Virtual backdrops spark conversation, inference, strategic talk

Using Zoom for teletherapy, my students and I have enjoyed the virtual background feature. If you have a new enough computer, you don't need a green screen, but I bought one and a stand at Amazon for relatively short money.

Besides the "how did you do that?" conversation with students, you can have a "where am I? " activity and target concepts like thinking with the eyes (Social Thinking®) and the STOP strategy of Space, Time, Objects, People (Ward/Jacobsen), or just provide personal narrative models to spark questions and comments.

You can find images just by a Google Image Search and Preview or Adobe Reader will allow you to type on them as I did here, to scaffold a discussion of how supermarkets are the "same but different" in terms of space, time, objects and people currently:

Marty the annoying Stop and Shop robot behind me there also generated a lot of conversation and personal narrative from the kids.

Me at the Supercuts led us to discuss how they knew it was Supercuts (besides the big signs saying SUPERCUTS) and to a narrative model of how I cut my own hair for the first time on Sunday. 

Virtual Backdrops if available to you are just an interesting way of putting yourself in an interesting setting. Another way to do this, though not a dynamic backdrop, would be to take/trim a photo of yourself over a background in Pic Collage and use that image in a session.