Last week’s Houston meeting started off with speech therapist Betsy Furler sharing and demonstrating one of her favorite apps — Toca Boca Tea Party. She explained how she uses it for turn taking, for small group work with elementary aged children as well as early middle school. It is useful and fun for working on receptive language and following directions.
Our Returning Users group spent time discussing favorite apps Little Writer, Matching Jobs, Verbally, and Montessori Crosswords. Through trial and error, one participant showed how she discovered that using a common plumber’s glove with the index finger cut out could help those with poor fine motor control accurately activate specific areas of the iPad. Often a person who tries to select something inadvertently hits an area they don’t want because of poor hand or finger isolation control. The glove easily slides across the screen, but does not activate the iPad until the index finger is used to select. Some users with poor fine motor control can use a keyguard to address this problem, but using the glove allows the user more freedom to search among apps, switch pages of apps and allow for the hand to rest on the iPad without activating it.
In our Getting Started group we discussed favorite math apps for those getting started with how the iPad can be used to help students with homework. We downloaded Counting Bills & Coins and Coin Math, great apps for elementary and middle school aged students for basic operations practice. We also discussed the best iPad cases for a variety of tasks. The Otterbox Defender for the iPad 2 and 3 is a favorite for those who need sturdy and durable protection to take back and forth to school and withstand drops.