It sounds like a cute Saturday morning cartoon character or a yummy pastry, but Popplet is actually an interactive graphic organizer app! It’s available on itunes but I am lucky enough to have it as part of my Office 365 suite on my school computer! This app is described on their website : “In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them.” My students, especially my students with social language impairments, ADD and/or executive function impairments, are definitely visual learners! I am too, so here is a link to a youtube video that shows how to build a Popplet organizer. Here is a link to a fabulous education blog that outlines multiple uses for Popplet in school with a great step by step tutorial. One of my SLPeeps (thanks Joy!) introduced me to this in a presentation recently and my mind jumped right to social language concepts (I know, it’s an obsession)!
How cool would this be to use for social mapping? You could add a picture of the problem scenario in the middle (or even have the students role play problems and take actual pictures of them to use with the app). Then, use the organizer to build out expected/unexpected pathways (you can color code them too) and tease out how their choices impact how others think and feel. If your students have tablets in your school system as ours do, you can push out the Popplet to them individually and they have an immediate visual social map to refer to.
What about our friends who have difficulty with group work? Building a Popplet together might be more enticing to my students who love technology and sneak in some collaborative learning skills at the same time in the therapy setting or in the classroom! I can see this being used to work on expanding social language concepts such as perspective taking using a graphic organizer, connecting the concepts of think/say/feel and even linking shades of emotions using Popplet. I want to try it out and have my kids look at a picture in the middle, then identify and connect the clues they see in order to make a smart guess! It would be fantastic to be able to print a screenshot and blow it up to poster size to refer to in your therapy room or classroom too.
I am excited to try out this new therapy tool and see how it goes. Have you used Popplet? Please share your thoughts here. If not, how would you use it for social language therapy?
SmartmouthSLP 