I was sitting with a friend the other day who was telling me about her students leaving Spanish monologues on her phone as home work. My first thought was that sounds dicey handing out your number to a bunch of high school freshman. (Insert your favorite prank phone call here (Is your fridge running?) She explained to me that she was using Google Voice which lets you get a number that allow a student/client to place a call and leave a message and the beautiful part is (drum roll please) it is not your cell number, home number, or work number. This sounded like a great idea for speech therapists!
I work with elementary students so this one might not work so well for therapist with younger kiddos, but I could see it working so well with a variety of students older than 12.
I was a little worried about the feasibility of me setting up something like this by myself. I am not extremely technologically savvy...(my main technological feat is creating Pintrest boards and witty Facebook statuses) but this was very easy to set up. It took all of 3 minutes to do and look at all the possibilities!
Here is how I am picturing it being used therapeutically:
1) Fluency: Have student read a passage and practice fluency strategies.
2) Traumatic Brain Injury: Give student/client a time and topic to call about at a certain time to practice long term memory strategies and organization strategies( encourage them to independently mange the information: put it in their phone calendar or reminders, write themselves a note, or set an alarm!)
3) Pragmatic skills: Practice how to appropriately leave a message with topic call back number and name.
4) Articulation: Have students practice their sound over the phone as homework.
5) Voice Clients: working on using breath support to leave a message of appropriate volume, using appropriate pitch etc.
6) Dialect Modification Therapy: Have your client read something you don't predetermine. Write down what you hear or understand. Have the student bring a transcript of what they said and review it in the next session.
That's just off the top of my head! Let me know if you come up with any other awesome ideas or how
to use Google Voice.
You can set up your own Google Voice account at https://www.google.com/voice
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