[Trainer-Talk] Virtual pencil

[Deborah Armstrong]

Sorry, somehow I kept calling it electric pencil; thanks for the correction.

The student doesn't read Braille. She's mostly done math in high school using a pebble magnifier; now she tries to do everything on her iPAD with speech.

I have in the past made tactile symbols using the PIAF, cut them in to squares and glued them to magnets. It was a lot of work and the math tutors kept loosing them and the students didn't use them as much as I would have.

I ended up taking the 1s and 0s home one weekend and having my husband use them to teach me to convert from binary to decimal and to hex. I really love manipulatives, but maybe as an older adult learner I'm just more patient.

Anyway, I'm going to have to get all the math tutors to scrounge around in their desks to see if they can find my magnetic math symbols. I'm thinking they won't excite this student much.

I know what would excite the student is a way to type on her iPAD free-form to work on equations and formulas.  The way virtual pencil worked. Some on another list suggested Script Calc but that's an app that lets you handwrite your equations in to a calculator. You can't use it to say, construct models.

--Debee