The Infused Classroom Blog
How to Help Struggling Readers – with Reading Progress by Microsoft
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Helping Struggling Readers Just Got Easier!
The question on most educators (and administrators) minds is how can we help struggling readers? From elementary to high school classrooms, we are letting struggling readers slip through the cracks...well that is until now! A new tool from Microsoft Teams called Reading Progress is changing reader success in classrooms. What it can do will blow your mind! Warning: You are about to say "Where has then been all my life?" And if you are a Google school you are going to want to ask for Microsoft as a platform too! (Heck most Texas schools have both and this new tool proves that all schools need both Google and Microsoft).
Every teacher on the planet is given a classroom of students with varying reading levels, but due to time and limited resources. we might not actually get a chance to hear all of our students read aloud. This step is critical for gathering the information we need to better understand their strengths and struggles, and what they might need for individual growth. Sometimes, we don't even hear them read until well into the first months of school. Because of this, we teach reading without the data we need to purposefully help students progress. Sadly, we teach reading to what we assume is the average and hope everyone is growing.
In order for us to help students become better readers we need to hear them read - they need a chance to practice - and we need data to better understand their areas of need. Armed with the right information, we can help students catapult into readers who can not only read fluently but may develop a love of reading - which should be our true goal.
Let’s level the playing field and meet readers where they are.
Enter Reading Progress part of Microsoft Teams.
Thanks to a new feature in Microsoft Teams, teachers can assign reading fluency checks and use the data to help students grow more intentionally based on their individual needs. The right data can help us stop teaching to the average or what we assume is the appropriate grade level - a strategy that might be really hindering some of our struggling readers and leaving them even further behind.
Struggling readers often avoid reading, but Reading Progress gives them a place to record their reading privately, build confidence, hear their mistakes and begin the process of self-correction they need to grow as readers. Reading progress is ideal for students who need more practice or might be struggling with English as a second language.
What is Reading Progress?
A revolutionary digital program by Microsoft that allows teachers to assign reading fluency checks. Students record themselves reading the passage and turn it in. Reading Progress then uses AI software to calculate words per minute, reading accuracy including problem areas like omissions, mispronunciations, insertions and repetitions.
How To Set-up a Reading Progress Assignment? Teacher Set up
- A teacher creates a Reading Progress assignment by using the attach button inside of assignments. Then they can either upload a Word Doc, PDF or choose from sample content (coming soon).
- The assignment can be done in either audio-only version or the more powerful video and audio version.
- The teacher can also select from categories like: genre, reading level, attempts allowed and even pronunciation sensitivity.
- Assign to students, the entire class, or a specific reading group.
Student Set Up
- Student open assignment from Teams
- They can use the immersive reader features to set up the reading passage in a way that is most comfortable for them to read. This might include increased font size and even background coloring that make them feel more comfortable reading the passage.
- Students now read and record the passage and when done they can listen to themselves read and then turn in.
The Microsoft AI will automagically count words per minute and accuracy with checks around mispronunciations, omission of words, rate, word insertions, repetitions and even self correction. Students also have access to view their own mistakes and see for themselves where they might improve.
What happens next? Review Student Work - Teachers can then view the students recording along with the actual passage and that has been marked-up with the mistakes Microsoft software auto-detected, which are color coded for easy reference. This auto-detection can be turned off if needed and teachers can manually mark the reading passage for themselves.
- Teachers can then watch and examine the student recordings with easy to view information around reading rate, accuracy and problem areas.
Working with Insights and Analytics
Teachers can look at scores from an overview of the entire class or drill down into individual students. Now ” Insights” is automatically installed in Teams and you can use this overview feature in Reading Progress to see patterns and trends as an entire class or drill down to specific student data. This includes data like the classes average words per minute, average accuracy rate, and any of the components of that accuracy like repetition etc. Finally you can see challenging words in a word cloud to see which words were missed more often or are challenging for a class or individual students.
Coming Soon: Spotlights to pinpoint patterns and interesting data for the entire class.
To learn more visit the Microsoft Education Center - They have a FREE Course on how to get started.
