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Why Digital Text might be useful in the Math Classroom
Digital text is flexible in that it is transferable and transformable. The ability to customize text, helps meet the needs of different learners. Digitally enhanced text may help students who have difficulty with comprehension or organizing information by embedding supports such as graphics, key questions or links to external websites to scaffold information. Digital text can be read aloud by a computer providing assistance to English Language Learners by seeing and hearing words together.

e-Text
Electronic text is text that is stored as strings of characters. It is the text that you can see on your computer screen that can be saved as “.txt,” “.doc,” “.cwk,” “.rft” and “.html”. This type of text is transferable and transformable and can be easily enhanced by varying the visual display, adding sound and embedding learning supports such as clip art, graphics and video, definitions, key questions, or hyperlink to external websites or graphic organizers.

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Examples of Digitally Enhanced Text:

Word or other wordprocessing software can be digitally enhanced.
An enhanced Word document notice the use of graphics, highlighting, and variations of font and color.

Reinforcing Math Concepts Using Word - After you have introduced and reviewed math concepts in class, you can have students interact with a Word document to demonstrate their understanding. This downloadable example reinforces the concepts of mean, median, mode, range, maximum, and minimum.

Equation Editor is a free Microsoft product that allows users to write equations into Microsoft Word or Excel.
Instructions for using Equation Editor - http://www.microsoft.com/education/InsertEquation.mspx

Digital Textbooks
Prentice Hall interactive math textbook sample - http://www.phschool.com/successnet/math.html
McDougal Littell middle school math online book. - http://www.classzone.com/math_middle.cfm

RESOURCES

Using Technology to Support Diverse Learners- this site created by WestEd should be your first stop in learning more about how technology can be used to differentiate instruction.
Overview - http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/print/docs/tdl/home.htm
Digital Text - http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/view/tdl_topic/4
Digital Enhancement - http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/view/tdl_topic/6
Tips for using Microsoft Word - http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/view/tdl_tip/19
Equation Editor - http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/view/tdl_subtip/8

AUDIO
The use of audio might be as simple as books on tape, audio files on CD-roms or more involved as Talking Text.

Why this talking text be useful in the math classroom?
Talking text is a benefit to any student who has problems decoding or with reading comprehension. It allows students to access materials above their reading level. Talking text reinforces reading and listening. The computer does not tire when it repeats itself multiple times.

Talking Text also known as Text-to-Speech

Mac and PC
Macintosh (10.3.1 & 10.4.1) computers have built-in utilities that allow the computer to read highlighted text.
To use this utility:
Go to Speech Preferences and choose > Finder menu, System Preferences, Speech, Spoken User Interfaces
Set key to read highlighted text (Command plus __)
Under Default Voice, choose voice and rate.

Windows computers need to add a program in order to read text. There a variety of these utilities, some low cost or free and others more costly.

Read Please is a free Windows-based program which reads any text on a computer screen.
http://www.readplease.com/
Awesome Talkster is a free Windows–based program that combines a browser, search engine, and text-to-speech. It will read entire web pages or only selected words and phases.
http://www.awesomelibrary.org/Awesome_Talking_Library.html

Resources

Learn about other these and other Text-to-Speech software at WestEd.
http://www.wested.org/cs/tdl/view/tdl_tip/39

Instruction Sheet for Read Please