Category Archives: Site news

Therapy Ideas Live Won the Shine a Light Innovation Award!

Exciting news here at Therapy Ideas HQ: on Wednesday Therapy Ideas Live won the Shine a Light Innovation Award at a champagne reception in central London. TV star Paul Ross presented me with the award (check out the photo.) Woohoo!

The awards were first given out last year by the Communication Trust, in association with Pearson Assessment, as part of the Year of Communication. They were developed to celebrate excellent practice in supporting children and young people’s communication development. The Innovation Award is a new addition to the categories this year: the judges were after creative projects that achieved great results.

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Therapy Ideas Live: “Enlighten us, but make it quick!”

Although there’s plenty of formal education for Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs), we need more opportunities to share ideas, learn from each other, and develop our skills in an informal environment. I had a blast at Ignite London last year, and it inspired me to organise a similar event for SLTs. Meet Therapy Ideas Live.

With some friends and colleagues I’m trying something new: an evening of informal and informative lightning-style talks presented by ten SLTs from a range of backgrounds. Broaden your perspective, learn from others, share your own experiences, and socialise over a glass of wine—it’s a more inspiring version of CPD!

The first Therapy Ideas Live is happening on the evening of 5th July 2011, hosted at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists in London. Ten amazing speakers–including Gina Davies, Marie Gascoigne, and Stephen Parsons–will each present for 5 minutes, with slides that advance automatically. Find out more on the event page.

Amazingly, all 50 free tickets for this event sold out within 24 hours, and we closed the waiting list when 50 more people had signed up. Thanks for your support! We plan to film the presentations and share them on this website.

We’re also planning another event at City University in the autumn. Register your interest and be the first to hear when tickets are released. And if you fancy sharing your experience, perspective, case study, or challenge, send us your talk idea using this form. You don’t need experience of public speaking: anyone can give a lightning talk (read this post for some handy tips), and we’ll give you plenty of help.

You can follow the event live on twitter, using the hashtag #therapyideas.

See you there!

Therapy Ideas is live!

Hello, welcome to Therapy Ideas!

I’m so excited that we’ve finally reached ‘soft launch’ day. I first started thinking about a website for SLT resources about two years ago and here it is, one of the first projects from Jonathan’s new web agency, Together London.

Please have a look around. At the moment there are about 25 ideas contributed by me and a small number of very special therapist friends, thanks girls! I hope the number of ideas will grow as therapists discover the site; making it an expanding and relevant resource.

Talking of resources, some ideas have resources attached, check out Same and Different. Print these out and you’re good to go, while you’re at it you could print out a set for school or parents too. There is a simple way to add photos, so you might want to use the site as a way of organizing your therapy photos- go on, upload that picture of pop up frog!

You’ll notice that the site is currently a bit focussed towards therapy for children, that’s because I’m a paediatric therapist. But all the infrastructure for adult ideas is there (at least I think it is, I’d really appreciate your constructive criticism) if you’re a therapist working with adults, why not add an idea?

So, what do you think? All comments, questions, feedback (and chocolate cakes) gratefully received.

Right, I think that’s about enough excitement for me, for one day. Thanks to Jonathan and David, you did a great job.

Rhiannan