Suno AI is a fun tool which will generate a song for you if you provide a simple prompt, such as a genre and topic. Sign in with your Google account and you can create a number of songs for free, and they are easily sharable by link.  I first played around with Suno by musicalizing a funny story (at least funny to me and my friends). Last year when having a gathering to watch Eurovision, I had a full fridge of things for the party. My friends discovered that I had put (briefly) a defrosting ham for Mother’s Day the next day in a pan on a shelf below a table in the kitchen. So I’ve been te ..read more

Last month, ASHA Leader featured a helpful article, Using ChatGPT to Create Treatment Materials (Price, Lubniewski, Du) providing great examples of prompts to ChatGPT for creation of sound-loaded paragraphs. Key to the article is the idea that what is returned will need to be filtered through your clinical expertise to create a usable material. I have found that this process is still "quick." Recently I have been using a student's interest, in this case, cooking shows, to work through comprehension of paragraphs. We use strategies such as noticing and breaking down elaborated noun and ver ..read more

Working with teens and young adults and interested in showing them how to use an AI tool that helps them be more independent? As this free (and committed to remaining free) site proclaims, "goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult." The site is powered by generative AI, specifically OpenAI's large language models, which basically means it can understand and produce prompts written in natural language. It currently features: Magic To-Do: enter a task and tap the magic wand to ha ..read more

Within sessions I strive to achieve what we might call media balance, using a variety of materials including hands-on, paper, and digital. If I feel the plan involves too much tech, I try to adjust. This has been a helpful model in supervising graduate students too. At the start of each semester, I encourage each of them to make sure they get a library card and visit the local library to practice identifying actual books they can use in therapy sessions. A library card is also essential for the resource I want to highlight here: hoopla! hoopla is an extension of public libraries' digital resou ..read more

During this time of year, we often do the obligatory lessons about gratitude that go well with the thanksgiving holiday. From a language perspective, practicing gratitude involves reflecting, listing and describing life events, so it is a therapeutically relevant context for sure. However, I always emphasize that there is science behind it for self-regulation, and we should try to practice it all year round! Here's a good video to detail those points. If you have students that need an engaging angle, Mr. Thankful made me (and them) smile. While the gratitude here is over-the-top, it provides ..read more

 ...is something my husband or I says to the other at some point every day since the spring. At that time, the New York Times added a daily puzzle that I thought was uniquely designed for SLPs and our love of categories as a foundation of semantics.  Connections is free daily via the web on whatever device, and also now is in the NYT Games app (I do subscribe as I have gotten in the habit of doing at least Sunday to Wednesday's Crossword). They explain it best:  And today's puzzle: With Connections be careful of what we call in quizzer parlance "Pavlovs"- you are cond ..read more

I have posted here recently on the therapeutic uses of Generative AI for language activities, and have recently been impressed by the results of using it to obtain modifiable content useful in sessions. ChatGPT is great at coming up with elaborated lists. I am working with a student on self-advocacy in the community, an an example prompt to ChatGPT is as follows: Not necessarily usable as a read-through with a student, but certainly a place to start in thinking about role-playing situations.  With another student, the need for intervention in social problem solving has been recently hi ..read more

This summer I became addicted to the New York Times' new Connections puzzle. I enjoyed each morning tackling this often-tricky categorization activity and comparing results (or sometimes providing or receiving hints) with my husband. I've always thought of categorization as one of the most important skills--it's how we organize information, and much expository text takes on a list structure--and our literature backs this up. Approaches like the EET also use Green-Group to target describing by category, among other attributes. We can be explicit with our students (see Ukrainetz' helpful RISE ac ..read more

Proceeding from some ideas about the role of music in speech-language therapy (and social coaching), back in the spring I did some activities with MusicLM. This tool is available from Google's AI Test Kitchen, which is free, though you currently have to sign in with a personal Google account and may have to wait a short while to be approved. With Music LM you "Describe a musical idea and hear it come to life." More specifically, type an activity, setting, situation, style, mood, or specific musical instruments, and it will create several examples for you. The language and/or social interacti ..read more

The title of this post is both an encouragement and some specific features I wanted to let you know about! You first of all probably know singing is a hobby for me and a self-regulation strategy. My husband and I have been back on our BS and adding to our playlist monthly. There are good resources and research for using music in speech and language therapy, and we of course know that for many of our students it is supported by the client values prong of EBP (a natural motivator and therapeutic avenue for those of you working with older clients as well). I've written before about using music fo ..read more