Pocket SLP has some great apps for speech practice.
I’m not a certified speech therapist, but as a special education teacher, I’ve found many uses for their apps in my tutoring practice. When a student has difficulty producing the right sound when we are spelling words (I use Sound Literacy for word building) I switch to Speech Tutor or Minimal Pairs.
With Speech Tutor, the student can listen to the sound being produced, while watching either a side view or front view of the mouth as the sound is made. This aspect of the app can be shown at slow, medium, or fast speed, which really helps the student ‘see’ the sound being made. The student can then match their tongue, teeth, and lips to the model, and record themselves making the sound.
A really cool feature is that the animation of the face has a ‘see-through’ quality which allows you to see the position of the tongue in relation to the lips and teeth. Another is the ‘palate diagram’ for certain sounds. This is also handy for helping students understand tongue placement.
In addition, older students can take advantage of the pop-up that explains in detail how the sound is produced. After using this app, my adult client had an ‘aha’ kind of moment, and could produce the sounds more accurately as well as hear the sounds better when I said syllables or words.
After looking at several apps, I found that Speech Tutor has very accurate sound production, eliminating the ‘uh’ sound that is so difficult to hold back…i.e. ‘p’ is ‘p’, not ‘puh’…this is very important for spelling accuracy…i.e. it’s P I G not P UH I G. It’s helping my students tremendously to understand that there are THREE sounds, not FOUR in the word.
This app is very well done, and there’s a short ‘basics’ tutorial on how to make the sounds, so that parents could use this to practice with their children at home, under a speech therapist’s direction.
Speech Tutor from Pocket SLP is $9.99 in iTunes.
I use Minimal Pairs when a student is having difficulty with sounds that have similar means of articulation. There are receptive and expressive modes, or both can be used at the same time. Minimal Pairs allows customization for each student you work with.
If a student is having difficulty telling the words apart, there is a pop-up function that shows tongue and lip position (similar to Speech Tutor, but not animated), that compares the two sounds side-by-side.
A student can record themselves as they say the words and then play the recording back. AND, the recordings are stored in the app so they can be played back for comparison over time!
Minimal Pairs has a feature that speech therapists should love! You can email a report of the session to parents and other teachers involved with a student, and even print a hard copy for your files. There is a homework feature in the Report Card version where the therapist can give suggestions to parents for working on the target sounds. It’s also possible to have instant access to spreadsheets or graphs that indicate the percentage of correct, incorrect, and approximate responses.
There are over 800 flashcards and options so that the app can be used with small groups, even if students are working on different sounds. The only suggestion I really have is to have an explanation of what the various processes are. I know what some are, but I don’t know enough to explain them to the older clients I use the app with, and I don’t think most parents would know what they mean, either.
While this is pricier than most apps I’ve reviewed, it is packed with so many features that a school speech therapist with a large caseload can’t help but love, that I think it is well worth it.
And an iPhone or an iPad is SO much easier to cart from school to school than a stack of 800 flashcards that has to be re-ordered for each group! With Minimal Pairs, the therapist is ready to go as soon as her students are seated.
Minimal Pairs is $29.99 in iTunes.
PocketSLP has two other apps, Articulation and the “R” App for Parents that you can see on their website.
Barth Educational Consultants 