It was a manic Monday! The weeks are busy, but flying by! I just wanted to swing by and share another round of reviews for the Super Duper Inc apps. Super Duper gave me codes in order to complete the reviews! The opinions on these are all mine.
What Doesn’t Belong? This is a new one from Super Duper. Like all of their apps to date, it contains the images in the fun deck with the option of data collection. Of the apps I'm reviewing today, this is the one I've used the most! The app has cards with sets of either 3 or 4 items. The clinician can choose which cards will be targeted. I used the app the way it was intended for several students, letting them identify which card did not belong in the set. I love this one because I used it a lot of other ways too! Start by turning off the volume so that no question probes will be said. I used the same app to work on receptively identifying objects from a field of 3 and 4. I worked on expressively naming vocabulary on each card. I worked on identifying objects by function (ie: what do you use to protect your feet.) As you can see this is a flexible app!
Homophones Here's an app for your readers. Select the cards you want students to see, and have your students fill in the blank to practice word pairs that sound the same but have different spellings and different meanings. The prompts include statements like, “___ is my favorite color” and “Yesterday, Karla ___ Ben a story.” The best part of this app, is that you can set up automatic scoring, unlike many of the Super Duper Apps! It makes it much easier to get accurate data in case you forget to mark each response!
Compare and Contrast the student looks at two items on the screen and touches the screen to listen to the prompts. Ask the student to compare or contrast the items. The student then gives a verbal response. After each answer, tap the green (correct) or red (incorrect) button to score the student’s verbal response. Move to the next card by swiping the card currently on the display screen to the side, and the next image appears. Most of my kids needed help to express this relationship. I used a little white board with the carrier phrases, "___ & ___ are both ___." and "__ is __, but ___ is ___."
Name That Category The Name That Category App is a perfect way to check understanding of the semantic relationships between vocabulary. Have your students fill in the blank to practice describing, categorizing, and organizational skills. The prompts include fill-in-the-blank statements like, “A car, bike, and train are ___.” and “A sandwich, pizza, and French fries are ___.”
Practicing Pragmatics The practicing pragmatics apps is appropriate for younger students on your caseload. Slide the questions and have the students answer social skills questions about Politeness, Solving Problems, Feelings, Giving Information, Requesting, Telephone Skills, and Staying on Topic. The 52 color cards can be answered immediately or used to set up possible topics for modeling social situations.
What Are They Thinking This app was developed to improve your students' inferencing, reasoning, and conversational skills. All the people and animals in these fun cards have thought bubbles above their heads. Touch the screen to hear all of the thoughts or touch one thought bubble to hear just that character's thought. Hit the refresh button to hear a new thought for each bubble. Slide your finger to move to the next page when you're done answering this prompt! As I have noted in the past. This is one of the most open ended apps from SD! I used this one for a re-eval with a student this week! It was great for eliciting sentence samples!
Listening for Absurdities This one is sure to elicit the giggles! Select the cards you want students to see, and have them practice their listening, reasoning, and problem solving skills as they tell you what makes each card absurd. Prompts include statements such as “The mother hen took good care of her baby octopus” and “Becky cut the paper with a fork.” I'm always surprised that my students can identify that something isn't quite right, but sometimes they have a lot of difficulty verbalizing the reason it doesn't make sense. This is a good language app to have in your tool box!
If you've read my other Super Duper app reviews you might remember that I consider them the type of apps that lighten the load you carry from building to building or room to room. The apps are limited with their interactivity, but certainly provide the opportunity for SLP's to reduce the amount of materials they need to carry to and from!
