Dyslexia Quest: Are You Ready to Climb Yeti Mountain?

Dyslexia Quest is a collection of games that can help you discern your strengths and weaknesses, in areas that frequently cause difficulty for people with dyslexia.  The games focus on working memory, auditory memory, phonological awareness, processing speed, visual memory, and sequencing skills.

There are short videos of several of the games on the Dyslexia Quest website.

Once you’ve completed the quest, you can see an analysis of your results, and whether they show any of the typical signs of dyslexia. The results are categorized as very low, low, average,  high, or very high.  You also receive a score ranging from 0% to 100%. After you’ve played all the games and received your results, you can return to the quest to work on improving weak areas. Your original scores and your improvement will be on the results page.  A useful feature is the ability to email results to yourself or to other interested parties.

In addition to seeing your scores, you can read a brief description of the skill.  For example, the app explains that a weakness in Working Memory can affect reading and spelling, as well as cause difficulties with attention to verbally presented material.   There are also tips to make use of any learning strengths that are detected. As the developer of the app says, however, you would need to be professionally tested to confirm a diagnosis of dyslexia.

There is also a short quiz about skills such as remembering the sequence of phone numbers, losing your place when you read, spelling, and forgetting what you’ve just read. The quiz is also a feature of a free app called What Is Dyslexia? In addition to the quiz, What is Dyslexia features tips for parents and schools, as well as a narrated comic strip about what it’s like to have dyslexia.  This ends on a positive note, with brief mentions of successful people with dyslexia.

Currently, Dyslexia Quest can be used by only one person at a time.  Once that person has completed the quest and/or continued practicing the games, a new user can be created.  The developers hope to address this in a future version.

Dyslexia Quest and What is Dyslexia are from the company Nessy, which is based in the UK. They have developed many educational software titles.  They collaborate with the Bristol Learning Centre to ensure that their products are helpful for dyslexics.  Dyslexia Quest, as well as other Nessy apps, are available  in the iTunes store 

Grasshopper Apps: How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways!

1. Simplicity

2. Consistency

3. Variety

4. Value

5. Quality

6. Creativity

7. Quantity

Grasshopper Apps are deceptively simple.  Why do I say that? They appear very basic, but they weave learning so deftly into the game play that it’s very natural.

The consistency of playing style from app to app keeps that learning curve low.

Grasshopper’s wide variety of apps address reading, speaking, writing, math, coordination, problem solving, confidence, creativity, imagination, brain stimulation, and motor skills.

What better value is there than FREE? Join their ‘Free the Apps’ email list and you can try the apps for free.  The catch? Grasshopper just asks for feedback so they can continue to improve their already outstanding field of apps.  If you don’t choose to do that, most of their apps retail for just $0.99!

Grasshopper apps are high quality. Just because the price is low, it doesn’t mean they are putting out schlock! The images they use are colorful, striking, and fun.

There is creativity galore in their apps–for you!  You can customize nearly everything in the apps to the needs of your child.  This includes using your own pictures, making up a story line using your voice and ideas, using highlights for words and pictures, and more.

The sheer quantity of apps offered by Grasshopper is astounding.  They have dozens of apps that your child can use to “open up a world of possibilities.”

Check out the website for Grasshopper Apps, and then get on over to the iTunes app store and find out how many ways YOU love them!

Book Bytes: Monstrous Book on MultiSensory Teaching

Thank you to Kathy Penn of 3DLiteracy for the heads-up on this weighty book. I just received my copy of the brand new, 786 page, 3rd edition of Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills by Judith R. Birsh.  Chapter 18 on “Learning Strategies and Study Skills” by Claire Nissenbaum and Anthony Henley is worth the price of the book all by itself!!

The book is jam-packed with references, including links to many websites.  This is just one that looks like it holds oodles of useful information for parents, teachers, and students: The Learning Strategies Database from Muskigum University.

If you work with students who have learning disabilities, in particular ones that are language-based, you gotta have this book!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apps Designed with Disability in Mind–Great Resource!

The Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence has compiled a categorized list of iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch apps.  Categories include:

Communication

Early Literacy

Access to Reading and Writing

Organization and Study Skills

Reinforcement/Data

Social Competence

Visual Motor and Movement

Accessibility

Other Fun and Useful Apps

Resources

They also include  links to other online resources for finding apps. OCALI‘s main website looks like a treasure trove of information! They are also on Facebook.

Thanks to Mobile Education Store for posting this link on Facebook!

Timely Tips #24: Apps for Children with Special Needs

Here’s a new blog I just heard about, Apps for Children with Special Needs.   They do video reviews of apps, which allows you to see them in action before you buy.

Apps for Children with Special Needs (a4cwsn) is committed to helping the families and carers of children with special needs and the wider community of educators and therapists who support them, by producing videos that demonstrate how products designed to educate children and build their life skills really work from a user perspective.

I’m going to get busy exploring their site!

Sound Literacy Rocks!

I’ve been using Sound Literacy with clients for a couple of weeks now, and it is the best! The developer is very supportive when I have questions, and her website has a several helpful videos and extra information.

Sound Literacy has been a great addition to my toolbox for teaching reading and spelling.  It is especially helpful with Orton-Gillingham methods for teaching students with dyslexia and dysgraphia.

It is ideal for working on phonemic awareness.  I like to use it in conjunction with Speech Tutor, which helps students understands just how sounds are made.  If a student can’t hear or make sounds correctly, they will struggle with reading, spelling, and writing.

For more advanced students, Sound Literacy  has sets of tiles for prefixes, suffixes, and word with a Latin origin.  This would be a great way to practice vocabulary for the SAT, for example.  If you use it with Word Sorts for Derivational Spellers from Words Their Way, you’ll have a dynamite teaching and learning tool.

And I haven’t lost a tile yet!

Speech Therapy in Your Pocket!

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.

Smarty Ears iPractice Verbs

Smarty Ears was founded by a speech therapist, Barbara Fernandes, to create language and articulation apps for children with speech and/or language delays.  Having a wide selection of pictures on your iPhone or iPad is so much easier than lugging a stack of flashcards around!

iPractice Verbs is designed so the student can practice verbs in the present, present progressive, or past tense. Flashcard is designed for learning and Find It is a game for practicing new verbs and/or reviewing previous ones. Both games can be used to address receptive and/or expressive language goals.

Before starting a Flashcard session, the therapist can select from over 120 verbs, using as few or as many as necessary for the student.  The icons at the bottom of the page allow instant customizing for verb tense at the word, phrase, or sentence level.

After using the Flashcard option to learn the verbs, the student can play Find It.  Like Flashcard, Find It can also be customized for the number of words, the verb tense, and the word, phrase, or sentence level.  Four images appear on the page at the same time, and after listening to the recording, the student touches the picture that matches what was said.  There are positive comments for correct choices.

If the child makes an incorrect choice, there is another opportunity to choose a card after listening to the recording again. In addition, the number of images to choose from is reduced in order to increase the opportunity for success.

iPractice Verbs is an easy and intuitive app that can be used in schools and at home. The images clearly depict each verb, and the audio is easy to understand, with alternating male and female voices.  I especially like seeing people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds in the photos.

I would suggest two possible changes in any future upgrades.  I’d find a way to make the introduction by the duck easier to understand, or give an option to hear a human voice.  The other would be to change the second level to ‘simple sentences’ or to use phrases only.

Being able to use enjoyable games to practice skills that need lots of repetition helps keep the kids motivated!

iPractice Verbs can be purchased on iTunes for $10.99. It is also available as an android app for $9.99.

Conversation Builder App, Updated

In a previous post, I reviewed Language Builder and Story Builder by Kyle  Tomson.  His latest app, Conversation Builder, just came out.  He was interviewed about it in depth on Autism Hangout.

As soon as my grandson goes to the park, I’ll be able to check it out for myself on my iPad.  It looks wonderful from what I saw in the interview and from what I’ve read on iTunes and the developer’s website.

Update on 4/18/2011:  This is going to be a very valuable app for speech therapists, special ed teachers, and parents.  It’s so simple to use, it’s deceiving. There are pre-set conversations that the client can have with the character in the app. Group conversations can be created in a give-and-take way with two or more clients.  The adult can also hold a two-way conversation with the student  in order to guide it in a certain direction. Conversations can be saved and emailed, too.

Check out the tutorial to understand all the capabilities of Conversation Builder.

Language Builder and Story Builder for iPad

 

Language Builder and Story Builder are designed to help children create sentences and paragraphs.  They are part of a family of apps from the Mobile Education Store which includes Conversation Builder, Question Builder, and Sentence Builder.

Originally created by a Dad (you can read his story, and those of other parents, on Squidalicious) to spark receptive and expressive language in his daughter, who has autism, the apps are also useful for students learning English as a Second Language,  young children just beginning to write, and kids with other language delays. It might also be useful for adults who are recovering language skills lost through accident or illness.

The apps work in a similar way, easing the learning process.  Children are able to record and playback their responses. There are extensive audio clips and dozens of story lines/pictures that help drive the creative process. Three levels of hints offer support from prompting with a spoken/written question to auditory only directions to make a sentence or tell a story about a picture.

In addition to sentence and story structure, students can practice fluency, articulation, and the ever-important skill of turn-taking. The completed sentences or stories can be emailed so that parents can see what their children are doing at school, and vice versa.  Language Builder and Story Builder are $3.99 in iTunes.

I’m having a great time making stories with my little grandson using these apps.