DS7 has dysgraphia and his math teacher is trying out math sites to replace worksheets for his homework, to accommodate both E's. I'm delighted by this and thought I could help out by canvassing the wisdom of this board. I've read threads on various math programs, but I don't know how/if any of them would work as worksheet replacements. He's doing grade 3 & 4 work and could go higher. Suggestions?

ixl.com isn't bad, but it is difficult to do calculations for some of the problems on that site. For instance say the problem is 836-797. There are boxes in the correct columns to type in the numbers in the correct place value, but no place to show borrowing. So DS has to do all that in his head and it's easy to make errors (esp. in DS's words, if he has to "ship things over from a far-away column"). Hopefully someone has a better suggestion. Someone suggested to me getting a laptop with a scanner, scanning the worksheet and then have software where you can click where the answers go. Then the worksheet could be printed or emailed to the teacher. But I'm not a techie and have no idea what software or how this would work. Let us know if you figure out anything that works since I have the same problem with my 6 year old. The teacher is willing to give him third grade math but the print on the page is tiny and he can't write that small. Even if he is able to write large, his writing is pretty poor.

ALEKS would work fine for that I would think. Of course any such thing is going to a bit different from a paper worksheet, but ALEKS at that level worked fine for my DS when he was very unwilling to write. Questions pretty samey, but likely less so than the worksheets they're replacing!

We are doing a trial of ALEKS and many/most of the problems have to be copied onto scratch paper in order to solve them. DS is in the middle of third grade on ALEKS. I don't know what the higher levels are like. So in a way, it is even worse than a worksheet where the problems are already there and the answers just need to be written.

That's definitely a ymmv thing then - I was always trying to get DS to write things down, but he never would, and just solved everything in his head (with more exceptions creeping in in later courses, but I mean much later). Might be worth doing a trial to see how your DS finds it, OP.

We have the same problem with this site. It's annoying. DS uses graph paper and has to re-write the entire problem (e.g. long addition or long multiplication) solve it then type it in... a little too much writing and lookign from computer screeen to paper. He actually slowed on using it for this reason. I wonder if their isn't some sort of software, site, etc. that would allow for this, ykwim? I wonder if there is an ipad app (they have awesome apps for dysgraphia on there you'd think there'd be something). Anyone know of anything?

Oh there is! Polarbear has it... and my husband knows of it too .. it's acrobat something but it is expensive (well I guess that is subjective but I beleive it is over $100) that is why we haven't gotten yet... We have less worksheet homework this year for some reason so we are still holding off on it but I fully intend to get it eventually. If polarbear doesn't chime in I will check for the name of it with my hubby....

Yeah, Adobe Acrobat can do this, and yes, the full version of Adobe Acrobat is expensive.

But there's another way... OCR, otherwise known as Optical Character Recognition. A lot of scanners ship with software that does this, allowing you to scan a document and translate it into, say, Microsoft Word. So that would be a feature to look for when shopping for the scanner.

If it's not part of the scanner, there are 3rd-party apps that do this. I can't vouch for any of them personally. I can say with authority, though, that if what you're receiving are poor-quality pages, your experiences with any OCR technology will be incredibly frustrating.

For a low-tech solution, you could always:

1) Scan the documents in as an image, and open in Paint.
2) Show your son how to create text boxes to write in his answers.

Paperport from Nuance is what we use. It has been improving.

You scan in the page and then you can click where you want to type and you type on the line or anywhere on the page. My DS does it and loves it. Then saves it as PDF and prints or hands it in on flash drive. You can also just email it to the teacher.

We are finding that a lot of PDFs now allow you to type on them too. Though printing can be flaky--sometimes the stuff you type doesn't show up. So, if you scan and save to PDF, you may --with out the software you have to pay for--be able to type on your PDF.

If you get really fancy, you can carry around a hand held scanner that has paperport on it (neat receipts). We are not that fancy at this house. Instead, we looked for a printer/scanner that already has paperport installed (Brother MFC 7840 W is ours). There are cheaper ones, but we needed waterproof so laser was our best choice. If you get the software with the printer, you can put the software on all your computers. If you buy Paperport separately (maybe this is changed?) you are limited, and it doesn't update. And it costs about half the price of our printer.

If you read reviews, they say Paperport is awful, but for our purposes--which are not mentioned in any of the reviewers purposes--it has worked flawlessly and been fantastic.

If you have a Mac, I believe there's something called "form typer". It seems to be exactly what you want, though we have a PC so never investigated it.

Efofex is the math program kids use once they reach pre-algebra and are starting to type equations. There are free trials and you can get it free for 10 years with a letter verifying disability. It is an add in for word so goes right into the word documents. However, my stick in the mud prefers to not use it in word and to save as a PDF directly from Efofex. It should be available for Macs within the next couple of years. They are still developing it.

For elementary school math, there's nothing yet that lines up the numbers for you. Many have tried. We looked at some stuff and are always looking to see if there is an app yet. Some have claimed to have it solved, but we haven't seen one good yet. We relied on the kindness of the math teacher to stand over DS and ask him what he was writing. Lots of people have made Excel work for them. We were lucky to never have to go down that path.

Thanks, everyone. We're looking for a new printer/scanner, so I'm glad I asked this question before purchasing.

I've had another look at the math teacher's last email and it seems to be the word problems, specifically, for which an alternative process is sought. DS7 is still painfully slow at typing. Typing on worksheets will be our way forward once we get his speed up, but right now it would try the patience of a saint to supervise that kind of homework.

Oddly, I think I'm asking for word problem sites that don't involve words! At least not words typed by the user. Does ALEKS fit that strange description?

I am still a little bit confused about what your teacher wants - I think she's looking for word problems for him to do as differentiation, but that don't require him to write much?

Aleks has word problems - the way you answer is putting the cursor inside a box, clicking on it, and then typing the number etc. I think it would work ok for a beginning typist.

A few notes: when our ds was learning to type, we were encouraged to let him figure out his own typing system rather than require that he use traditional touch typing. Apparently it's a lot easier for children to type faster if you just let them try and come up with their own key-finger rules - I've heard that some kids can type fast using just their thumb and first finger, similar to texting. If you want to let your child use their own inventive typing, you can still use touch-type teaching software, just ignore the directions for which fingers to use.

Aleks - it's easy to go in and create "quizzes" with any number of problems on whichever subjects you want to choose for the student - so that's one way a teacher could custom-design a set of problems for a student to work on (or you could do it as the parent if he had a home account).

There's a software package called "MathPad Plus" which was recommended for my ds when he was in elementary school - it allows kids to type in addition/subtraction/multiplication etc equations with plus/minus top-down/borrowing like they would calculate them on paper. My ds didn't ever actually use this, and I don't know if it's still available, but it's a nice tool.

My ds has always scanned in worksheets. On the laptop, he scanned to pdf format with a portable scanner (Doxy) - it's easy to use and easily fits into a backpack. He used Adobe Pro to type on the worksheets simply because that's software we already had at home. Paperport was recommended as an alternative. On his iPad, he uses JotNot to scan to pdf and has an app that I can't remember the name of that allows him to type in a pdf file.

He's also gone back and forth over time between using the computer and using handwriting to complete his math homework.

polarbear

I read mon's reply after I'd already typed mine, so I'll add a few notes:


There are a few Efofex modules already in production for Macs, and it runs really well. Prior to the Mac modules being released, my ds ran Efofex on his Mac laptop by using Parallels to run Windows (can't remember which version of Windows), and Efofex ran on the Windows OS.


This is exactly what MathPad Plus does. As I mentioned, we never used it, so I can't tell you anything about it from personal experience, but it was recommended to us for this purpose. I think I've seen similar attempts on a few iPad apps, but nothing that our ds was interested in using.

polarbear

Great resources Polarbear! Thank You! I am defintiely going to look into MathPad Plus sounds just like what my DS would love. It's a software for the computer, right?

Question about EfoFex - when should I look into getting that for my DS? What grade? Just want to be prepared and I am not sure when the "pre-algebra" starts ...

master of none, that's interesting about Mathpad! The tutorial for Mathpad Plus that I saw made it look like it would work well for this, but we're a Mac family so we didn't bother with trying it because, as you noted, it wasn't supported for the latest version of the Mac and they had no plans to upgrade it (this was several years ago). I had a feeling it might be headed in the direction of no longer being supported.

Irena, our ds started using Efofex when he was in Pre-Algebra (which is the course taken the year before Algebra in our school district). Our ds never used the equation module much, but he used the graph package a lot.

polarbear

Ok, I just took a worksheet, scanned it in as a jpeg and then opened Paint and was able to type in the answers by clicking and making boxes. It was a bit fussy and I wouldn't want to do it all the time but for worksheets with a lot of writing involved it is an option.

I can't imagine how it would work in a classroom though. DS's teacher doesn't even remind DS to use his slantboard.

My DS's math class is entirely online but they often have PDFs or docs that he has to do the math in. He uses daum equation editor, which is a Chrome app. Then he saves each equation as a jpg and pastes it into the doc, or the PDF. It isn't lightening fast, but it does work well!