TOP TIPS FOR TEACHERS ON USING SPECIALISED APPS TO SUPPORT CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
- Use customisable and systematic apps that support children to understand words within the curriculum prior to them being formally taught. This is particularly valuable when supporting the progress of children whose home language is not English.
- Use apps as a way to focus children on key skills such as taking turns, listening and following directions.
- Some apps allow you to build in visual support to help children achieve ‘expressive language’ targets. This can enable children to join in and contribute anywhere that learning is happening.
- Use an app that helps children learn language through narrative approaches, helping them to understand the who?’,‘where?’ and ‘what?’ elements of stories.
- Use apps to support children in their understanding of how words can link together to form early sentences. This is particularly valuable for those children who are struggling to read.
- Help children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) to remember available options (for example deciding the nextanimal when singing about Old MacDonald) by using a grid based vocabulary app.
- There are specific apps available that can help children and young people grasp the concept of ‘now’, ‘next’ and ‘finished’.
- MyChoicePad comes with an awesome collection of pre-made grids and activities. The best results come when teachers and support staff slowly build up the number of grids to include in users’ unique personalised zone.
- MyChoicePad can support you to capture photos of props, children’s artwork and real places to create truly personalised grids, which become memory banks about the words, characters and themes from stories and visits.
- There is nothing more motivating for some children than watching movie clips, or
perusing digital photo collections where they and their friends are the stars. Often
children who struggle to get going with words and sentences will be highly motivated and more able comment within this sort of context.
Make technology work hard for you
●Engage staff by scheduling a regular ‘app chat’ slot in your team meetings. Askmembers of staff to demonstrate apps to their colleagues.
●Map out how individual apps could enhance learning. What language and guidancecould the adult provide to support learning?
●Exploit the camera and video functions of tablet devices - put children firmly in control. This is such a motivating way to practice developing steady hands, a careful eye and a sense of timing.
●Buy an inexpensive cable adaptor to allow children and young people to project directly from the tablet onto your large display screen. It’s a wonderful way to build confidence in speaking to groups, and can make an exciting addition to a lesson or assembly!
●Consider times when selecting the ‘speak selection’ function on a tablet would make the world of difference to an activity.
●Ensure children and young people stay focused on the app that you have selected by utilising the device’s guided access - this temporarily restricts the device to a particular app.
●Test children’s ability to understand collections of words within a theme. For example, with MyChoicePad you can add into a collection of words a ‘rogue’ item that doesn’t below there. In a grid collection of clothes, can children spot the elephant that shouldn’t be there?! Explaining the reasoning is an amazing words workout!
●A tablet is as worthwhile as the learning experiences you load onto it. Take the same
amount of care in stocking your tablets with quality resources as you would when
choosing books for example. Be sure to delete those you find ineffective.
- Organise your apps into folders to make lesson planning quick and easy.
About Insane Logic
Insane Logic is the award winning Social Enterprise that’s dedicated to helping people learn to communicate.
It is the company behind MyChoicePad,a language development platform for mobile tablets using symbols and signs to reinforce language. Find out more at
Credit: Insane Logic, 2015