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This text-based course is a written transcript of the course, “Selecting Apps for Therapy using an Evidence-Based Practice Model for Intervention Tools” presented by Dr. Lara Wakefield & Theresa Schaber on August 11, 2011.
>> Amy Natho: I would like to welcome you to the SpeechPathology.com e-learning seminar entitled: “Selecting Apps for Therapy using an Evidence-Based Practice Model for Intervention Tools”. At this time it is a great pleasure to introduce Lara Wakefield and Theresa Schaber. Dr. Lara Wakefield, PhD, CCC- SLP, has 16 years of experience as an SLP. She has researched the roles of the speech-language pathologist and teachers in collaborative settings related to language and literacy for 13 years in several grant-funded projects. She has presented at state and national meetings for 13 years on these topics. She has a specific interest in writing development in children ages 2-7 years. Dr. Wakefield has worked in a variety of settings: rehabilitation, home health, schools and universities. She is now in private practice as a speech-language pathologist and parent advocate at Wakefield Consultation Services LLC.
Miss Theresa Schaber, MS, CCC-SLP, has 15 years of experience as a speech-language pathologist. She has worked in various rehabilitation settings (skilled nursing facilities) and in early childhood intervention. For the past 3 years, she has been researching therapy apps in the context evidence-based practice principles. She works PRN and as a clinical fellow supervisor for a post-acute rehabilitation facility. Thank you very much, Lara and Theresa, for being here today.
>> Lara Wakefield: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Lara Wakefield and I will be giving you my side of the story first and then my friend and research partner, Theresa Schaber, is going to tell you her side of the story.
Conversation in 2008
Theresa and I began a conversation three and a half years ago and now it has turned into an on-going project related to viewing apps for speech-language therapy and an evidence-based practice framework also common known as EBP. In 2008 when the apps were open for iPhone®, I started searching the apps daily to see what I could use in my practice. Probably like many of you do, I started reading what the app developers and reviewers were saying. I looked at education apps because there was not really a specific speech and language therapy section at that time. After a few months, I received a phone call from Theresa. She and I noticed a trend that the app reviews and the descriptions by developers were lacking pertinent information. We discussed the idea that we could start reviewing the apps from an EBP perspective and then we could share our reviews with other SLPs. Then after a few months of reviewing apps, I realized there is no way we could review all the apps that are out there on the market. We both have families and jobs and we knew this would take time. I decided to tell Theresa that our idea was too crazy and we could not do it. However, Theresa was so enthusiastic about the potential of apps, I could not abandon the idea. We continued investigating the apps and reading descriptions and reviews to look at the trends. I remember I was listening to an audio book by Albert Einstein when Theresa called me that first time to discuss the idea of app reviews. After I finished my conversation with her I went back to my audio book. This is the quote I heard: "If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it." The translation, without the double negatives, is that the idea needs to be a little crazy at first, if there is hope for it to succeed. I felt like Einstein was speaking to us and guiding our conversation and investigation. That is when Theresa and I decided to form App Kickers division in my company.
AppKickers Division
The goal of AppKickers is to kick around ideas. We're here to critically review apps. Critical means that we're using criteria or guidelines to inform our process. We are not concerned with concepts of positive or negative related to our process. Those are judgmental terms that others may want to use to label our review of an app. People can sometimes misinterpret the word critical as meaning negative and they think we may be giving a negative review. That is not what critical means for us. It means we use criteria or steps so we want to clarify that at the outset. That being said, we're not here to give you a feel good review. On the other hand, we're not going to be down raters and haters on an app either. We always find strengths in an app or ways to adapt it so it can be improved. We attempt to use an evidence-based practice model to review the app to help SLPs make decisions about app selection. Finally, we respect app developers. We're app users and we hope to see excellence in apps in the field of speech-language pathology and we firmly believe that SLPs are the best people to be designing apps for clients with speech-language disorders.
This conversation thread on apps has progressed over several years. We began to narrow our idea. We started to realize that we could not review all the apps out there. We learned that we really needed to develop was a tool to help us make decisions on reviewing an app. That it would be better to learn how to review apps themselves instead of trying to share a review of every app. In other words it would be more important to know how to fish in the ocean of apps. And we would like to share our strategies with you today. Theresa is now going to share her side of the conversation.
>> Theresa Schaber: As Lara said, frustrations were rampant in both our households. We knew there was a great potential for utilizing apps as a therapy tool; however, our choices were severely limited 3 years ago. Only recently has there been an influx of speech apps on the market and we thought, great. Now we're getting somewhere. Finally, some preverbal meat we can chew on. That was short-lived as we discovered these apps were not modeling evidence-based practice criteria and reviews by consumers, some of them speech pathologists, were a continued source of frustration.
