SO there ya go — the math literacy course uses online resources, including a little “learning styles” inventory. THen there are scores and stuff you do with those scores.
Complication: well, the site with the learning inventory updated it so teh scores aren’t done the same way any more.
Solution: give the students the instructions for the calculations to adapt the new scores to the old so they can still do the assignment the same way.
Huzzah 🙂 A practical solution and the kind of thing that you Really Do In THe REal World.
First two days pretty much busy busy busy b/c it’s the very beginning. Student in Math LIteracy duly noted that what usually worked was to “mimic the procedure” of the previuos problems or examples- his exact words. He is perfectly capable of the thinking — but it’s a serious cognitive shift.
I’m also trying to imagine … if I could create an environment to create the “Mary Ellen Carter Academy” of online math resources for the students who learn with their hands 🙂 I’m imagining a team of teachers analyzing the assorted combinations of things we do that work, with the manipulatives and the serious work connecting those manipulatives to the symbols they represent, and the practice, and the more practice… and which parts of that lend themselves to the whole online experience and the addictive things.
Resource Room Dot Net Blog 
howardat58
August 26, 2015
” ….the serious work connecting those manipulatives to the symbols they represent”
Have you considered that the symbols and their operations are representing the manipulatives and their behaviour? To me this is a more mathematical way of seeing things, and matches a desirable approach to the dreaded word problems, and real problems as well.
xiousgeonz
August 26, 2015
I’m thinking of the thing that the student is looking at and thinking about. If the student is looking at symbols, then it’s the symbols that are representing the abstractions they’re learning about. If I’m using manipulatives to help them understand what abstract symbols mean, then the manipulatives represent the abstractions. The thing being represented is the thing that isn’t there 😉