All answers›Online Tutoring Platforms

How do I run online tutoring lessons for students with dyscalculia? (Or: what makes a virtual classroom good for math learners who need concrete manipulatives)

Yes — independent tutors work with students who have dyscalculia every day, and the workflow moves online with fewer compromises than most people expect. What the pedagogy asks for is unchanged from an in-person session: concrete before pictorial before abstract, unhurried magnitude and number-sense work before arithmetic fluency, repetition-with-variety instead of drill, and reinforcement that rewards the effort of a hard cognitive lift rather than only the correct answer. What changes online is how you deliver the concrete piece — the physical rods, tiles, fraction pieces, and number lines you'd otherwise reach for on a table — through a screen the student is sharing with you. A virtual classroom fit for a dyscalculia tutor needs virtual manipulatives the student can drag and rearrange on a shared canvas (rods, number lines, fraction bars and circles) rather than only annotate on top of. It needs a way to hold notation without adding a second cognitive load (a symbols palette so a fraction reads as a fraction and a minus sign is unambiguous). It needs a small-frequent-effort-based reward mechanic to carry the reinforcement load between your verbal moments. It needs a way to bring the student's real practice material into the same tab so they don't leave the room to find it. And it needs enough restraint in its own interface that the platform itself isn't the fifth cognitive load in a lesson that is already asking a lot.

What "online tutoring for dyscalculia" is (and what it isn't)

The reader we're writing for is a tutor already working with — or about to start working with — a student who has dyscalculia, formally identified or clearly showing the pattern (persistent difficulty with magnitude, number sense, arithmetic fluency, or fact retrieval that doesn't respond to more of the same instruction). If you're a specialist maths tutor trained in a specific approach (Ronit Bird, Numicon, Mathematics Recovery, Making Math Real, Semple, TouchMath, Sharma / Making Sense of Number and Space), a general maths tutor whose caseload includes math-differing learners, a primary or middle-school tutor picking up an intervention student, or an ESL / general tutor whose student turned out to also have a maths learning difference, this page is for you. We're not teaching you the method — you already know it, or you're being pointed to one by the family. We're covering the parts of delivery that change when the lesson moves from a table with physical manipulatives to a browser tab.

What this page is not:

  • Diagnostic content. We don't help a parent decide whether their child has dyscalculia; we don't list criteria; we don't recommend screeners or assessments. If a parent is asking whether their child has dyscalculia, the useful referral is to a qualified assessor — an educational psychologist, a specialist assessor, or the family's paediatrician — not to us and not to the tutor's own judgement.
  • A math-anxiety treatment. Math anxiety is real, it often co-occurs with dyscalculia, and a well-run lesson helps — but the tutor's job is not to treat the anxiety, only to run a session that doesn't inflame it. Persistent, disabling anxiety belongs with a clinician, not a tutor.
  • Special-education-law advice. IEPs, 504 plans, EHCPs, SEND provisions, and the equivalents in other countries are formal legal instruments and vary by jurisdiction. If the family has one, ask to read it and let it inform your lesson; don't advise on whether they should get one.
  • A general-purpose "how to teach math online" page. That's the math-cluster pillar. If you're looking for the general workflow — the manipulatives problem, the notation problem, the practice problem — start at how do I teach math online? and come back here for the dyscalculia-specific overlay. If you want depth on fractions or number sense specifically, the spokes at how do I teach fractions online? and how do I teach number sense online with virtual manipulatives? cover the underlying manipulatives workflow.

What actually changes when the lesson moves online

Tutors we've spoken to who've moved a dyscalculia-heavy caseload online report the same three constraints in the first month:

  • The concrete step has to survive the screen. Every specialist dyscalculia program is built on concrete-pictorial-abstract (CPA / CRA) sequencing — the student manipulates the quantity before they see the picture of it and long before they write the symbol for it. In-person that's Cuisenaire rods on a table, Numicon shapes, fraction tiles, ten-frames, Dienes blocks. Online, that either becomes something the student can drag and rearrange on a shared canvas — first-class manipulatives, not screenshots of manipulatives — or it collapses into a video the student watches, which is not the same thing and does not do the same work. This is the load-bearing constraint; if the platform can't do it, the rest of the workflow doesn't matter.
  • Retrieval speed and working memory pressure compound on a screen. A dyscalculic student's arithmetic fact retrieval is often slower than a peer's; a lesson that pushes fluency without warming up the underlying magnitude and number sense first tends to fail badly. Online, the same student now also has to hold in mind where the mouse is, which tab is which, and what the shared canvas is doing — and the working-memory tax of the interface itself starts to eat the working memory the maths needed. The platform has to disappear into the background as much as possible, and the lesson design has to protect working memory more aggressively than it would in person.
  • Parents can't see the manipulatives moment. The most reassuring thing for a dyscalculia family is watching their child cross a threshold — really understanding, for the first time, that 1/2 and 2/4 name the same amount, or that 8 is closer to 10 than to 0 on the number line. In-person, a parent walking past the table catches those moments. Online, they don't — unless the classroom shows them the shared canvas alongside the video, or unless a short clip of that specific two-minute breakthrough gets sent home. If the platform can record the shared canvas (not just the tutor's face), the retention story gets much easier.

What the shared canvas has to do (concrete-first work in the browser)

Preserving the concrete step is the single hardest thing to get right online, and it's where the platform choice does most of its work for a dyscalculia tutor. What the whiteboard has to support:

  • Manipulatives the student can drag, not just look at. On Koala Go's whiteboard, a Math Tools panel inside the Whiteboard Library holds a set of first-class manipulatives that are draggable on the shared canvas — both you and the student can grab, move, and rearrange them, and both sides see the same state live. The set relevant for dyscalculia work:
    • Cuisenaire-style number rods (Pro tier): ten rods, values one unit through ten units, each a different colour. This is the workhorse for magnitude, additive inverse, complements-to-ten, place-value introduction, and early multiplication as repeated addition — the exact concept clusters most dyscalculia programs spend their first many weeks on. On Platinum, additional features on the same rods help specifically here: a red-and-blue alternating fill so a rod visually breaks into its unit count (which supports subitising work in students who don't yet reliably see 6 as 5-and-1), a vertical placement mode (useful when a rod is doing double duty as a bar chart or a place-value column), and a one-click "add all" staircase of all ten rods (the fastest way to reset the canvas at the start of a new number-sense activity).
    • Number lines (Pro tier): preset lines for 0-10, 0-20, 0-30, 0-100 (by 5s or by 10s), -10 to 0, -10 to 10, and a blank one you can label yourself. Number-line work is central to dyscalculia intervention specifically because magnitude comparison — knowing that 43 is bigger than 34 without counting — is one of the hardest core skills to build, and the mental number line is what does that work in a typically-developing brain. On Platinum, a "make your own" builder lets you specify start, end, and step (say, 0 to 1 in tenths for decimal work, or -20 to 20 for integer work) so you're not limited to the presets when a student needs something specific.
    • Fraction bars and fraction circles (Platinum tier): individual bar segments and pie-slices for denominators from a half through a twelfth (plus a sixteenth) — you place one 1/n piece at a time and build a whole together. This is the manipulative that closes the largest gap for many dyscalculia students, because "1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4" as a symbolic manipulation is genuinely close to impossible for a learner who does not yet see 1/2 and 1/4 as measurable quantities. Placing a half bar next to a quarter bar next to a quarter bar and watching the three-quarters shape appear does the pedagogical work that no amount of symbol drilling can. The pie-slice equivalents let you do the same in a circle rather than a bar, which some students grasp more easily. Denominators go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, then jump to 16 — those are the denominators that actually show up in elementary and middle-school fraction work.
    • 2D and 3D shapes (core set on Pro, full library on Platinum): a shape library you place and resize on the canvas. Basic square, rectangle, circle, equilateral triangle, and the cube are Pro — enough for area/perimeter, basic symmetry, and simple 3D introduction. The fuller library (rhombus, parallelogram, trapezium, kite, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, non-equilateral triangles, oval / semicircle / sector, and most 3D solids — cylinder, sphere, cone, prism, pyramid, cuboid) is Platinum. On Platinum, a shape-labels toggle also auto-labels dimensions on a placed rectangle, which spares a working-memory-taxed student the "wait, was it 4 or 6?" moment mid-lesson.
    • Number Roller (Platinum tier): a randomised digit roller in a range you set (1-6, 1-10, 1-12, 1-20, 1-50, 1-100, 1-1000; 1-4 dice at a time; whole or decimal). Useful for the "generate a fresh problem" moment during fluency work without you having to invent one on the spot — a small thing, but the surface area of "the tutor invents a new problem" is one of those places attention drops for a dyscalculic student, and outsourcing the generation buys back a few seconds of engagement each cycle.
  • Sticky-note and Stamp tokens for anything the maths tools don't cover. Ten-frame tokens, dot cards, tally marks, tens/ones place-value counters, chip-model integer counters (positive and negative), coin images for money work — anything you'd reach for as a physical counter on a table can be dropped on the canvas as a Sticky or Stamp and dragged by either side. These are the same primitives the dyslexia workflow (Elkonin-box phoneme tokens) and the ADHD workflow rely on; they cover any manipulative that isn't in the built-in Math Tools set yet.
  • Slide / PDF / PowerPoint upload for your existing materials. Specialist maths-intervention tutors typically have a large personal library — a program's workbook, worked-example sheets, dot-pattern cards, place-value charts, custom activity sheets accumulated over years. On Koala Pro, upload them as PDF or PowerPoint and they become the lesson surface — both of you annotate on top, using the same pen and shape tools as on a blank canvas. The library survives the move online instead of asking you to rebuild it.
  • A student view that shows what you show. Simple, but not universal — the student sees the same canvas orientation you see, no mirrored or laterally-flipped view. A student who reverses digits or misreads left-to-right sequences doesn't need any additional orientation friction.

For depth on how the manipulatives themselves work — the rods, the lines, the fraction pieces — the two math-cluster spokes cover it: how do I teach number sense online with virtual manipulatives? for rods and number lines, and how do I teach fractions online? for the fraction workflow. We don't repeat those here; we describe how the same tools land in a dyscalculia lesson.

Solving the notation problem without adding a second cognitive load

Real maths needs symbols keyboards don't have — fractions that read as fractions, minus signs that don't look like hyphens, the square-root sign, the degree symbol, an unambiguous "not equal." For most students, notation is a minor friction. For a student with dyscalculia, whose working memory is already carrying the concept, the notation is often what tips the session out of the "I can hold this" zone into the "I've lost it" zone. Every extra "how do I type that?" is a second cognitive load layered on top of the first one.

Koala Go's whiteboard ships a Math Symbols palette on the paid tiers, sorted into the categories a maths tutor actually reaches for. On Koala Pro you get the operations, comparisons, and basic geometry set that covers elementary and middle-school work: the four operations and equals (+ − × ÷ =), the basic comparisons (< >), the fraction / ratio / percent group (/ : %), a square-root sign (√), a degree symbol (°), and round brackets. On Koala Platinum you additionally get the algebra, geometry, and powers set for later middle-school and secondary work: not-equal and approximately-equal (≠ ≈), less-than-or-equal and greater-than-or-equal (≤ ≥), superscript powers (² ³ ⁿ), pi and infinity (π ∞), plus-or-minus (±), the geometry markers (∠ △ ⊥ ∥), and square and curly brackets. Clicking a symbol drops it into whichever text box or sticky note you'd otherwise type into, so you can build up "1/2 + 1/4 = ?" or "8 > 4" or "3 × 4 = 12" without either you or the student stopping to look up an alt-code.

Honest limit: the palette is a symbols set, not a full equation editor. It won't stack a horizontal fraction bar the way LaTeX would; it doesn't nest radicals; it doesn't render live graphs. For dyscalculia work through primary and middle school this rarely matters — the manipulatives carry the concept and the symbols palette handles the notation — but if a specific dyscalculic student is working on advanced algebra or graph-heavy statistics and you need a full equation editor, the honest answer is that a dedicated STEM whiteboard tool goes deeper on notation. Where Koala Go's whiteboard sits in the broader landscape is covered in the best online whiteboards for tutoring comparison; we don't repeat it here.

Structuring the online session for a dyscalculic learner

The template most specialist maths tutors converge on for an online session follows the same overall CPA shape as the in-person version — start concrete, move to pictorial, move to abstract, only work on symbolic manipulation once the underlying quantity is stable — but the segments run slightly shorter online and the transitions matter more. A working template for a 45-minute lesson (adjust downwards to 30 minutes for younger students; some 6-8-year-olds cap out at 25):

  1. Warm-up: magnitude / subitising / number sense (5 min). Whatever the day's concept, start on the number line or the rods with a magnitude task — "put the 7 rod next to the 4 rod, which is bigger, by how much?" — not on symbolic arithmetic. This is a temperature check on the student's mental number line, which for a dyscalculic learner is the substrate everything else sits on. If the substrate is not warm, the harder work later in the lesson will fail.
  2. Concrete introduction of today's concept (10 min). New content is introduced on the manipulative first, always. New idea: fractions of a whole → place unit-fraction bars, count them into a whole, then two wholes. New idea: subtraction with regrouping → rods on the tens/ones canvas, physically break a ten into ten ones, then subtract. Do not introduce today's concept in symbolic form; that comes later in the lesson.
  3. Movement or attention reset (1-2 min). Stand, stretch, walk to a wall and back. Some tutors use the Playground here — a short "walk to the sign, come back" beat with the student's avatar — because it's low-stakes movement inside the same tab and doesn't risk the student wandering off the lesson. Do not skip the reset; a dyscalculic learner's cognitive tank is genuinely finite and the second half of the lesson depends on refilling it.
  4. Pictorial bridge (8 min). Now move the same concept from the manipulative to the picture — a diagram of the same fraction pieces on the canvas without the interactive pieces, a written number line the student marks up, a bar model of the same subtraction problem. The pictorial step is the one that usually gets skipped in generic teaching and the one dyscalculic students need most; do not race past it. If the pictorial step wobbles, go back to concrete for two minutes rather than pushing forward.
  5. Symbolic bridge, brief (6 min). Only now, after the concept is concrete and pictorial, do you introduce the symbols for it. Write "1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4" next to the fraction-bar pieces on the canvas so the two representations sit side-by-side. Do a few — three or four — in this form. This is the moment the notation palette matters most; you're not asking the student to type it, you're doing the writing for them, but any moment either of you spends fighting the interface is a moment stolen from the concept.
  6. Guided practice, low volume (8 min). Not "twenty problems" — three to five, worked slowly, with you present at each one. Volume drill in this segment burns exactly the working memory you built the concept on. If the student is ready for more practice, that's the between-lesson home task, not the last block of the session.
  7. Wrap and reward (5 min). Recap the day's target using the concrete pieces one more time — "we saw that a half and two quarters name the same amount, and we wrote it as 1/2 = 2/4." Award effort-based reinforcement (see below). Preview one small task for the parent to do this week. End on a warm, specific "you worked hard on the bit that was hard today" — that specificity is what the student takes into the interval before your next session.

Two things to watch for. First, the pictorial step is where many students who "seem to be doing fine on the manipulatives" quietly fall off; give it time and don't take a shrug for understanding. Second, avoid speed at all costs — timed drills, races, "beat the clock" mechanics are almost universally counter-productive for a dyscalculic learner, because the exact problem is that their retrieval is slower, and time pressure activates the anxiety that made maths hard in the first place. If a program you're delivering has a speed component, run it in a low-stakes way (self-timing, "let's see if today feels easier than last week") rather than a competitive one.

Effort-focused reinforcement (why a rewards mechanic matters here specifically)

Maths intervention is genuinely hard cognitive work for a dyscalculic student, and it's hard in a way the student can see themselves being bad at — unlike reading intervention, where progress is often invisible to the learner even as it happens, maths practice tends to produce specific wrong answers the student notices. If your reinforcement pattern rewards only "correct answers," you're rewarding the student's ease — which is the least available signal for a math-differing learner — and inadvertently reinforcing exactly the "I'm bad at maths" self-narrative you're trying to unwind. Every experienced maths-intervention teacher's manual describes some version of this: reinforce effort, reinforce approximation, reinforce persistence through a wrong answer to a right one, not just accuracy.

Translated online, the mechanic that supports this pattern is a small, frequent, teacher-controlled reward currency you can trigger without leaving the lesson flow. On Koala Go, that's Gems: you open the student panel from inside the room, pick the student, and give 1-100 gems in a single click (the amount input is capped between 1 and 100 on purpose — a rhythm of small frequent rewards beats a single big burst). Each gem drops with a sound and a visual, and the student's balance updates live on their side. Why this shape supports dyscalculia-aware reinforcement:

  • You control the exact timing. Not the platform, not a schedule, not the completion of a task. You. So you can reinforce the specific moment the effort happened — "you said you didn't know, and then you tried anyway, and you got there" — while the effort still exists in the student's working memory. Delayed rewards ("you'll get five stars at the end of the lesson") do almost none of the work for the actual learning moment.
  • Size matches effort, not outcome. A quick correct answer gets 1 gem; a hard attempt on a novel problem gets 5; a full session of "you kept coming back to the maths that was hard" gets a bigger one at the end. Variable-magnitude reinforcement holds attention longer than a fixed one-per-correct schedule and doesn't teach the student to game the system.
  • Wrong answers are rewardable too. "You said 6 + 7 was 12; that's really close, and it's a good try — the answer is 13" is a rewardable moment. A schedule that only awards points on "correct" tells the student that the interesting distinction is between right and wrong, when for a dyscalculic learner the useful distinction is between engaged and disengaged. Award the engagement.
  • It's optional. If a specific student — usually an older teenager — reads the gems as infantilising, drop them. For a 14-year-old dyscalculic student working on GCSE / eighth-grade material, your visible enthusiasm ("that's a really good attempt, let's keep going") often carries more reinforcement weight than any on-screen currency. The mechanic is a tool, not the whole strategy.

None of this replaces the tutor's live warmth — the direct, timed, specific "that was a good try" that no platform can deliver for you. It's a lightweight second channel that carries some of the reinforcement load between your verbal moments. The gamified-virtual-classroom explainer at what is a gamified virtual classroom? covers the general engagement-mechanic story if you'd like the broader context.

Using external practice tools via the cobrowser

Most specialist maths tutors have a set of web tools they already use — an interactive graphing tool like Desmos for magnitude and pattern work, a practice-problem site like Khan Academy or IXL for between-lesson homework, a virtual manipulatives library the school district provides, a program-specific web app for the approach you're trained in. Traditionally on a video call you'd screen-share and drive the mouse yourself; the student watches you click, which for a dyscalculic learner puts them right back in the "watching, not doing" posture that fails.

The cobrowser (explained in depth at what is a cobrowser?) changes the posture — you and the student are on the same live webpage inside the classroom tab, and either of you can move the cursor, click, and type. For dyscalculia work this unlocks:

  • Interactive graphing (Desmos, GeoGebra, similar). The student drags a slider and watches the graph respond, in real time, on the same page you see. Watching magnitude and rate change on a moving graph does pedagogical work that no static picture can — and the student is driving.
  • Practice-problem sites the student won't otherwise focus on. Khan Academy, IXL, Prodigy, ALEKS, a program-specific practice portal, or the family's school-provided practice site — open it inside the lesson, sit with the student while they work three or four problems, and step in the moment they stall. This is the difference between "I sent them practice for the week" (largely uncompleted) and "we did three of them together and I saw the point where he got stuck." Teach from sites the family has legitimate access to and within each site's terms.
  • Virtual-manipulative libraries that aren't in Koala's built-in set. Some tutors use Didax, Toy Theater, or the U.S. National Library of Virtual Manipulatives-descendant sites for a specific tool that isn't in our Math Tools panel yet (base-10 blocks in specific configurations, ten-frames, algebra tiles). Open the site through the cobrowser and both of you can drive; the tool is now inside the lesson rather than a "hold on, open this link" tangent.
  • Program-specific web apps. If your maths-intervention program ships a companion app or web tool for the digital pieces, open it through the cobrowser and the student does the activity in real time inside the classroom.

One honest caveat on Koala Free: cobrowser sessions on the free tier are time-limited (you get 10 minutes at a time, with a 20-minute cooldown between sessions), which is fine for a single web-activity segment in a 45-minute lesson but not for a lesson where the cobrowser is the main teaching surface. Full-length cobrowser sessions come with Koala Pro.

Recording the lesson for the parent (and for your own records)

Recording is optional but for maths-intervention work it often pays for itself in retention. A parent who watches a three-minute clip of their child working through the moment 1/2 + 1/4 clicks into place sees the intervention working in a way that a written recap can't convey — the parent sees the hesitation, the tutor's cue, the manipulative move, and the student's second attempt landing on the right amount. That's the difference between "I hope this is helping" and "I can see this is helping." Practically:

  • Get consent up front. Recording a minor requires parent permission and, in some regions, additional consent — see how do I record online tutoring lessons? for the consent, storage, and sharing workflow, including a written-policy template you can adapt.
  • Share short clips, not full recordings. A full 45-minute recording is more content than any parent will watch. Clip the two or three minutes that show the actual breakthrough — the fraction placement, the number-line comparison, the point where the student said "oh" — and share those. Some tutors send one clip a week alongside the written recap.
  • Store for the intervention arc, not forever. A maths intervention runs on the order of months to a couple of years; recordings that long deep-file quickly. Set a retention policy (delete after 90 days, or after the intervention completes) so you're not carrying an unbounded personal archive.

On Koala Go, lesson recording is included on Koala Pro (saved locally to your machine), and cloud recordings of scheduled classes come with Koala Platinum. Either way the recording captures the shared canvas alongside the video, so the parent sees the manipulative move, not just the tutor's face.

1-on-1 vs small group for maths intervention

Most specialist dyscalculia tutors keep serious intervention 1-on-1. The pacing is too individual — a student who needs three sessions to build the 1/2 = 2/4 equivalence should get three sessions, and a group of two students who might need two and four sessions respectively breaks the model. Small groups (2-3 well-matched students, or a pair of siblings at genuinely the same stage) sometimes work for the concept-introduction side of a lesson — you can introduce a manipulative to two students at once and it can even help — but the differentiated practice is much harder to run in a group and usually pulls back to 1-on-1 within a few sessions. If you're considering the group model for the economics, see how do I teach small group classes online? for the general small-group tradeoffs — and note the "students with specific learning differences that require intensive individual attention" caveat in that page. Families paying specialist rates for maths intervention generally expect 1-on-1 and are right to.

Working with the parent (co-teacher, not co-fighter)

Maths-intervention retention lives or dies on the parent seeing progress. A dyscalculic student's home-side maths practice is often the flashpoint of the week — a parent who doesn't see progress and who is fielding a resistant child around a homework page will not keep paying for lessons for long, no matter how well the sessions themselves are going. A few moves that reduce parent-side friction:

  • Send a specific — not generic — recap after each session. "We worked on unit fractions today. She got the 1/2 and 1/4 pieces solidly by the end. She struggled with reading the fraction notation, so this week I'd like her to name the shapes verbally — no writing — using the fraction bars we made a photo of. Five minutes, three or four times." That's a recap the parent can act on. "We had a great lesson!" is not. On Koala Go, auto-generated class notes (on Platinum) draft this for you after each lesson and you edit them in a minute or two before sending. See how do I share progress updates with parents? for the cadence.
  • Prescribe home practice that is less than the parent expects. Parents often assume "more practice = faster progress" and push a dyscalculic student into volume that inflames the anxiety without moving the maths. Explicitly ask for less: five minutes, three times a week, on one specific concrete task. This is a specialist recommendation the parent likely won't get anywhere else, and it's a good reason to trust you.
  • Offer to record for the parent's review, not just yours. A short clip of a genuine breakthrough (the student naming an equivalent fraction correctly for the first time; the student comparing 32 and 23 correctly on the number line) does more retention work than any number of recap emails. Consent and storage rules covered in how do I record online tutoring lessons?.
  • Handle "he doesn't want to come today" without escalating. Every intervention caseload has these calls. Options that work: shorten the session to 20 minutes and end on a win rather than skipping; move to a lower-friction activity (the number rods and a familiar game, not new content); occasionally, when the family judges it right, skip and reschedule without penalty. If your cancellation policy doesn't have room for this, dyscalculia families will churn out.
  • Where the family also has a formal plan (IEP / 504 / EHCP / SEND), read it and let it inform the lesson. Don't advise on whether they should have one, and don't try to substitute for a formal maths assessment — but if the family has an existing plan that names goals, meet the goals inside your sessions and reference them in the recaps. Alignment with the plan is one of the strongest retention moves you can make.

Practical setup on Koala Go for a dyscalculia tutor

If you're evaluating Koala Go (the platform we build) for a caseload with dyscalculic students, here's what you actually get, and where the current limits sit:

  • The Math Tools panel on the whiteboard. Cuisenaire-style number rods and preset number lines (Pro tier); fraction bars, fraction circles, and the Number Roller (Platinum tier); a 2D/3D shape library (core set on Pro, full library on Platinum); a Math Symbols palette (operations, comparisons, and geometry basics on Pro; algebra, powers, and full geometry on Platinum). These are first-class manipulatives, not screenshots — the student drags them, both sides see the same canvas live.
  • Sticky-note and Stamp tokens for anything the built-in tools don't cover. Drop tokens for ten-frames, dot cards, integer counters (positive and negative chips), place-value counters, coins for money work — anything you'd use as a physical counter. Both of you can move them.
  • PDF and PowerPoint upload (Pro tier). Bring your existing intervention library — program workbooks, dot-pattern cards, place-value charts — onto the shared canvas and annotate on top. Each session's canvas is saved to reopen next week; the intervention arc stays continuous.
  • Cobrowser to keep external practice inside the room (10 min on Free with a 20-min cooldown; unlimited on Pro). Desmos, GeoGebra, Khan Academy, IXL, a district's own virtual manipulatives site, your program's companion web app — the student has real control of the page, not a passive view of your screen.
  • Per-student Gems for effort-based reinforcement. Each student in the room has their own gem balance. You award 1-100 gems in a single click from the student panel, with a visible drop on the student's side. Design the pattern the way your program prescribes; turn it off entirely for older students who find it infantilising.
  • Playground for the 1-2 minute movement break. A 3D space in a separate tab of the same classroom — teacher and student avatars in a shared world. Not the teaching surface. On older student devices, drop the Playground Quality setting to Low (see the Quality settings guide) so the break doesn't stutter and eat working memory.
  • Recording — local on Pro, cloud on Platinum. Koala Pro includes lesson recording saved locally to your device; Koala Platinum adds cloud recordings of scheduled classes stored with your account. Either way the recording shows the shared canvas alongside video — the parent sees the manipulative move, not just the tutor's face. Get consent up front; share short clips rather than full sessions.
  • Auto-generated class notes (Platinum). Drafts a specific recap after each lesson which you edit and send in a minute or two. Consistent, specific recaps are one of the biggest retention levers for dyscalculia families — see how do I keep parents renewing month after month?.
  • Browser-only, no install for the family. The student clicks your lesson link and lands in the classroom. No download, no account setup for the child. Works on the family's existing laptop / iPad / Chromebook — matters because dyscalculia families are often already managing more than the average family and one less tool to install is one less friction point.

Honest limits — what Koala Go doesn't do (and what else you'll want in your stack)

Frank about the gaps, because maths intervention runs long and small mismatches compound:

  • iPad experience is rougher than desktop. Koala Go runs in an iPad browser and many students use it that way, but the drag-and-drop feel and pen precision are best on a laptop with a mouse or a stylus. If the student is working with the fraction pieces on a first-generation iPad without a stylus, expect it to be workable but not great; a graphics tablet on the tutor side and a laptop with a mouse on the student side is the more forgiving setup.
  • Stability on unstable connections. Real-time collaborative environments are more sensitive to a bad Wi-Fi moment than plain video calls are. A wired connection on the tutor side (Ethernet beats Wi-Fi for reliability) reduces hiccups; families on weaker home internet will still occasionally notice them.
  • No built-in dyscalculia curriculum. We do not ship a Ronit Bird / Numicon / Mathematics Recovery / Making Math Real curriculum, and we're not going to — the pedagogy belongs with the tutor and the program you're trained in. Koala Go is the delivery surface for whatever approach you already use.
  • No built-in progress-tracking or intervention-log tool. Koala Go is a lesson-delivery classroom, not an intervention-tracking system. If your program requires you to log detailed per-session accuracy or generate structured progress reports, you'll continue to use whatever tracking system you use today alongside Koala. We ship class notes, not clinical intervention records.
  • The Math Tools set is still expanding. The manipulatives currently in the panel — rods, number lines, fraction bars and circles, shapes, number roller, symbols — cover most primary and middle-school maths, but requested tools that specifically help dyscalculia workflow (Numicon-style shape pieces with hole patterns, base-10 blocks in customisable configurations, algebra tiles, dedicated ten-frames as a first-class object, custom labelled fraction sets) are not part of the Math Tools panel today. If any of these is a hard requirement for the program you deliver, write to koala@teachwithkoala.com before you commit — we'd like to know what you need.
  • Not a full equation editor for advanced maths. The symbols palette covers what a primary or middle-school dyscalculia lesson needs; for advanced algebra, calculus, or graph-heavy statistics with a dyscalculic student who's reached that level, pair Koala Go with a dedicated STEM whiteboard or graphing tool through the cobrowser rather than expecting the palette to do it alone.

A short decision rule for whether this workflow fits

  1. Are you working within a specific dyscalculia-informed approach (or one clearly compatible with concrete-pictorial-abstract sequencing)? If yes, Koala Go's manipulative set maps cleanly. If your program is speed-and-fluency drilling with no concrete step, this platform is not the constraint — the pedagogy is; and neither of those tends to help a dyscalculic student regardless of the tool.
  2. Can the family you'd serve be reached only online? Distance to a specialist maths-intervention tutor is often enormous — many families never find one at all. If moving online is the intervention, not an alternative to it, set up the tooling and ship. The families gain access they couldn't otherwise have.
  3. Is your target student able to sit through a session that ends before it should? A short session that ends on a win beats a long session that ends badly. If the student caps out at 25 minutes, run 25-minute sessions; don't stretch to 45 for the sake of the schedule.
  4. Are you willing to hold the parent-comms cadence maths intervention needs? Specific recap after every session, less-not-more home practice, occasional clipped recording of a breakthrough. If you're not, dyscalculia families will drift out — not because the tutoring stopped working, but because the parent stopped seeing that it was working.

If you'd like to try Koala Go specifically for a dyscalculia lesson, the whiteboard, Cuisenaire-style number rods, preset number lines, Sticky/Stamp tokens, Gems, Playground, and cobrowser are all on the Free tier (with the free-tier cobrowser cap); Fraction Bars, Fraction Circles, the Number Roller, and the full Math Symbols set live on Platinum. You can run a real 30- or 45-minute session with your candidate student on their real device before deciding. Open Koala Go at classroom.teachwithkoala.com. If you want to talk through your specific approach — the program you're trained in, the age band of your caseload, the devices the families are on — before you commit, write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the maths intervention you do and we'll give you our honest read on the fit, including the parts where you'll want something else alongside us.

Related answers

More answers on this topic