Teletherapy Activities & Digital Resources for SLPs

For speech-language pathologists, the shift from in-person speech therapy to teletherapy usually means packing your physical materials into boxes and acquiring digital activities to teach and practice articulation and language goals.

This change can be tough to navigate. But luckily, SLPs are no strangers to being creative and flexible in new situations. And while, at first, you may feel more limited, I’m here to show you that there's a big world of digital activities out there to make your online speech therapy sessions just as engaging, interactive, and effective as ever.

DIGITAL ACTIVITIES FOR TELETHERAPY SESSIONS

There are many fun activities to choose from when building your virtual therapy toolbox. Whether your students can control the mouse or remote access is off the table, teletherapy SLPs have quite an array of options available to engage students of any age.

Website Games and Activities

The internet offers many (and often free) online games and activities you can share with students. If your teletherapy platform includes the ability to screen share an internet browser, you truly have no less than a gazillion options to choose from.

A few of my most used sites for interactive games and activities include PBS Kids, ABC Ya, Toy Theater, and IXL Learning. And see how I use Google spreadsheets to house all the links to my favorites.

Boom Cards

While technically Boom Cards are also website activities, these digital cards are at the very top of my "best teletherapy activities" list.

Why? Boom Card decks offer so much interaction for teletherapy students. 

In addition to engaging students in many ways and for any goal area you can name, there's a Boom deck for that! Whether you need an articulation game, practice with a certain language goal (such as sequencing), or a lesson for a particular social skill, the Boom Learning platform has you covered.

There are loads of free Boom Cards for speech therapy and you can always create the perfect deck yourself.

Books and Articles

Just because you're in a virtual setting, doesn't mean that you can't incorporate books and other reading materials like you do in face-to-face sessions. Online and digital versions of reading materials are a great way to work on a variety of skills with kids of all ages.

Sure, you can read a physical book, holding up the pictures to your webcam. But there is a much easier way. There are many book sites,  including Epic! and Oxford Owl, that provide free access to children's books.

Sites such as National Geographic Kids, Time for Kids, Smithsonian Learning Lab, and ReadWorks have informational articles and stories for a range of ages. I love finding texts on topics that my students are interested in or learning about in school.

PDFs

Don't underestimate the value of a good old-fashioned PDF file in teletherapy. PDFs can be used in a couple of ways.

• Upload the PDF directly into your platform. Most teletherapy platforms have annotation tools to digitally "mark up" the PDF document right by drawing lines or shapes or typing or highlighting text.
  

• Screenshare a PDF reader application (such as Adobe Reader). You can also share your screen to display the PDF opened in an outside window (such as this set of camping activities). This is the way to go when using interactive PDFs that have built-in features that you and your students can interact with, like clickable buttons and fillable text boxes.

Videos

Short videos are easy to incorporate into lesson plans for younger and older students. The sky is the limit for incorporating videos into therapeutic interventions, but here are a few ways speech therapists might use them in teletherapy:

• Introduce a theme and vocabulary and concepts for that theme.

• Play songs or nursery rhymes for young students.

• Work on making inferences and predictions in cartoons or wordless videos.

• Go on a scavenger hunt by searching the video for a set of specific objects.

• Take virtual field trips, such as to an aquarium, museum, landmark, or even just a grocery store.

• Elicit language (verbal or using an AAC device) about actions in funny videos compilations.

• Show models of various social interactions and social skills targets.

Apps

If you have an iPad (or iPhone) full of engaging apps for speech therapy, you can use it in your virtual sessions, too! Screen mirroring (available on many platforms, including Zoom) allows you to display your device's screen inside your teletherapy classroom.

Google Slides Activities

When it comes to virtual speech therapy, Google Slides is so much more than a presentation-making program. These slide decks can be some of the best teletherapy resources, especially for older students. 

Google Slides (such as this mixed group activity) offers interactive features such as fillable text boxes, movable pieces, clickable links, and embedded videos. I especially love the option to search and import Google images right into the presentation.

Green Screen Activities

While I cannot personally attest to using a green screen in teletherapy, I do know that many virtual SLPs (especially those working in early intervention and preschool) love this option. Using a solid green backdrop allows you to replace it with large images and videos, making it look like you (the SLP) are immersed in a different world.

While at first, newly practicing teletherapists might feel discouraged and unsure, with their physical therapy materials packed away, you might think it's impossible to keep students engaged.

But there really is a whole world of digital activities, games, and resources just waiting for you to explore with your virtual students. These new go-tos are out there, just waiting to be discovered, loved, and used again and again.

With the right tools and a bit of creativity, teletherapy activities can be just as effective—and just as fun—as traditional speech therapy materials.

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