Reading aloud is one of the first (and most important) literacy practices. It starts from the first years of life and is fundamental for the cognitive development of people. Several studies show that daily reading aloud offers multiple benefits such as:

• Children 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, quickly, and expressively, is a skill driven by reading aloud.

Despite all the benefits that this practice brings in the training of boys and girls, navigating the limitations of time in the classroom and at the same time managing a class full of students is not an easy task for teachers. To support education and provide tools to drive improvement, Microsoft introduces Reading Progress, a free tool integrated into Teams tasks and available Trinidad & Tobago in multiple languages. This has been designed to help educators create personalized reading experiences for each student and that build confidence and fluency in reading in their students.

Reading Progress works on all platforms including Desktop, Mac, Web, iOS and Android. Educators upload a single passage for reading aloud, or they can differentiate it for the many levels of their class. Students read their passages aloud and create a recording that teachers can access to review when they consider.

What are the advantages? Traditionally, monitoring students’ fluency is spotty and time-consuming because it demands attentive listening one by one, while still having to manage the activities of the rest of the class. Creating recordings allows educators to check students’ progress more frequently while freeing up time for active instruction. By empowering students to complete their reading fluency assignments regularly and independently, Reading Progress maintains the focus on practice and growth, without performing under pressure.

Whether educators used the tool’s autodiscover feature for quick review or prefer to manually review for areas of improvement, Reading Progress collects valuable data in insights. Teams Education Insights dashboards help visualize the class as a whole and also individual progress, providing a holistic view of trends and information, including accuracy rate, correct words per minute, most challenging vocabulary, incorrect pronunciations, omissions, and insertions.

Microsoft also offers another tool to improve the reading experience. This is Immersive Reader, a free interactive reading tool designed to help students improve their reading, comprehension and grammar skills. Immersive Reader makes texts more accessible to any student, works with Microsoft’s most popular programs (from Word, Power Point and Excel to Edge, Teams and Outlook) and is easy to implement in classes, in virtual learning and in the performance of tasks at home.

With a single click, the Immersive Reader helps increase student fluency in Spanish, English, and the languages you are set up in. In turn, it helps build confidence in the early years of reading and for those who are learning a new language.

Additionally, Immersive Reader is also very useful to facilitate learning and reading for people with dyslexia or other learning difficulties. The application recognizes any text written in Word, Power Point, OneNote, among other Microsoft solutions, and allows you to change the size of fonts; read aloud and highlight the words with different colors, for those who have color blindness.

In addition, it has a dictionary of drawings, through which words can be translated into images, and includes grammatical options that allow you to separate a word into syllables, distinguish nouns, verbs or adjectives, among other functions. Immersive Reader is also available to browse in the Edge browser a large number of web pages, in order to help those who do chores at home.

Developing strong literacy skills at an early age is one of the keys to the quality of education for children around the world, and technology should be a tool to facilitate and strengthen these processes.