Product Review of Articulate it! Assistive Technologies
A multiplayer app created to help kids with their pronunciation. The app contains over 1,000 images selected by a top language pathologist to enhance phonology at the word and phrase levels. Articulate it! is available on various iOS devices, making it convenient for mobile language pathologists, educators, or parents.
What Users Love About the App
“I use this app daily in therapy. It is great for the traveling SLP that doesn’t want to carry 20 card decks between schools. I love that I can choose the stimulus cards by sound, phonological process, or even number of syllables. There are many different cards for each sound. The printable HW pages are a nice feature as well. My students enjoy the different themes and memory game.”
“I use the Articulate it! app almost daily. I have many students with speech sound disorders, so I get to see a good variety of children use this app in therapy. It has been wonderful to see how motivated they are to get through 100 trials quickly! I also love how easily I can change between different levels of complexity. My students also love to use the memory match game to shake things up!”
“I love this app! I’m an SLP with grades 3-5 so they like things fast and like to see feedback. I use this often and am able to switch levels with just a touch and show them correct vs. incorrect immediately. They love it, and the pictures are familiar and realistic. The variety of words used for the sounds is also great! Overall, this app gets five stars!”
“I really like the recent updates. I use this in artic therapy all the time. It is so much easier to use than flash cards and it keeps data for me. My students love the different backgrounds. I like being able to choose sounds by location. I also lovebeing able to choose phonological processes.”
“I love, love, love it! How wonderful is it to have a fun therapy tool that fits in your hand that your students will attend to and participate with whether in a group or individual setting. Articulate it! does exactly that. Your students will ask you over and over again to work on their speech sounds on your iTouch or iPad. This app allows your students to work on their individual sound and will keep track of their overall accuracy for each sound produced, and at what position, for every session. You choose the phonemes, phonological process or mode of articulation you wish to address. Then,basically just click and go. The photos appear; the child can listen to the word, say it and record their voice as well. You,as the therapist, either touch the check or x at the bottom of the picture and every picture shown is scored and tracked. What a handy tool. You are able to show the teacher, even parents, what sounds their child has mastered and even see what needs to be addressed next in therapy. A wonderful little tool that I so love and my students do, too. Thank you, thank you, and thank you!”
What Users Dislike About the App
“I appreciate the themes on this app. You can change the theme to match the season or holiday. My students always get a kick out of it when I change it! They are more engaged and love the transition sounds. The only thing I would change is the complexity level of the sentences. I think a lot of the sentences are very basic and some of my older students need longer, more complex sentences.”
“I am a school-based SLP. I love using the iPad with my clients and they are very motivated by it; however, this app needs more work. I do like being able to use this app in groups and that it records data for me. But like some other users shared, the pictures are often blurry or bizarre. Some words even have blank pictures on them. I do not like how the app automatically moves to the next word, because it doesn’t allow for multiple target production. Or, if you accidentally press the correct/incorrect buttons more than once (which often happens), it skips over the next student and it is thencumbersome to get back to where it should be. Many of the words were not well chosen based on developmental data. For example, words containing the “p” phoneme (an early developing phoneme) also contain more difficult phonemes that children at those early developmental levels can’t produce. This app is a great concept but it needs several improvements!”
“I really like the customization to focus on phonemes vs phonological processes and being able to individualize which stimulus words will be presented. Recording responses is motivating for kids. I wish the stimulus sentences were shorter/simpler. Many of them are too difficult for my kiddos and are spoken fast. I don’t really use that feature and I model sentences for kids to imitate using the recorded option instead.”
“As a SLP, I am currently using Artikpix and Phonopix for my articulation and phonology therapy. When this went on sale I jumped at the chance to add an app that incorporates both. I am very disappointed with my purchase. There are only 14 final R words and R can not be sorted by vocalic production. When looking at phonological process errors, there are no minimal pair pictures. Deletion of final consonants, for example, has multi-syllable words and you can’t quickly and easily sort by final sounds. This is true for all phonological processes. Overall, I am disappointed and will stick with what I was previously using. Also, the authors should make it easier to see which sounds have been selected instead of just slightly shading the selection.”
“I appreciate the use of real images instead of drawings, but many of them are distorted and some are just bad! For instance, for the word “circle” they show a plate that has been resized without maintaining the aspect ratio. It is an oval. And “pants” are so shortened that they look like they were taken from a midget (plus, they’re hunter green). And the picture of a seal is so white you can barely tell what it is. If the pictures were better and correctly resized, I would give it a4 star rating. In its current state, however, it isn’t a very effective tool for helping my son with Childhood Apraxia of Speech work on his expressive language since I have to explain what the pictures are.”
