We are very fortunate in our school district to have recently been able to purchase iPads for our SLPs. I was put in charge of getting a group of fellow SLPs together to select what apps will be purchased for our new iPads, an SLP Tool Belt of sorts 
I got together a group of 4 SLPs who have been actively using the iPad in therapy and comparing and reviewing hundreds of apps. I thought I had a lot of apps! These SLPs brought so many new and creative ideas. I’m so excited to try out the many new apps that were recommended. With so much experience in one room, we were able to have great discussions comparing apps (“Why choose Preposition Remix over Preposition Builder?” “What’s most important to SLPs, good data collection or a more engaging app?”).
There are a couple discussions that I wanted to make note of, one surrounding articulation apps: deciding between Articulate It! and Articulation Station. My personal favorite is Articulation Station, because I find it to be the most engaging of the articulation apps. As we talked through the pros and cons of each, however, we decided on Articulation It! for the data collection and student profile features. Articulate It! allows SLPs to create student profiles that include their targeted sounds and sound level (word, sentences). It also allows users to create groups of students. That way, when you are working with a speech group the app will automatically shift targeted sounds each turn depending on the student. These features make planning and data collection very efficient for SLPs and make this app the most universal when purchasing for a large group of SLPs.
The other discussion was about which preposition app to choose. We decided on Preposition remix as we felt that it did the best job of depicting prepositions clearly and accurately. Preposition Builder is one of my favorites but the group felt it was a bit repetitious at times and I have gotten this feedback even from my students.
We were working with a budget of $100.00, keeping in mind that we get a 50% off group discount for purchases of 20 or more (so we could really spend $200). Since I did my own SLP Tool Belt not long ago, I wanted to share the updated list that we created. I have changed some of my top app selections after participating in this group, playing around with new apps and hearing new perspectives on the benefits of each.
Check out the list of our top apps. For a more formatted version of the list clink on the pdf link below.
|
App |
Function |
Developer |
Discount |
Price |
| ARTICULATION | ||||
| Articulate It! | Allows SLPs to work towards improving the speech of children with speech delays. It contains over 1 thousand images in all sounds of the English language! Voice recording and data collection included. | Smarty Ears | YES – 50% | $38.99 |
| Speech Tutor | Takes the areas of the face that impede the view of tongue placement and positioning and make them transparent. You can literally see inside the mouth as the sounds are being made! It offers a “Side View” and a “Front View” of each sound production. | Synapse Apps | $9.99 | |
| LANGUAGE | ||||
| Preposition Remix | Helps children learn prepositions while playing and having fun. Prepositions Remix provides practice with 20 of English most commons propositions. | Smarty Ears | YES-50% | $9.99 |
| Fun With Directions | Practice listening, following directions, colors, spatial concepts, auditory memory and auditory processing, from simple directions (“Touch the cat”) to more complex (“With your orange crayon, color the large one that is a furry pet and likes to chase mice”). | Hamaguchi Apps | YES -50% | $9.99 |
| Story Builder | Targets picture description, word order, sentence formation, vocabulary, making predications,cause/effect, pronouns, verb tense, sequencing) | Mobile Education Tools | YES-50% | $7.99 |
| Language Builder | Targets picture description, sentence formation, word order, verb tense, vocabulary, pronouns. | Mobile Education Tools | YES-50% | $7.99 |
| Rainbow Sentence | Designed to help students improve their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences by using color coded visual cues. The who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to help students recognize and understand how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure. | Mobile Education Tools | YES-50% | $7.99 |
| Categories Learning Center | Category Naming – providing the correct category name for a group of objects without prompts Category Selection – identifying which category name (of 4) a group of objects belongs Informally provide opportunities for naming additional items within a category |
Smarty Ears | YES-50% | $9.99 |
| ABA Receptive Identification-by Class | ABA style approach to learning specific language skills. | Kindergarten.com | YES – 50% | $1.99 |
| ABA Receptive Identification-by Feature | ABA style approach to learning specific language skills. | Kindergarten.com | YES – 50% | $0.99 |
| ABA Receptive Identification-by Function | ABA style approach to learning specific language skills. | Kindergarten.com | YES – 50% | $0.99 |
| ABA Problem Solving – Which does not belong | ABA style approach to learning specific language skills. | Kindergarten.com | YES – 50% | $1.99 |
| Picture the Sentence | Picture the Sentence is an exciting app designed to practice language and auditory processing tasks at the basic sentence level. This app offers three different levels of difficulty so the child can learn how to attend to important elements of a sentence and “picture it,” attaching meaning to the words and eventually forming mental pictures without visual support. | Hamaguchi Apps | YES- 50% | $9.99 |
| iPractice Verbs | iPractice Verbs contains verbs at the word, phrase and sentence levels and it can be used with children to gain/increase of “grammar when speaking such as using subject-verb agreement, complete sentences, and correct tense” | Smarty Ears | YES-50% | $9.99 |
| Question Assembly | The words comprising each question are provided in a jumbled format along with a picture clue. The student is then able to arrange the words in the correct grammatical form along a tab bar at the top of the page. Once the question is correctly formed, an auditory cue confirms the correct word order by reading the sentence in a conversational tone of voice. | Keeling and Associates | $3.99 | |
| Making Sequences | Making Sequences includes 15 photo sequences for teaching story order. Use these or upload your own images, add voice recordings and share them with others using Dropbox. | Zorten | YES-50% | $4.99 |
| Splingo | While your child is experiencing an entertaining, motivating game, you can be reassured that they are learning a variety of different aspects of language, including naming words (nouns), action words (verbs), location words (prepositions), description words (adjectives), e.g. color, size and much more! | The Speech and Language Store | $2.99 | |
| Lexico | Develop language understanding, vocabulary building, cognitive, memory and auditory skills in a playful way. | Pappy GmbH | YES -50% | $9.99 |
| Toontastic | Lights, Camera, Play! Toontastic is a Creative Learning tool that empowers kids to draw, animate, and share their own cartoons through imaginative play. | Launchpad Toys | YES-50% | $9.99 |
| Pictello | Pictello is a simple way to create talking photo albums and talking books. Each page in a Pictello Story can contain a picture, up to five lines of text, and a recorded sound or text-to-speech using high-quality voices. Target: social stories, story retell, etc. | AssistiveWare | YES – 50% | $18.99 |
| FLUENCY | ||||
| SLP- dysfluency plus | A tool designed by a Speech and Language Pathologist for on-line fluency evaluation. This application not only tracks ‘Fluent’ vs ‘Dysfluent’ words/syllables, but also, categorizes dysfluencies into the three common core behaviors: Repetitions, Prolongations and Blocks. | App-licable | YES – 50% | $2.99 |
| PRAGMATICS | ||||
| Conversation Builder | Designed to help elementary aged children learn how to have multi-exchange conversations with their peers in a variety of social settings. Students will learn when it is appropriate to introduce themselves, ask questions, make observations and change the subject of the conversation. | Mobile Education Tools | YES-50% | $9.99 |
| Touch and Learn Emotions | This app focused on helping kids read body language and understand emotions by looking at gorgeous pictures and figuring out which person is expressing a given emotion. | Innovative Mobile Apps | FREE | |
| Model Me Going Places | Helping learn to navigate challenging community locations through slide shows of children modeling appropriate behavior | Model Me Kids | FREE | |
| VISUAL SUPPORTS | ||||
| iReward | Fun, interactive reward tracking system. Can also use as a token board. | Grembe Inc. | $4.99 | |
| Picture Scheduler | Create visual schedules. | Petr Jankuj | $2.99 | |
| GAMES | ||||
| Personal Memory | With Personal Memory you are going to play with your very own and personal photos, which you have taken with or stored on your iPad. | Thomas Werner | YES- 50% | $0.99 |
| Make Dice | Make your own dice to target anything you’d like | hnm | $0.99 | |
| Cookie Doodle | We provide the dough, a rolling pin, cookie cutters, your choice of frostings, sprinkles, and candies all in one easy to use package. Target following directions, sequencing, vocabulary. | Shoe the Goose | YES – 50% | $0.99 |
| SLP TOOLS | ||||
| Common Core | Quickly find standards by subject, grade, and subject category (domain/cluster). This app includes Math standards K-12 and Language Arts standards K-12. | MasteryConnect | FREE | |
| Percentally | Percentally is a tally counter that automatically converts tallies to percentages. It enables progress tracking in education, athletics, and other activities. | Expressive Solutions | $2.99 | |
| Age Calculator | Calculates age based on birthday and date. | DMD | $0.99 | |
| MISC | ||||
| Educreations Interaction Whiteboard | Creating a great video tutorial is as simple as touching, tapping and talking. Explain a math formula… Create an animated lesson… Add commentary to your photos… Diagram a sports play… | Educreations | FREE | |
| Poplet | Used to create webs/mind maps to helps students brainstorm ideas. | Notion | $4.99 | |
| TED | app presents talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. | TED Conferences | FREE | |
| Dictionary.com | Dictionary that works off-line | Dictionary.com | FREE | |
| BrainPop | Explore more than 750 Science, Math, Social Studies, English, Engineering & Tech, Arts & Music, and Health subjects right on their mobile devices. All movies are close captioned, so it’s easy for them to read along. | BrainPop | $6.99 | |
| TOTAL: | $207.69 |
June 18, 2012
Chris
Hi Katie,
This was a great post and very informative. Thank you for sharing your process on how you chose your apps and thanks for mentioning Articulation Station!
I wanted to pass along to you that Articulation Station does have group session capabilities that focus on each child at their individual level. We would love to know what features you feel Articulation Station still needs (lacks) so that we can continue to improve it and make it your go-to arctic app.
We rely on SLPs in the field to give us constructive feedback because we feel Articulation Station is your app and we want to make it as powerful and as easy to use for you as possible. Infact, almost all of the new features in our next update (which will be release very soon) were based on suggestions from SLPs, so we’re excited to get it out there!
We would love to hear your suggestions!
Here are the links to the tutorial videos:
Group Sessions:
http://vimeo.com/32112721
Data Collection:
http://vimeo.com/31994488
all the best,
-Chris
Little Bee Speech
facebook.com/littlebeespeech