For today’s blog post, I decided to take a look at the Immersive Reader tool by the Microsoft Education Team. This tool includes many different features to help students who struggle with reading comprehension, better understand what it is they are reading. These tools include things such as a read aloud feature, translation of on-screen text, picture clues, etc. You can customize these tools based on how the student learns best, optimizing their reading experience. Here is the story of a dyslexic student who was able to overcome their reading challenges with the Immersive Reader tool.

The website I chose then proceeds to go into step-by-step instructions on how to use the immersive reader tool as it is available for many applications and all Microsoft 365 products. The read aloud feature itself has many different options to accommodate the learner. The accommodations include things such as voice settings (how text is read aloud), voice speed, voice selection (gender voice specification), play, and pause.

You can adjust each feature to your own liking as well as choose the font size, depending on what works best for you and your student. You can even insert pictures for specific words and choose which words you would like to translate if needed. You can give a lesson to your student and then at the end of it do a progress report. Immersive Learner has a feature called Reading Coach. This feature actively listens to the student reading aloud and “automatically provides a fluency report and word identification activities.” This way teachers can check on the progress of their students and see if they need to adjust their lesson plan or continue depending on how their students progress. Overall, this is a great example of using advancing technology to help our education system in an efficient manner.