Appy Hour: Speech FlipBook Review and Giveaway

a review of Speech FlipBook by Tactus Therapy {and Giveaway!}

***GIVEAWAY NOW CLOSED***

It's my first giveaway! I was thrilled when Tactus Therapy provided me the opportunity to review their new app: Speech FlipBook. I was even more thrilled with how great it was :)

Speech FlipBook is a very versatile app from Tactus Therapy that can be used to address a variety of speech/language goals. The app contains 125 single phonemes & clusters, which can combine to create over 2300 single-syllable words and 60,000 nonsense words. Wow!

GETTING STARTED:

I highly suggest watching the online videos before using Speech FlipBook to familiarize yourself. Their website is also very helpful. I put the Speech FlipBook Basics PDF on my iPad for easy reference during the first couple times using the app.

The app has a very clean and simple layout, and you can customize the sounds and types of words you'd like to target: initial sounds, initial clusters, vowels, final sounds, and final clusters.

You can tap a label to select or deselect all sounds in that category. In the picture above, you can see I've selected only labio-dental sounds. One thing that really struck me as 'awesome' on this app was the ability to control which vowels are used. I don't have enough tools to target vowels!

In the settings menu you can customize even more by choosing how the words are presented and how the pages flip, and even choose which words appear on the word list.

Back to the home tab, select if you'd like your targets to be presented in words or sounds, and you are good to go!

While flipping targets, you can hear the word, and can also record/play your students' productions.

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Articulation Therapy:
The obvious use for Speech FlipBook is for articulation therapy. It's great because it takes away the possibility of students falling back into habitual pronunciations of certain words in error as they often do when naming pictures. They really have to think about the sounds in the targets. It's great that you can customize the targets so well and eliminate any potential troublesome targets due to coarticulation (such as 'cat' if a student is fronting). I love that you can select more than one phoneme to work on minimal pairs and it's also great for RtI work in the hallway or for groups of students.

It's not just for Articulation Therapy!:
*APRAXIA THERAPY: easily progress through therapy from V, to CV, to CVC, etc. *PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS: sound blending/phoneme manipulation/rhyming *VOCABULARY: for different sound combinations, you can find homophones listed along the bottom. Have students define the homophones.

*IT'S NOT JUST FOR SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGISTS! Speech FlipBook will be great for special ed/reading teachers to teach sound blending, word fluency skills, word families, and so on.
*LITERACY: Many of my students are not yet readers, but enjoyed flipping the pages and didn't realize they were working on their early reading skills at the same time as their speech skills!
*OTHER: Website also suggests uses for aphasia, IPA transcriptions, accent reduction, auditory training, and dysarthria.

THE BOTTOM LINE: 

Things I Like:
~ Color-coded tabs make it easy to select desired sounds.
~ Lack of pictures stops students from relying on habitual pronunciations for familiar words.
~ Can be used with much more than just articulation therapy.
~ So many options for customization!
~ No more lugging around numerous articulation cards for each speech sound. Almost any combination you could want are now all in one place!

Suggestions:
~ I didn't feel the app was very self-explanatory at first. But the online video tutorials are EXCELLENT for learning your way around.
~ Would like to see ability to take data and save settings to various 'users' in order to reduce set-up time for each student.
~ More difficult to use with non-readers, which is the majority of my current caseload.

Speech FlipBook is available for iPad/mini, iPhone, and iPod Touch. It is currently $4.99 in the App Store. What a bargain for such a versatile app! Want to win your own copy of Speech FlipBook?! Just enter in the Rafflecopter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway 

Winner will be chosen on Friday! Have a great week!

Disclaimer: Tactus Therapy provided me a copy of Speech FlipBook to review and giveaway, but all opinions are my own.