It’s a common problem—and one that’s only gotten worse in the last few chaotic and fragmented years. You work with a child on articulation during your in-person (or, these days, virtual) sessions and then send them home to practice. And…they don’t. Or they do, but you can’t actually tell how that practice is going. Families are busy, life is chaotic, and at-home articulation therapy can get lost in the shuffle. Progress is slow.  As with every motor skill, speech-language pathologists have long known that frequent practice helps children succeed in reaching their articulation goals more quickly. Drills are essential. But finding or creating properly customized home-practice materials that are tailored to each child’s specific needs—and that are fun and motivating—is time-consuming work.  The unfortunate reality is that most SLPs don’t have as much time as they would like to spend with their existing clients, never mind the opportunity to get to all the other children who need help, too. This only gets compounded when kids don’t practice consistently and correctly. This is why we at TikTalk are so excited to launch a groundbreaking digital platform that can help. Learn More   

TikTalk is designed by SLPs, along with speech-sound recognition experts and software engineers. It allows you to quickly and easily create fully customized articulation goals for each of your clients, which they can keep working on at home until you see them again through integrated practice and dozens of fun games.

The platform includes a robust database of words, phrases, and sentences; in just moments, you can choose which phoneme or phonemes to focus on—and which to avoid—based on phonemic context. You can make a child’s articulation goals as specific or as general as they need, adjust the target length from syllable to word or sentence level, and layer in constraints to ensure their targets are precisely tailored to their capabilities at any point in time. (want a kid to work on S blends but avoid /SL/? The app can do that in just a couple of clicks.) Once clients are at home, the TikTalk app gives them an array of games to choose from to help motivate them to practice whatever goals you have set, turning something that can feel like homework into a bit more of an adventure.  In another innovation, you won’t be left wondering how it’s going in between therapy sessions. TikTalk gives you the ability to check on clients’ progress from inside the portal, with video and audio recordings of their practice sessions. The platform lets you easily generate reports capturing how much your clients are practicing and how effective that practice has been, allowing you to show the progress a kid is making to their parents and caregivers—and even to the kids themselves. If they are doing well, you can keep the momentum going and increase the complexity of the targets remotely; if a child gets stuck, you can catch that and help them course correctly right away.  TikTalk essentially closes the distance between you and your clients, keeping you in more frequent, better touch as they move through their goals.

If a tool like this might help you in your practice, you can try it out for free this fall. We’re thrilled to offer up to three complimentary TikTalk licenses per SLP, yours to use for three months, to celebrate our launch. Just head on over to TikTalk to get started. Free Trial