Hey, fixers. I'm Dr Jeanette Benigas, the owner of fix SLP, a grassroots advocacy firm here to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology by driving real change from insurance regulations to removing barriers that prevent full autonomy like the CCC, this podcast is your space to learn, engage and take action in the field of speech language pathology. We don't wait for change. We make it so let's fix SLP!
Hey everybody, it's Jeanette. We just decided this is a quick bonus episode. We've never done anything like this before, but my guest today is so important that we need to have it quick and accessible and something that we can refer back to as needed. No one can see this but her. I'm getting goosebumps now. I'm so excited to introduce to you my friend Darla Torkelson, who is the owner of speech therapy pd.com and she and I connected many months ago, nearly six months or more, and I've known for a while that this was in the works, and for months now, I sent her messages every now and again. When's this happening? Is it ready yet? And now it's ready. So we're here to talk about the new free accessible to everybody. CEU Tracker, hi Darla!
Hi Jeanette, thank you so much for having me. I'm so keen to see what you're doing. What you're doing is so amazing, and so I'm just so happy that that I can contribute something to our field.
Well, this this is great because as this movement has come along, and as we've talked about all of the issues that sometimes speech pathologists bump into, one of the things is continuing education, professional development hours, and so that's what we're focusing on for two weeks, and we're going to play this at some point in that two weeks, just to talk about what those look like. But one of the issues is, is that people are looking for ways to spend less money. And you guys just came up with this great resource to replace a paid CEU tracker. People want things to be automatic. They don't want to have to track things for themselves. They don't want to have to keep track of 50 certificates for however many years. And so you guys have really found a way to fill a need in this field that everybody can access without sending money somewhere. So why don't you tell us about it?
Sure. Uh, well, we've actually had a CE tracker for the last four or five years, and just recently we have made it free for everybody. So the CE tracker is basically what it says. It keeps track your CEUs courses that are taken from speech therapy PD are automatically put in the CE tracker. So if you take a course that's outside of speech therapy PD, you could upload the certificate and then fill in the information when it's time to review or submit to your CE for a time period, there's a place you can put the time period in from the date till this date, and then it will give you all the CEUs that you've done. And so again, it's all in one place, and it takes just five or 10 minutes to fill in the information.
Yeah. As a disclosure, I do have a Speech Therapy PD account, but this is not sponsored or endorsed. I had Darlaon today because of this resource that people have wanted. We have specifically been asked many times, what else can I use? And until this point, my response has been, Something's coming. Just hold on. Something's coming. I didn't go through it in through my account. I went in as a pretend person to sort of look at the process so I could talk about it competently, and the clinician will have to set up an account. Yes, but I want to make sure, out of your mouth, it's a free account?
It's a free account, it's an absolute free account. It also gives you access to a community that we we've started.
I love that. I if you told me that I forgot. So tell me about the community.
It's the SLP hub, and it looks kind of like Facebook, but it's private, and so the purpose of it is, if you take a course, you can go. In, or if you don't take a course, you can go in, and there's different subjects that you can discuss. And then we have monitors that will answer questions. They do blogs on it as well. But it gives a community that you can actually discuss with other therapists, very specific things or very general things.
And is there... is there a moderator? Are there rules?
There are moderators. And, like, I know that Char Boshart is one of our moderators for articulation, we've got quitea few moderators. Michelle Dawson, she's a moderator for pediatric feeding, and they just watch the comments, and we'll comment or answer questions as needed.
Nice, yeah, well, I know for sure this is going to air after the episode with Meredith Harold, because she's kicking off the league. And we do talk about this a little bit. So if you haven't listened to that episode. I want to repeat some things here that we talked about on that episode. We talked about the process of Asha automatically tracking CEUs and the reporting process. And one of the reasons they can make this free is because the fee has been eliminated for people to report to speech therapy. Pd.com, is always hard for me to get out of my mouth speechtherapypd.com, there's no fee for reporting where, if I'm a CEU provider, I'm going to pay a fee and have them track it. There's no inside system there. So this is probably the closest thing that anybody is ever going to be able to create, unless we start involving fees, right? So, yeah, we'll have to, if you take a course outside of their platform, you will still have to upload the certificate. Now I have severe ADHD. I was just talking to Darla about it before we started. I forget everything. My memory is awful. But I think what I'm going to do because I will start using this in January, so I'll switch to this. When I get that certificate, it will go straight into the tracker, and then I don't have to keep track of it, and I don't have to worry about it anymore. And I think we all have the what three minutes it will take to log in, upload and save we spend more time on social media than that, so I think as long as we do it, when we receive it, it shouldn't be a problem. And again, unless we start paying fees, and unless her company, which they're never going to do this, starts contracting with their competitors and other companies to, you know, have this inside system where everybody's tracking everything. Now we've created another monster. So I think this is as clean and as easy as it's ever going to be without paying something and setting up that whole system again.
One thing I forgot to mention is that once you put the dates in, you can download a PDF, and you can include copies, small copies, of the certificates or not. Some of the states want the certificates as well.
Yeah, that's better. Yours is better. That's better, and people aren't paying for that.
Well, we always try to do a little bit better.
Yeah,lately, on this podcast, we have been having people who have identified a need or identified a problem in the field and have gone out and just done it, changing the field for the better, just one person at a time, and it's really inspiring. We've had some great guests lately.
Oh, that's exciting, and it's fun to see other people doing what they can.
So, I also didn't prepare you for this, but if you'd like to take a moment before we go, we wanted to keep this short on purpose, so we have a few more minutes her, do you want to plug speechtherapypd.com for the people who don't know what it is?
Sure. And actually, we have just rebranded, and I don't know if you've seen it, but we have, Petey, the owl as our mascot, and we have rebranded it as Speech Therapy. PD, we've droppe d the dot com.
I saw that!
It's a new thing.
And also I'm a little salty. Now that you say the name, fine, I get it, but I was a little salty that you didn't go with the name I said, which somebody else actually said. And I was like, Yes, this is the good one. Was as a 90s kid, Hootie, like Hootie and the blowfish. I mean, come on!
We also have Hooters involved, okay?
Whatever.
You know.
93% women, it's fine. But when I saw P I was like, Petey? Hootie was way better!
But it's P, E, T, E, but when you say it, it's like
yeah, and it's probably better, but, yeah. I am
You'd asked about Speech Therapy PD and what makes itspecial, I am pretty excited about Speech Therapy PD, when we started it back 15 years ago, it was out of a need to have courses online that were more applicable to the therapist working in a clinic setting. I know when I would go to courses, I would get so frustrated because I'd hear about the evidence space, I'd hear about all of the research, and I was really incredibly supportive of people that do the research, then they'd spend about five minutes on how to apply the information. And I left feeling empty and really not knowing what to do. When I first started this, I started asking presenters, I care very much that everything you say is evidence based. You've done research. I appreciate it. Could you please keep that to the first 25% of the presentation, use the rest of the presentation to take me through how I'm going to apply what you've learned. By the end of the presentation, I'm able to apply it to my client or my student, and then that null it saves me time, rather than just taking one element of system and implementing it. Because I think a big thing with evidence based is that if you just take one element from a system and apply it in your therapy, that's not evidence based. You need to take the whole system. You need to take every step, and once you take every step and understand it every step, then you should have better results. So that was one reason I started it. We've grown to a point where we are having quite a few different mediums of courses. We have podcasts that you can get ces for. We have conferences. We have weekly live courses, and with all of the conferences, courses and everything, you have a moderator that's involved. Therefore, if there are questions from the audience, or if the moderator has questions themselves, they can dialog back and forth with a presenter, which makes it a lot more interesting. The other thing is that we are extremely customer driven. We are here for you, the speech pathologist. We listen to you if there's a group and they're wanting to have a specific presenter or a specific topic, we will do everything we can to get that course online for you. We definitely take your feedback and make our decisions based on your feedback. I'm going to tell you one of the most proud moments when COVID hit, one of our presenters, Anna vegan, gave me a call and said, Darla, we need to educate people on how to do teletherapy. She had been doing teletherapy for quite a while, and knew the ins and outs of it. When I brought it to the staff, they were like, okay, yeah, we agree with Anna, but we need to do a full day conference, which was a bit overwhelming, because what we needed to do within a week, so it was relevant to what was going on. I think she called me on a Monday. By Tuesday, we had the lineup already. By Wednesday, we started advertising, and we had connected with California Speech and Hearing Association, and they had brought in several other companies to sponsor the conference, and we were able to then advertise, I believe the conference was on Monday, on Sunday night, there were 42,000 people that had registered. And quite frankly, I was freaking out a little bit because on Zoom, the maximum you could have is 10,000 so we had some incredible engineers that jerry rigged up something that looked like a teleconference. We had a few little glitches, but at the end of the day, all the participants were able to complete eight hours of content, and they were able to implement it the next day, which I count as a huge success. We were really excited to be able to do that. One other thing I'd like to mention is that we do value the students that are going through to become speech language pathologists, and we have free accounts for each student. The student accounts are all individualized. You will get a certificate that you completed a course.
Yeah, andI can't wait to contribute that we talked about that earlier too, that I think my life has just exploded, and I was supposed to do something this fall, and there's no way it's happening now. So we'll have to redo that timeline as soon as stuff slows down a little bit. But I have some content that you guys don't have yet that I can contribute, so I'm excited to do that too.
Yeah, we're excited to have you.
So where do they go? Do they still go to speech
therapypd.com.
Okay, so they're still going to that site. Just don't say the dot com.
That is correct.
I'll also link it up in the show notes. Show notes right to where you can sign up for an account for the CE tracker. And I'm sure we'll throw this up in stories that whenever this runs as well. So we'll make sure to link it there so people can find it easily. But, thanks for taking your time to come talk about this real quick, dying to unveil it and tell people. And I'm so happy that the day is finally here where we can see it and use it. And now when people ask, we can say, this is where you go. So it would be helpful to us too.
I'm excited about it, and I also want to thank you for the inspiration to have it for free, because you were my inspiration. So thank you very much.
You're welcome. I wasn't going to claim that, but I'm glad you said it. You said it online, so you're welcome. Yeah, we saw the problem. I let you know, and you guys just ran with it. So that was great. All right, Darla, we'll wrap this up here for everybody listening, no review or anything. This was just a quick bonus, so I'll just tell everybody. We'll see you next week, and thanks for fixing it.
