My Teletherapy Tips
Who would’ve thought that we would be thrown into doing teletherapy? I certainly didn’t. I’ve now been doing it almost 2.5 months and I’ve learned a whole lot along the way, so I thought I’d share my tips.
- Prop your laptop up: Looking down for much of the day has been the cause of neck pain for me, so I found that propping my laptop up on a plastic bin (it does NOT have to be fancy) helps prevent that.
- Document camera: I was lucky enough to get one from my school and it really has been amazing. I can still use my mini objects and other regular materials and it’s a nice change of pace for the kids. Also, when I plug mine it, my video goes away so I take that opportunity to stand up and move a little while I’m talking.
- Reminder emails increases attendance: I’m sure we’ve all been stuck staring at ourselves when kids didn’t show for therapy. I’ve found that a persistent combination of emailing general education teachers/sped teachers/parents/students help improve my chances that kids will show.
- Change activities often: This has helped keep the attention of my students. I watch them carefully to see if I’m starting to lose them and will switch activities if I am noticing their attention decreasing. I do think I change more often than in person, but that’s ok.
- Keep it simple: I’m personally not doing any of the fancy green screens or other things that some SLPs are doing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I can only handle so much so I’m sticking to more basic things. I’m using Google Meet for sessions and a combination of Boom Cards, Google Slides, PDFs, some game websites as reinforcers, and regular materials.
- Share the entire screen: If you do this with two windows open, you can have different sounds/targets up (for groups). I recently did this with my new animal Boom Cards and it was awesome.
So far, those are my best tips! What have you learned??