I love using the iPad for speech sound therapy, and Articulate It! is my go-to app.
If you are still using an articulation drill book, consider switching to this! It is much more efficient, as you can find your therapy targets at the touch of a button and student data is recorded and stored for you. Plus, students enjoy flipping through the pictures (these are either real pictures or color drawings) and playing the memory game much more than the simple line drawings found in many drill books.
Articulate It! has several features that make it one of the best of its kind. First, you can choose your therapy target not just by phoneme, as in other similar apps (e.g., Articulation Station and Pocket Artic), but also by phonological process, manner of articulation, and number of syllables. This is very useful when working with students who are targeting fronting, stopping, cluster reduction, etc. There is also a recording button to save speech samples, as well as a small "mirror" (the iPad camera) that can be turned on so that students get visual feedback as they make their sounds. Another nice feature is the large array of homework sheets - words and pictures containing the targeted sound - that can be printed out and send home.
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Drawbacks to this app are relatively minor. Word lists have not been carefully edited to ensure that words contain targeted phonemes or sound classes (e.g., the following words are listed as containing fricatives: bongo, England, jungle, kangaroo, lung, marching band, ring, tango, wing). Another error: the word "wreath" is listed as a consonant cluster word (orthographically it is, but as a spoken word it is not). Other occasional mistakes in spelling and IPA (e.g., /y/ where /j/ is intended) detract from the overall quality of the app.
One improvement I'd really like to see in this app regards how therapy session results are presented. Currently, results are only given in percentages. I like to keep track of the total number of trials and the student's number of correct responses. Similar apps, such as Articulation Station, display this information, and I wish Articulate It! did, too.
Even though the SLP has to occasionally dodge some bad items, the convenience of Articulate It makes it well worth the money, as it replaces stacks of articulation cards and drill books. It can be used for every articulation student on caseload and has a number of other little features that make it enjoyable for students and the SLP alike.
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