Digital tools to enhance the reading experience in the classroom and at home

Almost all teachers have encountered this scenario: a child comes to school not knowing how to read. He has difficulty recognizing letters and has trouble with the sounds each letter makes. He has little or no vocabulary of sight words and has limited interest in books or stories or simply lost interest in reading. The student’s parents and teachers spend more time and use motivational techniques to encourage reading. However, he is not yet developing the reading skills he needs to be able to comprehend the meaning of the text with the speed, fluency, and comprehension he needs. This is when technology becomes a great ally.

What child or adolescent does not already have a cell phone, computer, tablet or laptop? So why not take advantage of it and that they are not used only for other activities that contribute almost nothing to their education.

There are several tools to improve the reading habit, one of them is the one offered by Microsoft and is based on reading aloud, one of the first (and most important) literacy practices. It begins from the first years of life and is essential for the cognitive development of people.

Despite all the benefits this practice brings in training boys and girls, navigating time constraints in the classroom while managing a class full of students It is not an easy task for teachers.

This tool is called Reading Progress, is free and integrated into Teams tasks and available in multiple languages. It has been designed to help educators create personalized reading experiences for each student and build confidence and reading fluency in their students. It works on all platforms, including desktop, Mac, web, iOS, and Android, and reading progress passages are easy to create and differentiate.

Educators upload a single passage for read aloud, or they can differentiate it for the many levels of their class. Students read their passages aloud, creating a recording that teachers can access to review at their convenience.

Advantage

Various studies show that daily reading aloud offers multiple benefits such as:

• Boys and girls who are exposed to this stimulus are almost a full year ahead of their peers who do not receive it. This occurs regardless of your socioeconomic status or cultural background.
• Fluency, the ability to read accurately, speed, and expression are skills boosted by reading aloud.

“At Microsoft, we believe that everyone can reach their highest potential. In the educational context, this means that all students deserve to have access to a quality education, which allows them to enhance their skills in a more individual and personalized way. And this is achieved by allowing access to tools that are carefully designed, taking differential conditions into account. 80% of children in Latin America have learning gaps in reading and writing and 10% of the world population has dyslexiaTherefore, allowing each person according to their abilities and pace to access quality education becomes an imperative. Reading is the gateway to knowledge and, at the same time, one of the deepest gaps in Latin American educational systems. Technology makes it possible to understand the specific needs of each student, enable text models (font size, color, images equivalent to words) and, above all, facilitate the teaching work and empower students as leaders of their own learning process”, he explains. Natalia Jaramillo, director of education for the Andean South region of Microsoft.

Traditionally, tracking student fluency is spotty and time-consuming because it requires attentive one-on-one listening while still managing the activities of the rest of the class. Creating recordings allows educators to check student progress more frequently while freeing up time for active instruction.

Today, tools like reading progress allow students to learn to read more fluently and boost their autonomous learning, says Jaramillo. “At the same time, it makes it easier for teachers to have traceability of student learning. Students can record a video or audio in Teams for the teacher to review later. The tool provides a series of analyzes and data on trends in the class, including accuracy, correct words per minute, errors in pronunciation, omissions, and inclusion of words that are not in the text. It also gives the teacher information about the main reading challenges of individual students and of the class as a whole.”

Whether educators use the tool’s automatic detection feature for a quick review or prefer to manually review for areas of improvement, Reading Progress collects valuable data in insights (understanding, perception). panels Teams Education Insights help visualize the class as a whole as well as individual progress, providing a holistic view of trends and information, including accuracy rate, words correct per minute, most challenging vocabulary, mispronunciations, omissions, and insertions .

other tool

there is also Immersive Reader, a free interactive tool designed to help students improve their reading, comprehension and grammar skills. It makes text more accessible to any student, works with the most popular Microsoft programs—from Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to Edge, Teams, and Outlook—and is easy to implement in classrooms, online learning, and on-the-go. doing chores at home. With a single click, the Immersive Reader helps increase the fluency of students in Spanish, English and the languages ​​in which it is configured. In turn, it helps build confidence in the early years of reading and for those learning a new language.

For the Microsoft expert, reading fluency is understood as the ability to read with speed, precision, and meaningful expression. This is an integral component of academic success and future results. “Its importance for word recognition and building a deeper understanding of the text is also essential for cultivating strong reading skills. In this sense, Microsoft has implemented Reading Coach or Reading Advisor, a tool that allows you to create personalized reading practices by identifying the five words with which each student had the most difficulties and offers exercises to reinforce them. Thus, the student can review at home or at school to build confidence and improve their coach of reading, gives the student immediate feedback on the recorded reading. Details such as the words that were most difficult for him. Students can select the word that was most difficult and the coach of reading will show them step by step how to break the word by syllables and pronounce it correctly. This tool makes it easier for teachers to do their work, as it allows them to assign reading tasks individually and enhances students’ autonomous learning”.

Immersive Reader It is also very useful to facilitate learning and reading for people with dyslexia or other learning difficulties. “We must transcend the concept of hybrid education, and stop thinking that it is restricted to a remote class or a video call. Hybrid education is using technology to monitor and improve educational quality, making it accessible to people with disabilities, democratizing content so that no one is left behind, facilitating personalization of learning, taking care of the student’s well-being. It is the possibility of broadening the horizons of learning and empowering students to become leaders of their own educational process”, says Jaramillo.

What are the scopes of reading aloud in learning?

It is essential to develop a student’s oratory skills, highlights the Microsoft representative. “In that sense, our tools start with the fundamentals: students’ understanding of phonetic rules. Our software Auto-detection, Reading Progress, has the ability to analyze each word down to the phonemic level and give an accuracy rating by phoneme in up to 67 languages. In this way, we will provide the greatest feedback students as possible and we will provide more teacher time to focus on helping them improve with accurate data about the learning process.”

This week, from September 21 to 25, the Guayaquil 2022 International Book Fair will take place, so it is one more motivation to generate interest in this practice that should become a habit.