When Speech-Language Pathologists begin providing teletherapy, they may feel unsure about what activities will work for their virtual students. How do you conduct a speech therapy session without board games, cards, worksheets, and books... or even so much as a shared table space?
Lean in for this little secret. You can still do variations of all of those activities. You just have to think outside of the box– I mean inside of the screen! Allow me to introduce the 3 tools that I use every single day to conduct engaging and interactive teletherapy sessions.
Boom™ Cards Teletherapy Activities
I'm not trying to be dramatic, but when my friend Belinda at BVG SLP introduced me to Boom Cards, it was a true turning point in my teletherapy career.
Boom Cards make it easy for students to interact virtually in so many ways. One example is movable facial features that allow students to (digitally) create facial expressions for various emotions.
Boom Cards provide a whole lotta digital engagement for teletherapy (but they can also be used during in-person sessions, too)! Since we've barely just scratched the surface of what Boom Cards can do for SLPs, learn a lot more about using Boom Cards in speech therapy... and get a bunch of free Boom Card decks, too!
Annotating PDFs in Teletherapy
"But what about all the PDF resources I've purchased or made over the years for my speech therapy sessions? Can I use those in teletherapy?"
Yes. You can 🙌
Digital annotation (or drawing on or marking up a document in some way) is a great way to get more mileage out of PDFs that are maybe-meant-to-be-printed therapy activities.
This might include drawing shapes, underlining, highlighting, or writing text. In the above activity, annotation is being used to draw circles around the articulation targets of the PDF and write numbers in the blanks.
Nearly any PDF can be annotated in some way, although you might find that some are protected against digital annotations (depending on how they were saved).
Interactive PDF Teletherapy Activities
Teletherapy is like a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view... of digital materials. Pardon the Aladdin reference, but you know how sometimes when you download an information form to fill out and it already has those magic little text boxes for you to type into?
That, my friend, is an example of an interactive PDF. But interactive PDFs for speech therapy are much less lame than paperwork forms.
With such a range of interactive features, you can find an interactive PDF for just about any goal or age group. As in the severe weather language activity above, it's a great way for older students to work on written language... without having to write.
Interactive PDFs are true gems for speech therapy since they are versatile and work great for screen sharing in teletherapy, but can also be used in-person on a tablet or computer.
Boom Cards, digital PDF annotation, and interactive PDFs can help you keep your teletherapy students focused and engaged in sessions. Learning to use any (or better yet, ALL!) of these tools will help keep your sessions moving right along with a variety of student interaction types.
For an additional type of teletherapy activity, don't miss Google Slides! I discovered this one after writing this post, but it definitely deserves a mention as well 😄
📌 Got a speech therapy board on Pinterest? SAVE the love ❤️
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