Well, good morning everybody. It's a beautiful day to bust some cognitive distortions and learn a bit about technology. Welcome welcome welcome to the technology episode. My name is Suzanne M. Swain, EDS LMSW. I am a master teacher and kid therapist. Today I am going to go down the rabbit hole of technology because it's something I absolutely love to do. I even ended up getting my specialist degree in educational technology because I love it so. I have been a computer geek my entire life. I remember getting our first computer when I was about 10 years old and it had a VGA monitor. Hey kiddos, that means it had like 256 colors. I saw a picture of King Tut in full color and I was like whoa. We used dial up internet that cost $3 an hour and got me into a whole mess of trouble as a child. But we'll get into that later or how about not. Anyway, but yeah, it was amazing and the click of the keyboard, it was like this whole sensory experience and my mom was a big computer person as well. So I think I really got that from her and I know she would be absolutely excited to see all of the cool things in technology these days. So one of my favorite things to do is to share my love of technology with others. So kiddos, today this one is more for your family like we just did the grandparents episode. This may be one that you want to take some notes or maybe re-listen to again and practice some things as we're talking about it. And kids, for you what I've got for you is how to do some cool activities on the internet. So rather than just playing Roblox all day and so on, let's do something different. So I've got some ideas for you. So we're going to do three different sections today. We're going to talk about AI stuff. We're going to talk about virtual reality and we're going to talk about media and mental health. Okay. Now obviously we want to focus on mental health with kids when we deal with technology and help them to be good patrons of the internet community and you know we want to have a good dialogue with kids about what they're doing on the internet and kids can be such a great help to teach us things that we didn't know. So a lot of these things I've learned on my own but many kids have actually been like hey, hey Suzanne can we try this? Can we do this? Do this. So I really want to share some cool stuff with you today and so kids we're going to try to make it to where you're not bored this summer. Yeah. I'm going to give you some activities to do. You got homework but it's fun. It's fun work. So let's first talk about AI. Okay. So virtual reality, AI, all of these things are coming into us like a tsunami right now. But I want to show you kind of how to have some fun. Let's just play, right? A little bit of play therapy for us. So first thing that I want to talk about is image creation. Okay. AI is so cool because you can make images. Now I use the Bing image creator. I just sign in with my Google account, my Gmail account and there whatever you can type you can create a picture of. So what I do with my kiddos is I make coloring pages for my little ones. I find out stuff that they're interested in like dinosaurs or even the very specific dinosaurs. Anything they want. So I can go on there and type in please create a coloring page. You don't even need to write the word please. It's just a bot. Create a coloring page of two brontosaurus's having lunch together and eating cookies. So and hit enter. And then all of a sudden you'll get four images of coloring pages that you can download and print. Now for a kiddo recently for I believe it was the holidays. Yeah. I made her her own coloring book. So you just do make a bunch of these and print them out and then bind them with a stapler or whatever you want to do. And you can make your own personalized coloring book. You can also make like mazes. You can ask it to create a word search, all kinds of neat stuff like that. But the image creator, the other thing that I love to do with my older kids is we make our own Pokemon cards. So we type in image creator that please create a Pokemon card. And then I put in their kind of like background information or like super powers they want to have and then whatever animal capoeira is mostly that they want to be. And then it'll make like a fake Pokemon card. And so you can print those out and then you can like trade them. The other cool thing you can do is you could end up making your own board game. So that's another thing. So with the image creator, you could go on there and just say, Hey, help me make a little board game based on the idea of, you know, whatever your idea happens to be. So that's really cool. So being image creator, go check it out and be creative about it. Think of the wildest thing that you want to create. If you want to practice it, just type in like the weirdest thing you can possibly make in a picture and see what it does. It's incredible. Also, let me just mention real quickly, everything that I talk about here, I'm not making any money from this podcast. In fact, I pay a lot of money for this podcast. So no one's sponsoring me. I don't get any kickback. So whatever I'm saying, it's just because I like it and I think it works. And I think they deserve a, you know, a shout. So just so you know. Okay. So the next thing is a thing called Trello. Okay. I believe it's Trello.com. This is the coolest organizer that I have. It makes these sort of movable little topic trees. So when I'm trying to organize a project or even a podcast or anything that I just need to noodle through and I need this workspace, it creates sort of a movable workspace. So I can say like a heading would be meetings this week. Okay. And then underneath that, I could put the different people I want to meet and things, but then you can click on the individual little box it creates for that, you know, bit of information and you can drag it all over the place and reorganize things. So Trello is more of an adult thing, but kids, it works really well for high school kids, especially that are doing group work or middle school kids that are doing group work. They can also work together. You can have people on a team kind of join into your Trello and then everybody can work on stuff together and then it also has a checklist so you can mark stuff off when it's done. So that's really cool. Let's see Google Drive. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I told my I actually was talking to my dad yesterday and I told him that if anything were to happen to me, please go find my Google Drive and you will see all of my brain put out there. I've been using Google Drive for years and I put everything in Google Drive. And what that is is a cloud based kind of like a big filing cabinet. And many of you probably use it already. But if you're not familiar, you can go in there and create documents. You can it has like a full office suite in there, but it saves everything on the cloud and every keystroke is saved. So for someone like me who has, I remember my master's thesis, my computer crashed and I lost like 40 pages of it. So I am that person. So luckily with the cloud, everything that I'm working on, I can undo whatever I did. There's a great undo button. And also I can create whatever it is that I want to do in the cloud. And then that way it saves all my keystrokes. So that's cool. Okay. AI also. Now we're going to talk chat GPT and Claude AI. Now, both of which are excellent Claude. A lot of people get the pro edition because it can do a lot more. I use that. But chat GPT, all of these things, think of it as your personal secretary. I write emails with it. I say, I need to write an email to a family about this. And it makes me sound way better than I normally would. If I have to organize like hours that I'm doing, I can actually upload my schedule to it and say, how many hours did I do of this this week? And it can do those calculations and write it all out for me where I can copy it and paste it into a document in Google Drive. Cool. Right. But you can actually have it make short stories for your kids, make bedtime stories on this. Say, can you write me a five minute bedtime story about dinosaurs? It can do that. It's the secretary you didn't know you needed. I use it for so many different things. The only thing that I don't do is, you know, when I'm dealing with people's personal privacy type of stuff, I don't do that. But I do a lot of calculations. I write a lot of emails. I check all kinds of good things. And there's that software Grammarly, which you can add to your phone and you can add to your computer. And then that'll check your grammar for you. So that's really good. That's always a good thing. As a former grammar teacher, though, it kind of hurts, but we need it. So go with it. Okay. Also, in chat GPT and Claude AI, you can do calendar creation. So you can say, I have all these different things. Can you help me to create a more streamlined and efficient calendar? When you type it in there, you can make it more efficient and it will do that for you. It will noodle through all kinds of things and tell you, Hey, this is the best way to do it. So go play on that. You know, if you want to create any kind of writing at all, just tell it to do it. Say, you know, write me a five minute story about birds. Try it. See what it does. A lot of people are using AI now to write novels and things like that. And if you want to do that this summer, just for something fun to do, do it. Just like on being image creator, you could create your own graphic novel if you wanted, but just understand is created by AI, but it may be a fun way for you and your family to practice using AI and see if it's something that you really enjoy. So I definitely do use it for emails though. And it just streamlines my life a little bit. Okay. All right. So let's talk about virtual reality. This is my real favorite here. Okay. So I use a meta quest virtual reality machine. Okay. Now they have the meta quest three that's just come out and I would love to play with it, but you know, I can't afford to have run out. So that's not happening, but I do have a wonderfully used first edition. I think virtual reality meta quest, which I would assume on eBay could be found for probably less than a hundred bucks. This thing has revolutionized my therapy practice with my kids. I am a play therapist. I believe in like 80s video games, things like that, things that encourage higher order thinking and critical thinking, but let's face it. If you have virtual reality, you go into an entirely different world. That is so powerful. You put on one of those virtual reality headsets and yeah, they're heavy. They're awkward. They're a little weird, but you know, you adjust the strap and roll on because when you turn that thing on, you're in your own universe. So one of the things that I have found to be the very best option for kids when I am doing therapy and adults, this is so important. I downloaded an app during my kind of student teaching for being a therapist. And I used an app called trip TRIPP. And I've actually written back and forth with the folks that created it, because I think it's so cool. It's a virtual reality bit of software where you can go on guided meditations. Yeah. And say you want to be in a forest, you can be in a forest. You want to be in a mushroom forest. You can do that. You want to be under the water. You want to be in space. You want to be pretty much anywhere. They have like real places you can go like the beach or like a river or you can go to something that's computer created. I sometimes like just floating around in space. That's kind of nice as well. But then you can choose and it's all customizable and you can choose the type of guided meditation that you want to do. So with my kids, like say they had a lot of anger, maybe I would pick one on mindfulness and trying to cope with feelings of anger. So I could really cater to my client by working with them in this way and find out things that they like to do and put them in a positive environment. But also if I was working on something like fear and they're afraid of space, for example, I had a couple of kids who were because it was just so expansive. So we slowly did exposure therapy where I would put them in this virtual reality space world and maybe left it without any, you know, mindfulness discussion talking to the meditation itself. And I just let them float around in space in the quiet for a bit. That's a good thing too. So trip is wonderful. It's like taking a vacation. I cannot tell you this is like the only vacation I can afford is using my MediQuest and it is worth every bit of it of our time. So also Nat Geo has a great app where you can actually go to the, you know, if you want to go take a safari, go on safari. You want to go hang out with penguins? Yes, please. You can do that. You can travel the world and here in this rural little area where I live, where kids barely, I mean, if they're lucky, they go to Nashville occasionally. They don't get to go anywhere. They can't afford to go on big vacations and Disney and all this kind of stuff. But they can have 20 minutes of going anywhere in the world they want to go and be right up close and personal. I had a girl that had a lot of trauma and she loved horses. So I hooked it up and surprised her and put her in a field of running horses. You know what that did for her? Just that little bit of time to say, like, wow, you heard me and this is what I want. And wow, you like, I want to go to that city where there are foxes everywhere and you can just play with foxes. So it'd be like that. You know, you have such a great sensory experience. So let's talk games. OK, then we I usually will have them do a meditation and then we will play a game. Now, if they're actively angry or just really hyperactive, the games go first, then the meditation afterward. So some of my favorite games that the kids love, this is their polling that this is what they said. So number one, they love a game called Thrill of the Fight, which I agree is great, especially for angry kids and ADHD. This is a boxing game. It's very realistic, not real bloody, really. It's kind of, you know, cheesy, looking that way. But but you can box with someone. And so I think for female empowerment, I had a little girl who was, you know, kind of shy and everything. And I put her on that and boy, hmm, girl, she'd be fierce. So my anger kids, a lot of my boys, they love this. I have one boy that used to come in and he would just be like, Suzanne, I want to talk, but give me a minute. He'd grab the VR headset, pop it on, play one round of the boxing tournament. And then he'd be like, OK, now I can talk. Like, wow, talk about self-awareness, right? So Thrill of the Fight boxing game is great. I love Tetris VR because it's like giant Tetris, like a giant wall of Tetris. It's cool. Then we also have, let's see, virtual story books. There are lots of those. Those are really neat. I went on, did one that was like Alice in Wonderland and you fall down the rabbit hole with Alice. Oh my gosh. So cool. Fruit Ninja. Absolutely love some Fruit Ninja. I love Fruit Ninja. I put it on Zen mode and you get these two swords and they just throw fruit in front of you and you just slice them. But it has like that gushy sound and you can hear like the blade go through it. It's really, really cool. So Fruit Ninja. I love watching Netflix on there because they put you in this cozy, like Colorado house, like in the snow. And then you're watching TV. It's very cool. Dogs VR. Can't get a pet. Well, you can get dogs VR and it's just you play with dogs. Look at that. There's one that I love where you are at a pottery wheel. I went to art school and I took a lot of pottery. So I love doing that. It's very Zen where you can create your own pottery, which is nice. So you just sit at a pottery wheel. So much less messy. So virtual reality has a lot of really cool options and you don't have to get a brand new thing or anything. You can get something used, but it opens up this whole world and whatever virtual reality system that you use, there are many different ones now. You will be able to find escape. When can you get escape these days? Seriously, if you can just give yourself an hour a week of playing on this thing, I think it can do a lot of good. I also have a golf game on there where I can play just about any golf. Not that I'm good at it. I'm more of a mini golf person, but you can play golf. You know, Beat Saber is really, really fun because you're slicing boxes to like techno music. So if you're a little more active and you want to step up from Fruit Ninja, you can go to Beat Saber. There's also a really cool tennis game where it's like racquetball kind of, actually, and you're in a big room full of mirrors. And when you hit the ball, it's like, it just, oh, it's fast. It's, it's crazy. And then my last favorite and the kids said, definitely make sure I mentioned this one is Epic Roller Coasters. I got this game because I'm terrified of roller coasters. I don't like falling. I don't like heights and I just, I'm like, no. I can appreciate, you know, all of the wonderful engineering that went into it. But I'm not doing that. So that I got from myself originally. But then the kids were like, hey, can I do it? And you can download like SpongeBob roller coasters. You have like beach ones and like, you know, zombies. And you can sit next to whoever you want. Like you can pick like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or a myriad of scary things, which I never offer to the kids. But most of the kids like to ride with the Easter Bunny and you can go on loop to loops and all kinds of neat stuff. And sometimes they just need, you know, a ride on a roller coaster to kind of reset them back into themselves. So it can be great for the mental health of your family. It really can. And then you can also hook up a you can get a Google Chromecast that will hook up with your MetaQuest and then you can watch on TV, whatever it is that they're watching. So that's pretty cool. So virtual reality is awesome. We, you know, please consider adding this to your life in therapists. I don't know if any other people are doing this out here, but I've been doing it for a year and a half now. And I'm telling you, it's changed everything when I work with kiddos and young people, really anyone. I mean, really. OK. Last thing I want to talk about. And this one to me is the biggest thing is mental health and media. Obviously, I'm not going to get into today talking about safety on the Internet. I'm just trying to give you some ideas of things to do today. But of course, we always want to monitor, as I said before, what our kids are doing on the Internet. But all right, I want to talk music. Music is what feelings sound like. So everybody loves music. So music gets the Mental Health Award for the day. And, you know, the Pandora app. Make your own radio station. Come on, put in like 10 or 15 artists you really like. And lo and behold, you have your own radio station. I have one that I play for my kids and I've added certain people like, you know, maybe Tracy Chapman or Sean Colvin or Sting or Melo type of music. And yeah. And I play that for the kids and they love it. Sometimes I'll play like 40s music and do kind of like rat pack kind of thing. And the kids love that too. So, you know, create your own little radio stations for various moods that you have. You can make as many as you want. And they have a pro account as well. But I think I just have a free one and it works great. Spotify, you can make playlists as well and share them with your friends and things like that. So Spotify is an app and it's also a website. And you can go on there and just search for whatever song or artist that you want. I wanted this club mix of sweet Caroline that's come out and I'm like, I cannot get enough of it. So I made a Spotify playlist for middle school, Mary Poppins for this podcast. So if you want to go to my website, it's Ms. Mary Poppins.com. I have a page on there for the playlist. It's all 80s and goofy and just a bunch of silly stuff, 80s, 90s kind of thing. But you can also go on Spotify and look up Middle School, Mary Poppins, and you'll see it there and you can add that playlist and check out some cool 80s and 90s music. I hope you will enjoy it. You make a playlist. You know, have the kids sit with you and make a family playlist of songs from your childhood. There's all kinds of ways to tie in an activity to this. What would the playlist be for the story you just created? OK, let's see. Appy Pie. Now learn to make apps. There are little apps out there where you can make your own app, like a game or something like that and even sell it. So this summer, if you're bored, kids, go make your own app, you know, coding for kids.org. You can do it. Also, the last thing that I want to mention is that I don't know if you know this, but AI can make movies. Now, there are multiple movie places out there on the Internet. Just look up AI Movie Creator and there you will be able to make your own AI movie. Yeah, you can upload pictures and it'll pull like stock imagery. And you can just do a little write up of what you want to make your movie about. And boom, you're a filmmaker. How is it possible that you can be bored this summer? And so if you have that kid at home that's like, I don't know anything to do. I'm bored. There's nothing to do. Play this podcast and be like, hey, pick one. Let's do it. And I realize the virtual reality thing requires the machine. But I think I gave you some ideas of other things that you can do with AI just on the web. So give it a shot and families, Google Drive your life. Use some Trello. Let Chat GPT help to organize your family schedule a little bit better. You can live better and more efficient, thus happier and you can spend more time with your family. And isn't that what it's all about? All right, y'all, this was a bit of a longer one that I wanted it to be, but I'm so excited to share this technology with you. Keep on keeping on. Explore, explore, explore and always, always stay clever little foxes. Thank you so much for your time today and go play on the Internet. See you.
