What you need to know
- Microsoft just announced a new Reading Coach in Teams and new capabilities for the Reading Progress tool.
- Reading Coach identifies words that students struggle with, shares guidance on the correct way to pronounce words, and provides a chance for further practice.
- Reading Coach and the new features for Reading Progress will be available in summer 2022.
Microsoft will soon launch a new Reading Coach experience in Teams to help students receive feedback and guided instruction on assignments from the Reading Progress tool. The new experience will be available in Microsoft Teams at some point in summer 2022. Microsoft will also launch new features for its Reading Progress tool this summer, including the ability to measure a student's expression and intonation.
When a student receives a Reading Progress assignment, they can then read text out loud while being recorded by Reading Coach. The student will then be told which words they struggled with the most and a breakdown of how to pronounce the words correctly.
"Reading Coach is truly a dream come true for teachers, after students are done reading their passage it gives them instantaneous feedback on the words they struggled with the most," said Angela Milversted, an instructional coach in the Chino Valley Unified School District. "I think it's amazing what we would do in the past with a student when they struggled with a word now can be done with the AI in Reading Coach."
Microsoft's Reading Progress already measures a student's correct words per minute, accuracy rate, and which words an individual finds challenging. Soon, the tool will automatically detect prosody, which is the intonation and patterns of expression in someone's speech. Microsoft notes that prosody is connected to reading comprehension.
Reading Progress will also be able to show teachers which phonics rules students struggle with.
The new Reading Progress features will be available in over 100 languages, though the phonics rule feature is limited to English.
