50+ Links to Creative (and Budget Priced) App Ideas for Speech and Language Therapy

Tablets and apps have changed the way that most of us work with our students and clients. The wide variety of apps available is great, but it is what you do with these apps that is even better! Here are links to more than 50 creative ideas to help you make the most of your budget priced apps.

Visual Supports for Apps

Use visual supports to increase communication for those with limited expressive language skills as they use apps. You can find visual supports for apps at Boardmaker Online and at Teachers Pay Teachers. Here are just a few of many available.

Toca Boca Tea Party Visual Choice Board (Boardmaker)

Toca Band Visual Support (Boardmaker)
Pepi Doctor (Boardmaker)

Play Home Lite (Boardmaker Studio)

It was a Cold Dark Night (Boardmaker)

Therapy with Toca Boca Hair Christmas app  (TpT) Free visual supports and more!

Supplemental Materials for Toca Boca Hair Salon (TpT) Free

Farm Pic for Peekaboo Barn App (TpT) Free

Don't see visuals for your favorite apps? Don't have Boardmaker? 

Make your own with screenshots. 

Try ConnectAbility.ca  or Sen Teacher. 

Class DoJo (FREE)

Visit Allison Nichole, at Speech Peeps, to see how she creates visuals for Class DoJo.

Use PowerPoint to make custom visual supports (this would be my choice). Make each slide a visual and print the slides as handouts - two or six slides to a page depending upon your desired size.  PrAACtical AAC has a FREE tutorial for this on TpT. 



And, for those of you who need visuals for app rules and iPad guidelines, try these visual supports at Boardmaker Online.

• iPad If/then chart 
• Apptivity Schedule for the iPad 
• iPad usage at School 

Toca Boca

Toca Boca Tea Party $

There were a few Toca Boca mentions above. I don't know anyone who doesn't like Toca Boca. They are not usually free, but definitely budget priced. My favorite remains to be Toca Boca Tea Party. This trailer from the Toca Boca site demonstrates a perfect therapy activity. Imagine all of the language possibilities in this activity alone! 

Toca Kitchen
Monsters (FREE)

TocaKitchen Monsters is a FREE app and another favorite. Read how Katie Millican uses this app in therapy at ActivityTailor and more suggestions for using this app from PrAACtical AAC. 

Speech Language Neighborhood has some FREE printable language activities for Toca Store, Toca Robot Lab, Toca House, and Toca Kitchen.  

QR Codes

Qrafter - QR Code
and Barcode Reader and
 Generator (FREE)

Want to use QR codes? The SLPs at Sublime Speech and Crazy Speech World tell you how. 

Freebies at TpT include QR Code Receptive Vocabulary Task Cards {Autism}: Feature, Function, Class and Individual Student Rewards with QR Codes.





Great Ideas from SLPs

Sock Puppets (FREE)

There are a lot of good articulation apps, but read how Heather Hetler, at Smart Apps for Kids, uses non-articulation apps such as Sock Puppets, Garfield Daily,  ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard and Stack the States to work on target sounds

Speaking of Apps blogger, Jeremy Legaspi, wrote about What's the Saying?, a free app that he uses when teaching students about idioms and figurative language. 

Pocket SnowStorm
(FREE)

Visit Chapel Hill Snippets to see how Ruth Morgan uses Pocket Snow Storm! in therapy. 

Story Creator
(FREE)

Jordan Sadler uses Popplet for Social Cognition. 

Read the blog, speechymusings, to see how this SLP grad student uses Story Creator to teach language and articulation skills.

Make Dice
Lite (FREE)

Trading Cards
(FREE)

Make Dice Lite, isn't an app that would pop up in a search for speech and language apps, but Abby, at School House Talk, creates dice for articulation, language, and fluency therapy. 

Speech Techie, always a great resource, uses the MarcoPolo Weather (Free) app to talk about the weather, creates photo comics with Story Me, and develops descriptive schema with Trading Cards. 

TinyTap (FREE)

You can do so much with TinyTap. Check out the blog posts below to see more!

• Free Apps For Speech Therapy: Creating Games With Tiny Tap! - Speech Sprouts
• Create Your Own App With This Impressive App - Apps for Speech Therapy
• TinyTap Gets a Facelift – Create Your Own iPad Games for Older Students - iPad Apps at School by Richard Byrne (not an SLP, but gave good examples for language activities)

Educreations
(FREE)

Word Clouds
 (FREE)

A past post from The Budget SLP - Word Clouds for Your Therapy Sessions.

Another past post - Educreations for Speech and Language. Since this post was written, Educreations has added a paid version to their inventory. The free version still allows for most of the exceptional features of this app. 

PowerPoint
(FREE)

SlideShark
(FREE)

Beth Oliver made Kid-Friendly /b/ Initial Word cards to be used on the FREE app, SlideShark Presentation App. Microsoft PowerPoint is also FREE to use for viewing and minor creating and editing.  

Balloonimals $

I follow Elizabeth Harmon's blog, sync up autism. I like her use of core words and her recent post demonstrating video modeling. Go to her blog to see how she uses apps such as Build a Train, Toca Hair Salon, and Balloonimals.

Apptivities and App Smashing

Apptivities and App Smashing are terms that we are beginning to see more frequently. Apptivity is defined at Apptivity Bank as a learning activity using mobile apps. App Smashing is defined by Greg Kulowiec as the process of using multiple apps in conjunction with one another to complete a final task or project.

Below are links to apptivities - some that involve app smashing!

Story Maker HD (FREE)

Apptivities found at iEducate incorporate listening, speaking, vocabulary comprehension, and critical thinking skills. 

Visit iLive 2Learn iLove 2Grow to see a good example of app smashing. Three free apps (Story Maker HD, Balloon Stickies Plus, and Pic Collage) were used to learn weekly vocabulary words. 

Explain
Everything $

You're the
Detective $

Look at Inference iLessons by ilesson lady. Her students practiced making inferences with a Kenny Chesney song, followed by using the app You’re the Detective, and lastly, assessment was made using the app, Explain Everything.

My Playhome Lite(FREE)

Lisa Johnson wrote about ways to use My Playhome Lite in her post,  Surprisingly Educational, Entertaining, and Engaging. Two of her many suggestions were to pair it with Popplet Lite to work on sequencing and use it along with Doodle Buddy to create a dialogue based on what the characters are doing in the house. 

Check out Sean Sweeney's (SpeechTechie's) List of Social Apptivities at Diigo. 

Even More Resources!

Animoto (FREE)

Over 100 iPad activities to work on vocabulary skills, grammar, literacy, and more (all with task cards) can be found at Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish School Board’s Technology Training Center. The cards are made with PowerPoint so that you can easily change cards to meet the individual needs of your students. 

At Mesquite Student iPad Camp find many creative ways to use the FREE app, Animoto.  

ALL Grasshopper Apps can be customized to meet your students needs. And, a bonus - Free CVC activities can be found at their TpT store. 

Diana

© 2015