Awesome Apps!

Last year for my birthday/Christmas, I put iTunes cards on my wishlist, thinking that I’d maybe get one or two $10-$15 cards.  Wrong.  When all was said and done, I ended up with $125 in iTunes credit! I actually just found one of those $25 cards when I cleaned off my desk at home the other night–I had never redeemed it and it was just sitting on my desk this whole time! I also found a $5 Starbucks card while organizing… talk about hitting the jackpot! Coffee and iPad apps are two things that can make my work life a little a lot easier on crazy days when I don’t have time to plan! (Well, let’s be honest, coffee helps pretty much any day, regardless of how crazy it is…)

#2: Mr Potato Head!

I love this app because of all the different potato heads you can create.  It’s great for requesting (“I want hat”), increasing MLU/using carrier phrases (2-3 word phrases– “hat on” or “put on hat”), and vocabulary for clothing and body parts (both receptive and expressive! ie “Show me his shoes” or “What are these?”).  You can target final consonants with this, too, using words like “on” “off” “put” etc.. in a carrier phrases.

This app is $2.99 in the app store.

#3:  What Goes Together? By Smarty Ears

I target associations a lot in therapy with my older 4 year olds and 5 year olds.  I like this associations app best out of any others I’ve tried because of the amount of customization you can do.  You can choose how many correct pictures you want on the screen, various categories of stimulus pictures, level of difficulty, and whether you want to do expressive vs receptive tasks. 

With preschool, I typically only do a field of 2 with 1 correct picture, and I almost always have it on the ‘receptive’ setting but can easily target expressive on this setting, too.  I love that you have to hit “next” in order to go to the next stimulus picture, and that it doesn’t do it automatically.  This way, when I’m on the receptive setting and the student chooses the correct picture, I can take the time to ask them how or why the two items go together, before moving on to the next picture.  This app is $9.99 in the App store.

I also have another few apps I like to use for baseline data when I’m collecting info for annual IEPs. 

1.  Compare & Contrast Fun Deck by Super Duper:  Easy way to get data on explaining similarities/differences between items. $2.99 in the App store

2.  Understanding Inferences Fun Deck by Super Duper:  I use this to get some data on their ability to make inferences in picture scenes.  Also $2.99 in the App store

3.  The ABA Receptive Identification series apps– I have the ones for identifying items by feature and by category.  I also have one for identifying items by function, but for some reason, it’s not showing up on the kindergarten.com list of apps, nor will it show up in the iTunes U.S. store– not sure why!!

Do you use any of these apps? What are your favorite apps to use in therapy?? Head on over to Speech Room News to check out what other SLP bloggers have listed as their favorite language apps, too! Click on the image below!