Digital Math Workspaces

Now why didn't I think of this?! Montgomery County Public Schools have a page of strategies for helping struggling students featuring low-tech and high-tech solutions. A couple of people have recently asked me what software solutions exist for students who have difficulty writing out math calculations in their workbooks. My immediate thought was MathPad Plus, which sounds pretty nifty, but I haven't seen it actually being used by students (if you have, please comment!). The trouble with MathPad is that it was abandoned by the publisher; well, they still sell it, but they haven't updated it in years, and it's still in version 1.x.

So, back to Montgomery County. They have a simple solution for getting some calculations down using some well-thought-out MS Word tables. Here are direct links to download the Word 97-2003 version and the Word 2007 version. Tables are my favourite feature of MS Word, so it pains me that I never thought of this. Kudos to those folks in Montgomery for their elegant and simple (and no-cost) idea to help kids with dysgraphia and executive dysfunction get through their arithmetic.