Using Pictello in Therapy

I am thrilled to include a post from a fellow SLP, Gina Gladstone, who has been using the iPad in therapy for longer than most.  I thought I had a lot of apps!  Gina is the queen of iPad apps related to speech-language therapy in our district and has so many wonderful ideas on how to incorporate apps into therapy.  Looking forward to sharing many of them with you and encourage you to share your own.

Pictello Books

At the workshop I showed a few examples of books that I made in Pictello.  I thought that I would include them here as I had to present them rather quickly.   The first example involves a student who was working on speech targets due to apraxia.  During the course of our therapy I asked his reading teacher for some of his reading books.  He loved practicing his final sounds while reading these books aloud.  I decided to make the activity even more motivating by using the iPad.  I decided to use Pictello.  My goal was to make a digital/audio book with this student.  We chose the reading book together and he helped me take pictures with the iPad of the various pages of the book.  After taking photos we started to make the book.  The photos of the book cover and pages were uploaded from the album “camera roll”.  After we created the Pictello book pages my student began to record each page.  After we recorded each page of him reading aloud we listened to it.  My student listened to make sure if he said all final sounds on words.  He was so motivated to create a great book that I think he was pickier than I!  He reread each page until he was satisfied that it was perfect.  We also listened to make sure that his intonation was correct on questions and exclamations.  The result was a very cute book that he was proud to share.

Another example that I shared was a book I created during language therapy. This student was working on using past tense verbs in the context of using narrative/sequencing words.  He practiced using his targets as he told me about how he created his project.  I asked  him to demonstrate each step as he described it.  I took a picture of each step with the iPad.  Again, he listened to each recording while judging for accuracy.  He re-recorded as needed.  Please see this link for a .pdf that details how to create books using Pictello.

-Gina Gladstone