I Get by With a Little Help from the Apple Store
As technology continues to grow and evolve, we as music therapists must keep up with the many ways we can adapt and utilize new apps, programs, and products in our sessions. Being a young music therapy intern, I grew up utilizing technology, and I enjoy learning about new and innovative products or apps to complement what I’m doing in sessions. However, it can be a difficult challenge for parents of kiddos using technology or therapists who didn’t grow up using technology to learn the ins and outs of this constantly changing tech environment. There are countless apps that can be motivating, challenging, and add something different in sessions, but sometimes that learning curve can scare parents or therapists away from utilizing them.
Our team recently attended an Apple Store workshop, and the learnings and experiences were wonderful. The Apple Store puts on daily workshops to help members of the community learn about and explore their apps and products. The workshop we attended was based heavily on garageband, a free app that comes already installed on the iPad. The techs took us through the app step by step, explaining the features and different ways we could utilize it for our clients.
Some other workshops Apple does are Parental Visibility, Apple ID and iCloud, Photo Projects, and many others. The parental visibility workshop covers family sharing, guided access, home-sharing, and anything else related to parental control. This is a great resource for parents of kiddos using AACs for communication, as well as therapists who want to have a better understanding of these features on theirs and their clients’ devices.
Apple Store workshops are a free and accessible way to learn more about ways to implement technology into a music therapy practice, or to better understand the technology you are already using every day. To find out Apple Store Workshops happening in your area or to look into setting up one of your own, check out https://www.apple.com/today/.
Darby
