Last May Microsoft announced a new tool for Teams called Reading Progress, which will allow students to develop a greater fluency when reading, as well as allowing their teachers their revision and correction possibilities. As a result, students will be able to complete their reading improvement assignments regularly and independently, keeping the focus on practice and growth, without the need to perform under pressure.
Benefits of using Reading Progress
This new utility has been specially conceived and designed to help improve students’ reading fluency, and can be evaluated using Artificial Intelligence incorporated by their teachers. As specified by Microsoft, the benefits of using Reading Progress are as follows:
- Students can record themselves reading aloud, both on audio and video.
- This allows students to read at their own pace and in a more comfortable environment, eliminating the stigma, stress, or distraction associated with reading aloud.
- The app has simplified a time-consuming process by seamlessly integrating with the Teams education dashboard. Once submitted, teachers will be able to review the recorded assignment and provide relevant feedback on it.
- Educators will be able to use the automatic detection function to quickly review errors in pronunciation, repetitions, phrasing, intonations and omissions, which they can use to customize the instructions to follow for each student.
So far just some of the main features of Reading Progress and its potential benefits with which to assess the user’s reading fluency. The application has been designed to be used by both teachers and students, standing out for its analysis of tasks assisted by Artificial Intelligence for an easier review by the teacher, as well as the possibility of collecting data to improve practical knowledge.
Its implementation worldwide has already begun
Microsoft has begun the global implementation of the Reading Progess application within Teams, a Free tool translated into more than 100 languages. For around the next two weeks, it should be deployed to all Teams apps and all platforms where it is supported such as Windows, macOS, web, Android, and iOS.
The arrival of this new function within Microsoft Teams it will occur gradually. We can already check if we already have this option enabled, although it normally takes a few days for it to be available. This is because the release of this functionality is not instantaneous for all users, so it is expected that we will have it available over the next few weeks. If you don’t have Microsoft Teams you can download it for free from this link.
