Five Ways to use Alexa in Private Practice

Hello strangers!!  It's been a while, but I'm making use of a snow day in Illinois to catch up with you.  My speech and language private practice continues growing in leaps and bounds between home office sessions and telepractice therapy in Indiana and California via Presence Learning.  Over Christmas, I treated myself to the new Alexa Dot to help keep me organized at work.  Here are five ways that I'm putting Alexa to work:

1) I synced my calendar so I can set up for morning sessions while hearing my schedule for the day.  It only took a few minutes and it was worth each and every second!

2) Just before a client arrives, I set an alarm for five minutes before the session ends.  This helps me stay on time, reduces constantly looking at my watch/clock, and gives me a chance to take the last five minutes to finish writing my online note through Therabill.

3) During sessions, I have my verbal clients tell Alexa to "stop", "turn off", or "tell a joke."  This has been especially helpful for articulation practice and reducing speaking rates.

4) Alexa is synced with my free Pandora so during the Christmas season, I asked her to play some holiday tunes while clients worked on my annual crayon giving project.  Nowadays, I have Alexa play music for my toddler clients to enjoy during play tasks.  I've always loved using music to imitate gestures/sounds/words with toddlers, but never remembered to set up my boom box (Do people still call it that??!) and I try to keep my iPad out of the therapy room when possible.  Syncing my Pandora allowed me to have some good tunes jamming within seconds.

5) I set a quick timer for "jump" breaks on my "new to me" trampoline.  Setting these timers does not impact the alarm warning for the end of sessions.  Clients are practicing following directions by waiting for Alexa to say: "One minute timer starting now" before they start jumping and then clients stop moving when the timer goes off.  No fighting or crying and pleading for more time: that timer is simply magical!!

There are so many other tasks that you can accomplish with Alexa!  Have you utilized this device in your speech and language sessions?  If so, then leave me a comment about it.