March 16, 2016

Our first trade-show at the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention in Fort Worth was a success. We had a great time meeting so many SLPs and chatting about SLP Toolkit. We were also fortunate to be neighbors with Little Bee Speech! Heidi and her husband Chris have been in this business for a few years now and their wisdom and advice was priceless! I love being a part of a community where we help and encourage one another. There is enough room in the world for all of our ideas to come to life and I genuinely believe in supporting and promoting products that make our practice better.

I have been using Articulation Station for some time now. It is one of my FAVORITE speech apps and the only one I use for articulation therapy. I love the ease of the app, the visuals, the flexibility and hierarchy of the materials, and the kids enjoy using it too! At the convention, they were demoing the new bilingual edition of the app. I don’t speak Spanish, but I know there is a shortage of products for this population and from everything I can tell this app is amazing.

After the convention, I purchased their Test Center app. All I can say is…WOW! They thought of everything! It is organized beautifully and is easy to administer. My favorite features are the ability to select what sounds I want to test (e.g. early developing, /r/ only, vowels), the speech sample and the auto-generated report. In our district we use the Articulation Severity Rating Scale, published by the Virginia Department of Education, to qualify students for speech sound disorders. The scale takes into account intelligibility, Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC), stimulability, phonological processes and speech sound norms. Little Bee’s app includes the ability to gather/analyze all of this data, and the best part is it writes it all up for me in a nice little report! This is going to save me so much time.

We included an articulation screening tool as part of the resources on SLP Toolkit. It is not meant to support eligibility but to provide a quick overview of a child’s speech sound errors if you don’t have another measurement tool. I will be using the Test Center App as an informal screening measure, as part of the evaluation process, and to guide treatment. I will then use the articulation progress monitoring tools in the SLP Toolkit app to measure progress.

Here are some screenshots of the app:

We live in a technological age. It is exciting to see all of the apps being developed that are specific to the field of speech-language pathology. With the increase in caseloads and paperwork demands, we need to critically analyze how we can best collect, organize, and analyze data for our students. Little Bee Speech is one excellent resource to add to this list.

-Sarah