Last year, Reading Coach launched as part of Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams. Reading Coach provides students with personalized and independent practice that Reading Progress identifies a student has mispronounced. Reading Coach has proven to be popular not only with educators, but especially with students. We’ve heard stories from teachers of students “demanding more passages” from the teacher, and that they’ve set personal goals of improvement. To enable students to practice with content that aligns with their interests and focus, without the need for a teacher to make an assignment in Teams, we are rolling out Reading Coach as part of the Immersive Reader in many of our M365 apps. This will be available in school, consumer and work accounts, and in 116 languages and locales.
Now anyone using Immersive Reader, with any content they choose, can go to the Reading Preferences pane, enable Reading Coach to practice reading out loud and receive focused practice exercises. When the Reading Coach switch is enabled, the Play button in the Immersive Reader changes to a Microphone button. Students can select the Edit button near the Reading Coach toggle to customize parts of the coach inluding the voice, feedback style, and more. When the microphone button is selected, a dialog pops up that encourages the student to prepare to read out loud.
Once the student selects Let’s read, a 3…2…1 countdown appears, and practice begins. The student reads out loud for as long as they like while Immersive Reader “listens” to their performance. When finished, the reader selects Stop, and a reading report immediately provides data on their reading speed, accuracy, time spent reading, and any words to practice.
If the Practice Words button is clicked, the Reading Coach pops up to allow personalized practice. The Reading Coach interface is the exact same as the one in Reading Progress in Teams.
The initial set of apps that Reading Coach in Immersive Reader is available include Word for web, OneNote for web, Desktop, Mac and iPad, Teams Assignments, Flip and Minecraft Education. We expect to bring Reading Coach to more apps in the near future.
Updates to Education Insights Premium for Reading Progress
We’re excited to share that Education Insights Premium (including all Reading Progress data) is now included in all versions of Microsoft 365 Education including our no-cost Office 365 A1 license. Education Insights Premium enables education leaders to monitor student academic progress and wellbeing across their organization to help improve learning outcomes with actionable insights. Built with student safety, privacy, and security in mind, it helps schools support students while maintaining compliance with industry standards. Below is an example of a Reading Progress report across an entire school system.
Reading comprehension questions in Reading Progress
Our reading fluency app Reading Progress, launched in Microsoft Teams in fall of 2021. Reading Progress supports educators in increasing the frequency of reading fluency evaluations, helping them to differentiate more powerfully to support students on their fluency journey. The #1 request from educators and schools has been a desire to add reading comprehension questions for the student to complete after they read. We heard educator’s request and are excited to announce that we will be adding reading comprehension question support to reading progress later this year! Using Microsoft Forms technology, educators will be able to assess not only students’ fluency, but also their understanding, right in Reading Progress. Educators will be able to provide students with access to the questions prior to reading if they wish, a scaffolding strategy that can help students learn to read with purpose. The auto-grading capabilities of Microsoft Quiz will also be included to streamline grading of multiple-choice questions. We expect to have comprehension questions in private testing later in late spring of 2023.
Reading with expression (prosody) in Reading Progress
Reading fluency is composed of three pillars – speed, accuracy, and expression. The initial version of Reading Progress uses auto-detect to help track reading speed and accuracy, but historically an educator needs to listen to each student independently to gauge their expression.
With our forthcoming Expression update, Reading Progress will automatically identify students’ performance on aspects of prosody including monotone reading, long pauses, not pausing for a period or comma, voice inflection for question marks or exclamation points, and even the stress of multi-syllable words. Student expression results will be available in the teacher review experience, alongside accuracy and correct words per minute. Later, this information will be added to the student’s view of their returned work and incorporated in Insights so it can be easily monitored over time. Reading expression updates will begin rolling out to Reading Progress in late spring.
With the introduction of Reading Coach in Immersive Reader and the continued evolution of Reading Progress, we hope to maintain students’ excitement for and growth in literacy while supporting educators as they work to help every student reach their fluency goals.
Mike Tholfsen
Group Product Manager
Microsoft Education
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/reading-coach-in-immersive-reader-plus-new-features-coming-to/ba-p/3734079 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/reading-coach-in-immersive-reader-plus-new-features-coming-to/ba-p/3734079 2023-02-09 17:03:19Z