Technology for School Counselors

We are living in a technology-infused world. For the counselors and educators out there who have embraced the many benefits of using technology in the schools, the possibilities are truly endless!
Below are just a few of the possible ways that school counselors can use technology to make their school counseling program more efficient and more beneficial for the entire school! 


Counselor Organization

• Google calendar- scheduling at a glance
• Google docs- surveys and forms, share documents, spreadsheets
• Individual Notes- (careful to ensure student confidentiality!)
• Keep track of parent contacts
• create charts and graphs for accountability 
• Dropbox- Instead of filing cabinets full of papers, keep resources at the click of a button!

Individual/Group counseling

• Minute Meetings using Ipad
• Check-ins using google forms
• Ipad apps for relaxation, ADHD, character education, emotions, problem solving, etc. This site has some great links: Korea International School - Elementary Counseling

Classroom Guidance

• Smartboard activities- 
• text your answer- http://www.polleverywhere.com/
• youtube videos
• http://edudemic.com/2012/08/50-education-technology-tools-every-teacher-should-know-about/
• Career exploration- O*Net, Bridges, Paws in Jobland, Career Cruiser, Career Webquest
• Powerpoint or Prezi presentations
• Wordle.net - great for lesson summaries, brainstorming, character building, compliments, and so much more! See my lesson with Wordles here
• Classroom timers

School-wide

• Survey teachers, parents, and students using Survey Monkey
• Pinterest- sharing ideas with teachers through community boards (see my post about Pinterest here!)
• Facebook- keep parents in the loop
• Generate QR codes for quick access to information with smart phones
• Edmodo- Social Networking designed for schools 

Other

• Posts related to technology on The Inspired Counselor
• Convert PDF's to Word- http://www.pdftoword.com/
• Keep up-to-date with the latest research-based interventions with sites like Intervention Central
• create newsletters, flyers, and other documents
• Doodle.com- online scheduling tool that can be used quickly and easily to find a date and time to meet with multiple people
• Professional Development- such as the ASCA webinars
• http://voicethread.com/ 
• http://www.kerpoof.com/ 
• Connect with and learn from other school counselors- https://schoolcounselor.org/scene

Why Are You So Grumpy? Parent presentation on helping children express anger

Why It’s Important: After analyzing the school data on Positive Discipline/Office Referral forms, I realized that 87% of the write-ups were in some way related to children inappropriately expressing their anger. Because of this information, the school counselors have conducted classroom guidance lessons, led small groups, and counseled individual students on how to effectively manage their anger. When considering the child systemically, it is also important to have extra support from home in handling their anger. For this reason, we put together a parent workshop to help parents know what they can do to assist their child in handling anger.

Event Details: The parent breakfast/workshop was held on a Friday morning from 8:00am-9:00am in the school media center. This time included opportunities for parents to mix and mingle over breakfast, and ask questions at the end.

Advertising: To advertise, we sent home a small flyer about the breakfast workshop with each student. We also made a “connect-ED” phone call to reach all parents. Flyers were posted around the school and we gave teachers an electronic form of the flyer to email to parents. Paper copies were made for parents without internet access. Furthermore, the workshop was also advertised through word of mouth during parent contacts at school and over the phone.

Introduction: As parents arrive, they helped themselves to some donuts or bagels and coffee, and were able to speak with other parents and with the school counselors. The presentation began with a quick pre assessment to determine how much the parents already know about helping their child with anger. This served as a focusing activity to get parents into the right frame of mind. Answers to the pre assessment were discussed during the presentation.

Activity: We presented a PowerPoint that includes information about what to do when your child is angry and how to help your child calm down. Included in the presentation was a list of books and resources on where they can go for more information, as well as ideas for parents to include when creating a calm-down basket for their child. Specific ideas were discussed as well as some tips for parents to consider when disciplining their children. 

Conclusion: To wrap things up, we summarized the main concepts covered and asked for specific questions and concerns from the parents. Parents were invited to stick around to talk individually with the counselors about other concerns they may have for their child. Before parents leave, they filled out a post assessment, which included the questions from the pre assessment, and a section for feedback and suggestions for future workshops.  

Results: 15 parents attended this workshop, but informational materials reached an additional five parents who could not attend, and four teachers also requested the materials for their parents. As a result of this workshop, there was a significant increase in parent’s ability to name concrete strategies to help their child handle anger. Before the workshop, 8 of the 15 parents were not able to provide specific things to help their child calm down. After the workshop, 14 out of 15 were able to list definite at least two strategies that could work with their child. Overall satisfaction ratings for this presentation were highly positive, with suggestions for improvement being to have more interactive activities, more ideas for older students, and some specific examples for the points covered. 

—Information in our presentation came from: 

A Volcano in My Tummy: Helping Children to Handle Anger 

and  

— www.kidshealth.org

Play Therapy in Schools

I've recently had the privilege of speaking to a Counseling Children class at my university about the practical uses of play therapy in schools.Play therapy is often viewed as something that only clinical counselors can do. It's seen as being too time consuming and a poor use of a school counselor's time. These statements, however, could not be further from the truth!

Imagine that someone in an authority role came up to you and started asking you to do something in a language that you could not understand or comprehend. You most likely would not know what to say in response, and would be at a loss of what you were expected to do. Using talk therapy with children can sometimes come across this way too.

Play is a child's first language. Using play therapy allows the child to express themselves in an alternative, more comfortable way. Children learn about their world through play, and are able to manipulate their world on a smaller scale to work through their own issues. We have been taught to meet the children where they are. If they are most comfortable in speaking "play", why should we not meet them where they are?

As stated by Blanco and Ray in their article, Play Therapy in Elementary Schools: A Best Practice for Improving Academic Achievement,  “Play therapy allows child to overcome emotional limitations that were hindering expression of intelligence and released the child to demonstrate full potential (2009).” Play therapy helps kids succeed academically by helping to remove emotional barriers. 

So, how can you use play therapy as a school counselor, and still keep your sanity?? Below are some ideas!

Puppets

• Interview puppets about child
• Make up stories with puppets 
• “impulsive puppy”- Classroom puppet who teaches students how use whole body listening
• "Which puppet are you? Why?" 
• Create your own puppets
• Finger puppets - cut tips off cheap gloves, attach googly eyes, yarn hair, construction paper  (or felt) clothes
• paper bag puppets- decorate with markers, lightweight materials
• Puppet shows
• Shy students can hide behind puppet theater
• Have student puppeteers present to classes on important issues
• Introduce new topics to class using puppet shows
• Shoe box for finger puppets, trifold board or turned over table to bigger puppets

Play Dough

• Create a feeling using dough - what does sad look like to you?
• Make yourself from dough - what do you like about yourself? What, if anything, do you wish you could change?
• Take out aggression- punch, squeeze, hammer, etc
• Energy outlet while talking- gives hands something to do while mouth does the talking

Sand Tray

• Create your world - who is in your world? what are they doing?
• Make a story - tell me a story about a time when you ___.
• Who do they introduce? Do they leave out anyone seemingly important? Where are objects placed in relation to one another?
• Ask questions - why did you choose a __ for yourself? How does that make (sand tray character) feel?
• Suggest changes (what would happen if…)

Games

• Social skills - taking turns, patience, being a good sport, following the rules
• Get-to know you games 
• connect 4- for each token you drop, say one thing that you like
• Jinga - put talking prompts on each wooden block, answer prompt as the block is chosen
• Uno- assign color cards to prompts

Expressive Arts

• Drawing- 
• Draw your family doing something 
• Family accolades- who is the happiest? is anyone sad?
• Draw a time when you felt… 
• Color your life- feelings assigned to color
• ex. pizza- cheese= yellow= happiness. Pepperoni= red= Anger.
• Zentangle- relaxation, concentration (http://www.zentangle.com/)
• Music- give or create instruments 
• What does sad sound like? 
• How angry did that make you?

Other Play Techniques

• Play house - who is there? who is not? what happens in each room, etc
• Toss ‘n Talk ball individual or group prompts
• toss ball while talking (great with boys)
• Mask collage
• outside- what you show the world
• inside- what are you hiding from the world
• Shared Drawing- if drawing with a child, ask what and how you should draw.  
• Narrative (create story of life) 
• large sheet of paper, draw big events of life, walk through and talk about each event
• Basketball hoop in office- talk while shooting hoops! Or answer prompts to shoot the ball x number of times.

Pinterest Workshop

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am hopelessly addicted to Pinterest! So when the opportunity came along to share my passion for Pinterest with other teachers in the school, I was very excited!

Pinterest can be an excellent tool for teachers if they know how to use it! If you are not on pinterest- here are a few reasons why you should be!

1. It's a great tool for collaborating with colleagues. If colleagues follow one another's boards, they can share creative lesson planning ideas. In fact, multiple teachers can pin to the same board!

2. Plan creative/unique lessons. There are lesson ideas for about anything you can think of! There are also instructional videos that can be utilized during instruction. Just search for your topic.

3. Maximize space in your classroom.  Find original ideas on how to organize your classroom.

4. De-stress after a long day! Lose yourself in page after page of inspirational ideas!

About the workshop:

All of the teachers and staff at the school were invited to attend. To introduce the concept of Pinterest, each person wrote down several ideas that they have used in their classroom based on different categories, and used a push pin to "pin" their idea to the correct board. This process helped them understand what a pin is and what a board is, and start to see the benefit of having hundreds of thousands of people sharing some of their best ideas- all in one place!

Here is a handout with some of the basics of Pinterest.

If you share my passion for Pinterest, please follow the Inspired Counselor here!! Yeah, it's kind of an addiction :)