Lifetoon for story creation

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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!