Dan, Qaixen Consultant, introduces us to Immersive Reader, which is embedded in most Microsoft 365 apps and how schools can use this free tool to aid less confident readers and help them improve their reading skills in his latest blog:
Supporting equal access to education
It cannot be understated, that within education in the UK, inclusion is incredibly important. Ofsted state in their Inspection Framework for equality, diversity and inclusion that there must be “Equal access to high-quality education for all learners… we will consider whether education providers offer inclusive education.” It is spelt out, right there in black and white, in one of the many myriads of documents that the organisation provides to ensure every educational professional understands what good teaching provision looks like.
During a conversation with some colleagues of mine, however, it came to my great surprise that they had never heard of the Immersive Reader tool embedded in most Microsoft 365 apps. This often-underutilised tool is specifically designed to aid less confident readers by helping them read. With this in mind, let us see what this feature can do to support the inclusive classroom.
Introducing Immersive Reader
From my experience working with children with specific needs, there are plenty of technology providers waiting to jump down the throats of education professionals explaining that their software will, “revolutionise reading in school.” And these solutions often come with a caveat: A subscription, faulty or buggy software – or in most cases, an eye wateringly exorbitant price tag (you know who you are). However, many teachers are just simply not aware of the free tool within Microsoft apps which can help improve inclusion within the classroom, and more importantly, get children reading.
How Immersive Reader works
At its core, Immersive Reader allows a reader to access texts. It makes text easier to view by adding filters or supporting reading by reading the text back to the user.
Immersive Reader can be accessed through many of the Microsoft 365 apps including Word, SharePoint, Teams, and OneNote.
By using Microsoft Lens, you can use the feature with any unplugged text you have in front of you. By simply selecting the View option in the toolbar of most apps, or by looking for the Immersive Reader icon, any text can be augmented and made accessible by any child. When this is selected, Immersive Reader allows the user to do more than simply change the colour of the background or font of a text.
It allows you to add a line focus, ensuring that children with dyslexic tendencies, for example, can focus on one area of a text. This can be combined with word or line spacing to allow children to view the text in front of them in a manner that is comfortable and accessible to them.
Complex texts can be broken down into simpler and more manageable to read formats, including breaking polysyllabic words into syllables to help with fluency. For many older children, this takes away the stigma of not being able to access the class book and having to have something “simpler” to read.
Immersive Reader and Microsoft 365 Lens
As I mentioned earlier, Immersive Reader can also be combined with the Microsoft 365 Lens app. This app allows you to photograph texts and convert them into a variety of formats, such as Word documents or PDFs. Lens also allows you to export the text to Immersive Reader too. This is a massive time saver for teachers and offers any child with specific needs around reading, the ability to access the same texts as everyone else.
Helping younger readers to read
This is all very good for older students, but what about younger pupils who have a limited vocabulary? Immersive Reader has a feature for this, too. It now includes a pictorial dictionary to help give context to the meaning of some words.
However, teachers should use this feature with caution, as whilst trying to test this facility, I did become aware that not all words had pictures, some of the pictures did not make any sense for the word I was reading and some completely gave the wrong meaning. This feature is not perfect and is in no way a substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face teaching.
Grammar can be very difficult to teach to children with specific learning needs. Often, the very first hurdle with understanding grammar is to know which word class each word belongs to. Immersive Reader can turn on a feature that labels the words of a text with their respective word types. Teachers could use this feature to ask a pupil whether a sentence they have written contains every word class it needs to make sense. Children can also use this to help them to understand the complex rules of grammar in the English language.
Managing Children with English and an Additional Language (EAL)
Finally, with many classrooms today being multi-lingual and with more and more different languages being spoken in classrooms across the UK, it can often be difficult to get the expertise or the funding to truly support children with English and an Additional Language (EAL).
Funding for EAL services is often cut and that is even before you can start to search for support translators or translations of texts. Immersive Reader can at least ease that pressure with the ability to translate any text. This again, combined with the Microsoft Lens app, can help in just a little way to make everyone feel like the classroom, is their classroom.
Get children reading with Immersive Reader
As you can see, Immersive Reader offers a wealth of uses to ensure that your classroom environment is as inclusive as possible. Hopefully, this will give you the confidence to begin to use it to support not just children with specific needs, but all children in your school.
Here at Qaixen, we offer a range of consultancy services as well as a set bespoke Microsoft 365 training courses for teachers to help drive adoption and increase understanding of all the Microsoft cloud tools, including Immersive Reader, Microsoft Lens, Assignments, Power Pages, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. If you would like to learn more about how Qaixen can help your school with Microsoft Immersive Reader or any other Microsoft 365 application, simply contact us.