This month's post was written by Anoo Padte, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Education.
Reading Coach blog topics
Reading Coach, Microsoft’s free AI-powered tool provides personalized and engaging reading practice at school and home. It is now generally available in 81 languages through zero-touch deployment.
Reading Coach can be used in the classroom or at home with a Microsoft 365 account for Windows, or from any browser-enabled device, including Surface, Surface Pro, Chromebook, or iPad.
With a wealth of new enhancements to accelerate literacy, Reading Coach makes reading practice personalized, and engaging for learners of all ages.
Improve learners’ literacy skills with AI-powered Reading Coach
Reading Coach offers a range of features designed to build engagement and improve literacy for learners of all ages, including:
- AI-powered features: Reading Coach uses AI to generate stories that provide instant feedback on pronunciation, improve reading fluency, and help learners practice reading content that matches their abilities and interests.
- Personalized learning: Reading Coach provides personalized and engaging reading practice, detecting challenging words and offering targeted practice to help learners improve their fluency.
- Inclusive design: Reading Coach is designed to be inclusive and support emerging readers and learners with dyslexia. Built-in support from Immersive Reader makes reading enjoyable for all learners.
- Engagement and motivation: Reading Coach motivates learners to earn achievements, unlock new story elements as they read, and pick their own path through stories, driving continuous engagement. Learners can also track progress over time, and review reading accuracy insights, time spent reading, and other helpful metrics.
What’s new
Multiple languages supported
- The user experience is now available in 81 languages, making Reading Coach accessible to native speakers of all those languages.
- Learners can add their own content in up to 81 languages.
- Learners can create AI-powered stories in 14 languages. Picking their own path through each chapter, learners go on an adventure through three or five chapter stories.
- 14 different English dialects are supported to recognize pronunciations across the globe.
See the list of languages supported here.
Reading Coach listens to readers in the language of their choice, notes mispronunciations, and coaches them on challenging words.
Reading Streaks and progress data over 30 days and all-time
To keep learners motivated, Reading Coach offers encouragement through digital badges and rewards. Readers can now earn streak badges for completing three, five, and seven days of reading.
As readers progress, Reading Coach displays their growth in a dashboard that they can easily understand. They’ll see information on reading time, accuracy rate, and mispronunciations, as well as goals to reach the next achievement.
Easy-to-track information and digital badges encourage readers to continue practicing with Reading CoachLearners can also track their growth over a week, a 30-day period, and all-time with summary statistics:
- Total reading days and time
- Stories started and completed
- Average accuracy and words per minute
- Badges earned and characters unlocked
Zero-touch deployment
No action is needed to enable Reading Coach, as it’s already enabled in Microsoft 365 through zero-touch deployment. Microsoft Education M365 school and home users can find Reading Coach already pinned and ready to go at www.microsoft365.com once they login.
To get started:
1. Go to https://coach.microsoft.com.A computer screen shot of a computer
2. Click the Get started button.
3. Sign in with your Microsoft 365 school or personal account
4. Explore, practice, and enjoy!
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