#167: My Favorite Speech Therapy Apps (Part 2)

Marisha:
Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast where we share practical therapy tips and ideas for busy speech language pathologists. Grab your favorite beverage and sit back as we dive into this week's episode.
Hey there, it's Marcia, and today I'm continuing to share some of my favorite apps to use in speech therapy. So let's go ahead and dive right in.
So this first one is another very versatile app and it is called CoughDrop. So I tend to use it on my iPad, but they also have a web version, so you can use it on your computer. But CoughDrop is an AAC app, and I first learned about them years and years ago at an ASHA conference, and was just really impressed with the founder story. He has a daughter who uses AAC and they were just struggling to find a system that would work well for her, and that's what led him to create this app. So just a really cool story.
And this is an app that I like to use. It's nice just if I need some visual supports in a session, even if students are not using AAC as a mode of communication. I just think it's a really nice support to use in sessions in a variety of ways. But it's also really accessible, it's easy for me to put together vocabulary sets. They have tons of templates and it's really easy to customize. So I've been able to put together AAC boards and little systems for students just for testing purposes in a really easy and efficient way.
And I have a whole blog post on CoughDrop, so I'll add that to the show notes, as well. But this is just one that I'd love to shout out, I think it's really helpful. And they have some really amazing features. I've used it with some of my students, and you can see how often ... like it makes it easy to track data on a lot of goals because it gives you data on which vocabulary words have been used, how often it's being used, lots of really cool data. So that is a really neat one that I like to use just, again, as visual supports for students. But then also to trial AAC in an easy, low cost way. So that is the first recommendation.
Then my second app for the list in no particular order is Articulation Station. So this is a fabulous app to use with speech sound disorders. You can just open up the app and you can select any sound, and you can choose if you're working on initial, medial, final or any combination of those sounds. And it makes it really easy to build decks of cards to work on with your students, and you can target the sounds at various levels. It's really easy to move up and down the speech ladder, and it's just a fun and engaging way to target all of those goals without having to prep a million different materials.
I'd love it too because you can customize decks, as well. If you're using a core vocabulary approach, you can create your own set of decks in the app, as well. And there's just tons of ways to use it to target a number of goals. I also wrote a blog post very long time ago about Articulation Station, so I will link that in the show notes. That's my second recommendation for today.
The third recommendation that I have is a little bit of self-promotion, but one of my go-to resources to use in therapy is SLP Now. So it is not an iPad app, SLP Now is a web application. Which means that you can access it on any device that has a web browser. So a lot of SLPs use SLP Now on their computer, but you can also access it on your iPad or any other tablet or your phone. I am adding it to this list because I know that it saved SLPs a ton of time and resources, and it helps streamline a lot of the workload and gives you easy access to therapy materials.
So to recap, our three apps are CoughDrop, Articulation Station, and SLP Now. And if you'd like the list of all the apps and links, you can head to SLPNow.com/167. That's a wrap.
Thanks for listening to the SLP Now podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your SLP friends and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to get the latest episode sent directly to you. See you next time.