5 places to find online training for speech therapists

I have been to some great training courses in person over the years that I have been a speech therapist.  There is something really great about attending a course in person – you get totally immersed in the topic with no distractions, and you get to discuss the material with fellow attendees and with the person running the course.  Watch out another day for some of the best and most useful courses I have attended in person.

However, as an independent therapist especially, going on courses is expensive!  Not only do I have to pay for the course and travel to get there, but I also lose out on all the money I would otherwise have earned that day.  Still very worth attending but I can only afford to do a certain number of physical courses in a year!  However, the internet is opening up so many more possibilities, and now you don’t always have to leave your house to do a course.  This is great – you can do more training, keep up to date with evidence-based practise, but also fit it in around your life and take the course whenever suits you.  I also like the fact that you can watch bits again if you don’t understand or forget what was said.

In today’s post, I am going to share a few places I have found where you can take online training courses for speech therapists.  The first two are even free!

1.  Pearson have now run 2 SLTLearn events.  Each time they ran a week of online training courses – mostly one hour long and run by a range of different therapists from around the country.  Topics covered include working memory, AAC, SLT assessments.  You can even hear us talking about why speech therapists should use social media.  The recordings of all of these sessions are free to download online.  You have to put in your name and email address to register but then you can listen in whenever you like.
2. A group of American therapists are running a similar event this summer.  The SLP Summit looks really good – lots of talks on various different topics.  Take a look here.  This event will take place from 31st July – 4th August, and personally, I have registered and am looking forward to it!  Again, it is free to attend, and you can listen again afterwards if you can’t tune in live, which is good, since most of them will be in the evening or at night in British time!
3. Now we come on to courses you will need to pay for.  speechpathology.com is great value for money however.  You pay $99 for the year (on today’s exchange rate, that works out as £75:59) and you can watch as many of their 350+ courses as you like, any time you like.  Well worth the money.  Every course I have watched has been very good.  The biggest problem is choosing which one to watch as there are so many!
4. The last two are not courses I have taken myself yet, but they look good, so I thought I would highlight that they are there.  I am sure I will get to them one day.  Hanen will be a familiar name to most British speech therapists.  But did you know that they offer a range of webinar training courses on their website?  The topics covered are a range of topics to do with language delay, literacy and ASD.  Check them out here.
5. Finally, I came across this one the other day in a Facebook group I am on.  Thank you to whoever posted it, I can’t find it again to credit them!  There is a long list of training courses for professionals on the apraxia-kids website, covering a range of topics relating to apraxia (called developmental verbal dyspraxia or DVD in the UK).  Click here to find them.

I’m sure there are lots more online training courses for SLTs that I don’t know about.  Do comment under this post and let us know about any others you have found useful.

Also, schools and nurseries find online training options really useful too.  It means they can send people on courses without having to buy in supply teachers or bank staff.  If you work with a school or nursery who would like some online training on how to work on speech sounds, don’t forget to let them know about our course Supporting children with speech sound difficulties where we give lots of background information and then take them through the therapy process one step at a time.  There is also a Facebook group they can join and ask any questions they have as they go and we will answer them.