To usher out Better Hearing and Speech/May Month, I thought I would do something different here and focus on a topic that I have thus far neglected: Artic! After this week I am going to go into my "Summer Slowdown" mode and you'll only be hearing from me about once or twice weekly, while I recharge and get ready for an exciting Fall!
Today, I am thinking on the days when I used to have to remember to bring my plug-in cassette tape recorder home in order to transcribe language samples, and there weren't many options to use audio in therapy with kids. Or those options caused your computer to run out of memory and crash. Bye, bye to those days!
Audio is pretty important in speech and language therapy. Not only does it help us have a record of (or just a way to listen more closely and accurately to) speech and language samples, it also provides a way for students to hear themselves and develop key discrimination and self-monitoring skills. Here are 3 simple and free ways to expand your use of audio for articulation therapy (these also work for language)!
1. Create a speechie PowerPoint! PowerPoint allows you to record sound very easily (in my version it's Insert>Sound>Record Sound). You could use this feature to create a contextual project in which your students practice key sounds, listen back to recordings, and decide which production was best!
2. Voki: See that little koala on the right in my sidebar? You can make one of those as a motivating way for students to practice speech (the tool allows you to record as well as use text-to-speech)
3. GarageBand: When students get to the conversational level and are working on carrying over sounds, try using the full Mac or iPad version of GarageBand (or Audacity if you are on PC) to create podcasts on their topic of choice!
3 is a magic number, so they say, and I will stop there. How about you? Got any other fun ways (tools or contexts) to use audio to practice articulation? Let us know in the comments!
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