Teletherapy: What to Do the First Week of School

Starting back to school with students is a few weeks away but my nerves are flaring.  I have a new assignment at a new school with new kids and a new staff. As a teletherapist, I have experienced periodic, if not frequent, reassignments. I don't know my caseload yet but I'm itching to prepare. In the past, I have started off the year with get-to-know-you activities, reviewing speech room rules, and collecting baseline data. The first round of progress reports come quickly and I like to be prepared. I am still tinkering with ice breaker activities but I did decide to put a new twist on my typically boring speech room rules review. I made a video of myself on webcam, in Zoom, demonstrating less than stellar etiquette for the students to critique. My goal is to have the students observe my behaviors, discuss my behaviors, and generate a short list of speech room rules. I uploaded the video to You Tube, set the permissions to unlisted, then copied the link to SafeTube to get rid of the advertisements. I made a very basic slide show in Power Point with a link to my video, then saved it as a PDF. I use Adobe Acrobat Reader for my PDF's. This tool allows me to click on the video link, which will open in a new window, then annotate the slides if the students have more ideas or comments. I also plan on creating a Google Document for each group where I can write down student thinking and post the rules list. That way I have a running record of session activities, homework assignments, and a way to review rules as needed. Now I have an activity I'm hoping to be able to use with the majority of my students and their families. 

Speech Therapy Pensieve: Part 2

After talking with a few speech colleagues in my district, I am liking the idea of using Google forms to track student contacts even more. I decided to create two additional forms. One for screenings and consultation services and another to document meetings. I'm not sure that tracking these therapeutic activities will be any faster using an iPad but I like the idea of having all the data in one place. And maybe, once I start using the forms, I will be able to glean some trends or big ideas. I was afraid that my co-professionals would think it was a dorky idea and it would be too difficult. But as it turns out, some of my speech buddies are also interested in experimenting with ways to collect and interpret student data using their iPad. My thinking is that any data collection method needs to be quick. As school speech therapists, our time with students is often brief and we need to be able to use every instructional minute wisely. Data collection cannot be so cumbersome that it steals away lots of these minutes. I anticipate that I will want to make revisions to the forms as I begin using them. Below is a screenshot of the live form for tracking screening and consultation services. Under the live form is a view of what the columns in the Google spreadsheet will look like. Any suggestions, questions, or comments are very much appreciated.

Screenshot of the live form as it will appear on my iPad.

This shot shows what the buttons will look like on my iPad.

 

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Speech Therapy Pensieve: Part 1

A few days ago I came across two excellent blog posts from Ruth Morgan at Chapel Hill Snippets explaining how she uses Google forms to track student therapy contacts. As a literacy coach, I used Google forms to create my own digital conferring notebook and was itching to use the same approach with my speech therapy students. Ruth created an individual Google doc for each of her students which allowed her to display all therapy notes on a comprehensive spreadsheet. I liked this idea and may end up following Ruth's model but I also wanted to experiment with a single form that could capture all of my therapy notes for all of my students. Below is a screenshot of the live form I'm playing with as well as what the spreadsheet looks like. I will probably enter some dummy data to get a feel for how it will work or not work.

This is what the form will look like on my iPad.

This shot shows the headings for the data I want to collect.

Whenever I create a form in Google docs, I start with what information I will need and how I want it to look in the spreadsheet. In other words, I don't start by creating a form. I begin with sketching out a spreadsheet on paper, then go from there. I want my form to be simple, quick, and flexible. And I want the columns to fit across one sheet of paper in a landscape view. I usually do a test print of what the spreadsheet will look like before I finalize the questions on the form. In the future, when I need to print the information I have collected, I want it to be in a useful format. Please follow the links for the live form and the spreadsheet to take a look, ask any questions, and provide any suggestions or comments.

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