Welcome! With Everyday Speech, everything is done for you — no planning or prep needed! Everyday Speech is built with ease in mind: our mission is to get you up and running for your next therapy session instantly!
This article will help you learn the basics, so you can get right into social skills teaching quickly.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:
- How to use the Social Learning Platform dashboard
- Finding your way around the Full Curriculum
- Viewing your first video
- Downloading a video companion worksheet
- Downloading a printable activity
- Using an interactive activity
- Launching an online game
- Saving to a list
- Sharing a saved list and sending materials home
How to use the Social Learning Platform dashboard
When first logging into the platform, you'll be presented with a Quick Start Video and suggestions of our most popular materials.
As you view more materials inside the app, the dashboard will change to a custom view. Your dashboard is personalized - this will be based on the materials you have been using, so it will look a bit different for everyone.
Want to jump back into a video you saw earlier? It's right there for you. Want to pick up where you left off in the curriculum? You can see the goals you viewed most recently.
Recently Viewed Materials
At the top, you’ll see your most recently viewed materials. This allows you to jump right back into a piece of material you recently opened. If you need a longer listing of materials you’ve looked at, click on the View All link next to Recently Viewed Materials to see a longer listing of your viewing history.
Recently Viewed Goals
All of the materials in our library are tagged with a Goal that they work on. You’ll learn about these goals more in our Full Curriculum section, but here you’ll be able to jump right back into any goals related to the content you’ve recently seen.
Your Saved Lists
A quick way to get to your saved lists, we show your most recently created lists here. To see all of your saved lists, click on the View All link or click on Saved Lists in the navigation bar.
Finding your way around the Full Curriculum
The Everyday Speech curriculum is divided into Skills and Goals.
Skills are overarching areas to work on, like Basic Conversations, Problem Solving, and Friendship. Each Skill is made up of multiple Goals. For example, Conversation Topics includes the goals of Making Connected Comments and Think it or Say It, among others.
When you navigate to our Skills listing, you’ll notice that Skills are in a numbered order. This is our suggested developmental order for a learner that is starting from the absolute beginning. It’s likely that you’ll have learners who have very specific needs - it’s entirely okay to start somewhere in the middle, or jump around in an order that makes sense for you.
Once you choose a Skill that you’d like to work on, Goals will appear on the right-hand side. Again, this is in a suggested order, but you can feel free to jump to the best starting point for your learner.
Once you select a Goal, you’ll be taken to the Goal page.
On our Goal pages, you’ll find the Lesson Units that bundle and organize our materials for you (Complete Guided Therapy subscribers only). Designed to take the questions and effort out of lesson planning, the Lesson Units suggest an order for teaching a Goal and present our best materials for that Goal.
Each lesson follows the same structure to ensure your learners are mastering each goal. They follow the sequence of:
- Introduce
- Practice
- Apply
- Review
Every lesson is designed to take up an entire session. That said, if you have shorter or longer session times or your student is moving at a different pace, don’t feel you have to stick to the one (1) lesson per session rule. Every learner is different! We highly recommend reviewing video lessons multiple times to make sure your learners retain the skills taught.
Lesson units are broken down into different age groups - Pre-K - Elementary and Middle - High School. Learners on the fringes of these age groups may be able to use either one. Generally, our Middle - High School units have videos with older actors, and more complex worksheets and activities.
We’re adding new units all the time, so if you don’t see a unit for a goal you want to work on, check back later and we may have added it!
Viewing your first video
We're best-known for our video modeling lessons. Video lessons range in length from about 3 minutes, all the way up to 15+ minutes.
Video Modeling is an evidence-based practice in the field and is a core tenant of our materials. As you work through our curriculum, you’ll notice that our videos increase in complexity as you work through our lesson bundles. Our Introduction videos introduce the skill and show a straightforward model of the skill being performed. At the next level, we add in contrasting behaviors – showing how different actions taken affect the thoughts of those around you. Finally, we compile different clips to create videos where learners have to infer what’s going to happen.
Video lessons can easily be identified with this icon: 
Once you've selected a video to watch, click on the video to go to the content page.Click on the Play button to start watching the video.
Downloading a video companion worksheet
Every video comes with a companion worksheet that provides a jumping-off point for further discussion and/or review.
You'll find a What To Do section beside the video. Click on the Preview button to open the video companion worksheet.
Once on the preview page, click on Download Video Companion Worksheet.
Downloading a printable activity
Printable activities are great tools to enable students to independently practice and apply concepts that they are learning about.
Activities can easily be identified with this icon: 
To download a printable activity, head on over to the material that you want to print. Once on the page, click Download.
Some pages may present you with a different screen. Click on Download PDF instead.
Please note that you will need a PDF reader to view the files. A standard web one is Adobe Reader (https://get.adobe.com/reader).
Using an interactive activity
Don't have a printer at home? We've added online interactive versions of our printable activities! (Not all activities have interactive versions, so always keep checking to see if we've added it!)
Head on over to the material that you want to work on. Once on the page, click Play On Screen.
The page will have on-screen instructions to guide you on how to complete the activity.
Launching an online game
Looking to break the routine in your therapy sessions? Games are a great way to help students develop their social and emotional skills.
Games can easily be identified with this icon: 
Open the content page of the game that you'd like to play. Click on Play Game.
A new window will open, and your desired game will now load.
Saving to a list
Never lose track of your teaching materials again with the saved lists feature of the Social Learning Platform! With the SLP, you can organize therapy materials into saved lists that are easily accessible in the future.
How to save a piece of content
Use the Save to List dropdown button on any piece of content.
In the dropdown, you can add the content to an existing list, or create a new list starting with that piece of content.
If you're viewing a piece of material, click on the Save to List button. You can add the content to an existing list, or create a new list starting with that piece of content.
We suggest starting off with one list called "Favorites", where you store your go-to pieces of content for easy access.
Sharing A Saved List
How to access your saved lists
There are two (2) ways you can access your saved lists. You can access the Saved Lists button on the top menu bar, or you can access them from the bottom of the dashboard.
Once you're on the Saved List's page, click on the URL bar and copy the link. You can then send the link via email or any messaging platform.
Please note that just sending the url of your saved list isn't enough. Users will need an active Everyday Speech account to access the materials. They also won’t have the ability to delete or modify your list. You can read about How to Share Materials with Parents or Send Materials Home here.
Want to know how if the Social Learning Platform is compatible with your favorite e-learning tool? Read up on that here.
Hope you enjoyed this quick walkthrough of the Social Learning Platform! If you have any further questions, check out the Knowledge Base for more in-depth articles.
Happy socializing!
