I dare you to watch this video and not laugh out loud.
The other day, I was thinking about how much technology has affected every aspect of our lives, personally and professionally. When I was in graduate school in the mid 80's, one of my assignments as a speech/language pathologist (in training) was to create my own articulation cards to use with kids. This was actually a bit of a problem for me since I was not a very talented artist. I remember trying to sketch a mouse for quite a while when my friend, an architecture student, in a fit of exasperation grabbed my 3 x 5 card and sketched a mouse in about 5 seconds- Show off.
Anyway, these days technology can help us with materials in our daily work with kids.
A while back I started playing with YouTube to see how I might be able to use it with some of the kids and have found quite a few ideas.
If you go to YouTube.com, you can get an account for free. Once you have an account you can "save" videos to your account. Even though your video clips are "saved" they are not downloaded to your computer. You can watch them there on the website from any computer you have access to.
You can also create "playlists" of videos. A "playlist" is just a grouping of videoclips that you choose to group together. So, for example, one of my playlists is "Sh" words. Within this play list I have videos of:
1. A 44 second clip of Fonzie jumping the SHARK on "Happy Days."
2. A commercial clip featuring a McDonald's "Shamrock Shake"
3. A short clip of someone getting a SHAMPOO at a salon
4. A funny animation of a SHEEP knitting herself a sweater from her own wool
Once I knew I wanted to find /sh/ words in YouTube. I went to the search bar at the top of the page and simply typed in the word I was looking for. So for example "shark" led me to many clips of actual sharks, many of which seemed to be eating things that might be a bit scary for some of our young friends. In which case I may have typed in "Shark jump" or something like that to find a shark doing something a bit less scary, and then found our friend, The Fonz, who was (I'm pretty sure) the original "shark jumper."
The clips are nice because they often hold the kids' attention and you can often get multiple opportunities to practice the target word. The pause button is helpful to gain attention!
You can also use video clips to elicit language. One of my playlists is called "Simple Sentences" and in that playlist I found video clips by typing in the search box terms such as "baby walk" or "boy eat" and see what pops up. Sometimes it's better to find the videos prior to your session since YouTube can sometimes be a showcase of inappropriate behavior from people with entirely too much time on their hands. (hint: see Mentos and diet coke)
There are tons of clips of babies and toddlers from all over the world on YouTube. These clips can be a wonderful resource for learning about typical child development.
Some of my other playlists include animals, specific word shapes (VC, CV, etc,) from the Kaufman Speech Praxis Treatment Kit, 3-syllable words, emotions, community helpers, etc. From these examples you can see how easy it is to find materials to share with pediatric clients.
We've come a long way since we had to make our own artic cards, right?? This way can sure save a lot of space, too! How many times have you moved your giant collection of artic cards since 1985??
