Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera Part 3

In Using a Document Camera Part 1, the focus was on how to incorporate a document camera to share materials, typically used in face-to-face therapy, for telepractice sessions. In Using a Document Camera Part 2, the emphasis was on ways to use books to engage students. In Part 3 of this series, incorporating books is a continued theme.  Do any of your students have goals related to producing grammatically correct compound or complex sentences to describe characters and events, respond to questions, or compose questions? Using a document camera to engage the student in a virtual book pass is a low cost high-yield activity with the potential to address all of these goals and more. In brick and mortar schools, a book pass in a classroom might look like stacks or tubs of books placed among the students. The student can choose books from the tub, look them over, then decide if they want to add it to their "Books I Want to Read" list. After a few minutes the book is passed on to another student to examine. The most effective book passes I have participated in are followed with a class discussion about what books the kids found the most interesting and exciting or having the students share their lists and explain why they added particular books.  Picture in your mind the local children's librarian coming to a classroom and sharing tantalizing snippets of books available for check-out. Classroom teachers sometimes refer to this as giving a book a "book blessing". Kids, and adults for that matter, tend to gravitate to books shared in this way.  Here is one way to emulate the benefits of a book pass experience while using a document camera in telepractice sessions:

Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera Part 2

Books. Books. More books. I love books—all kinds of books and when I started using a document camera to share my favorites, a huge weight was lifted from my nervous telepractioner shoulders. Once again, I had the ability to share a book, using my voice, stopping when I thought it made sense, and thinking aloud to facilitate comprehension strategies in response to the child. And here is the amazing part, I had the ability to zoom in and zoom out on parts of illustrations, words, and sentences. That power to show parts while hiding others is a useful tool for facilitating inferential thinking, questioning, and synthesizing. Bring on the delicious wordless picture books! The wordless book used in the video clip below is The Red Book by Barbara Lehman.

Teletherapy: Using a Document Camera--Part 1

Thank you to Chelsea DiMarzio, one of my managers, for
encouraging me to try a document camera and giving me
new ideas for planning telepractice therapy sessions. 

Are you new to or considering using teletherapy to provide speech therapy services? Are you using a platform like Go To Meeting? If so, seriously consider purchasing a document camera. For me, it has been worth every penny. Before purchasing my Ipevo Ziggy HD Plus, I asked what other speech therapists were using on the Teletherapy Materials for Speech-Language Pathologists Facebook group. I searched for and purchased my document camera on Amazon and it arrived in less than a week. I followed the directions for downloading the software, played with it for about an hour, and was ready to use it for therapy the next day. 

Using a document camera to share materials, in my view, feels more like face-to-face therapy than sharing activities pulled up on a computer screen. Although the students don’t get to physically manipulate toys, they are often more compelled to use their oral language skills to verbally direct the SLP on how to engage with the toys. In essence, it feels like a barrier activity. A simple activity is to have a motivational coloring sheet under the camera and have the student instruct the SLP how they want it colored. Although your webcam can easily be used for Show and Tell activities, a document camera provides a way to share the details of objects and photos, even photos from a phone. Another simple low prep activity is to have parents text photos of pets or toys, share them on my screen with my document camera, and use them to engage the child in discussion, similar to face-to-face therapy.