earned--these turn out to be rich sources of useful Tier 2 vocabulary, and it is motivating for him because he is always asking about the words. As we know, students need multiple exposures to new words, so we use semantic and structural techniques in reviewing and revisiting the words, including making this Jamboard (available through your Google apps):

-Vocab "stories" are so easy to co-create with students. Following the student's interest, we searched for a feline Pokemon and copied a PNG.

-You can use the Background feature to search for Google Images (how we quickly took Sprigatito from Chicago, the student's choice, international to Venice).

-Sticky notes were used to create the loose "story" (also scaffolded with Story Grammar Marker®)

Back to ChatGPT. Access this by clicking the link, click try ChatGPT, login with your Google, and pose a query. In our case it was "Write a story about a feline Pokemon using the words...(vocab above, another opportunity for the student to generate the words)." The cool and engaging result was as follows:

Yes, wordy, but with opportunities to scaffold comprehension and yet more vocabulary. The student was amazed and so was I!