Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time

Reading Progress is built-in to Microsoft Teams Assignments and works on all platforms, including PC, Mac, Web, iOS, and Android.

Here's a quick overview of what you can use in Reading Progress, courtesy of Microsoft:

1. Students can record their reading through audio or video.
2. Students read at their own pace, read freely (in some environments where reading aloud is often not allowed and are time-limited), unaffected and undistracted by their surroundings.
3. Reading Progress integrates with Teams' Education Insights dashboard, teachers can review recordings of students' readings to make comments in a scientific and easy way.
4. Teachers can use the Auto-Detect feature to quickly see errors such as mispronunciation, repetition, stress, and underreading, and provide correction instructions for each student.

Traditionally, monitoring student reading is time-consuming because teachers must both listen to each student read and manage the classroom. If a class has 25-30 students, the teacher cannot ask each student to read because of the time limit.

Thus, with Reading Progress, teachers can check students' progress more often, more extensively, and at the same time save time.

Reading Progress is suitable for all ages, especially from 6-11 years old, and is useful for students who want to learn English.

Four parts of the Reading Progress experience

1. Create exercises

To create an exercise, users choose Create -> Assignment -> Add resource -> Reading Progress. Here, the assignment creator can upload a Word or PDF document of their choice. Teachers can manually set the Reading level, Genre, Number of attempts, Time limit, Pronunciation sensitivity to suit each student. object.

For example, younger students will need more comfortable pronunciation, while older students need to read fluently and without much error, so it is necessary to set the time and pronunciation to suit the audience. statue.

Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time Picture 1

Teachers can manually set Reading level, Genre, Number of attempts, Time limit, Pronunciation sensitivity to suit each audience.

2. Students read and record

Upon receiving the assignment, students open the passage to read and start recording. Video recording will be enabled by default, but teachers have the option to only play the audio without opening the video.

Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time Picture 2

Here, students can change the font, font size and themes. When finished reading, students select I'm done at the bottom of the page to end the recording of the reading. Then, the students listened to their reading again. If the student agrees to submit the assignment, the student selects I'm finished. If they want to record, students choose Start over.

Students can preview a recording of their reading.

3. Teacher rating

The Auto-Detect feature is turned on automatically so that teachers see potentially mispronounced words. Next, the teacher can manually check if the prediction is indeed correct. If the student makes a mistake, the teacher can correct it.

Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time Picture 3

Teachers can easily detect mistakes and correct them with Reading Progress's Auto-Detect feature.

4. Track student progress

Student reading data is saved in Insights, from which teachers can make assessments and comments. In Insights, teachers can observe reading rate, average number of words read per minute, mispronounced words, omitted words.

Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time Picture 4

Teachers can easily observe students' reading progress.

In October, leaders will be able to access Reading Progress data when they opt in to Teams' new Education Insights Premium to get an overview of each block's readability.

Microsoft Teams' new Reading Progress tool improves student reading and saves teachers time Picture 5

A recent Stanford University study found that oral literacy growth has slowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in 2nd and 3rd grades saw a 30% drop in academic performance compared to expected. Therefore, with the introduction of the Reading Progress tool, students and teachers have the opportunity to get back on track like before the pandemic.

Marvin Fry

Update 25 August 2021