Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! It’s Anoo Padte, Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft Education team. I’m excited to share with you that Reading Coach, Microsoft’s free AI-powered tool designed to provide personalized and engaging reading practice, is now available in 81 languages through zero-touch deployment. With a wealth of new enhancements to accelerate literacy, Reading Coach makes reading fun for everyone.
Improve learners’ literacy skills with AI-powered Reading Coach
The holidays are a great time for learners to practice reading with Reading Coach. It brings the magic of stories to the holidays so students can have fun while staying up on their reading.
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.
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.
What’s new
With this update:
- Learners can add their own content in up to 81 languages, including 14 different English dialects. Reading Coach listens to readers in the language of their choice, notes mispronunciations, and coaches them on challenging words.
- Learners can create stories using AI that have multiple chapters, allowing them to pick their own path through their story.
- Learners can earn rewards for achieving a consistent three-day, five-day, or seven-day reading streak. They can view their stats for reading accuracy, time spent reading, and other progress metrics over a week, month, and all-time through an easy-to-read dashboard made usable for learners of all ages.
- No action is needed to enable Reading Coach, as it’s already enabled in Microsoft 365 through zero-touch deployment.
How it works
- Go to https://coach.microsoft.com.
- Click the Start reading button.
- Sign in with your Microsoft 365 personal or individual learner account at home or through your school login (provided your school has enabled Reading Coach).
- Explore, practice, and enjoy!
Success stories
Reading Coach has been available since January 2024, and is being used by learners in 125 countries. We’re excited to hear from all the early adopters about the impact Reading Coach has made for learners.
Here are just a few success stories:
Boosting English language learners’ confidence
In Vietnam, English-language learners (ELL) in Ha Tran’s fifth-grade classrooms have limited exposure to English speakers. After using Reading Coach for three months, Tran said the students feel more confident in their English language skills, and have even produced “how-to” videos to teach peers how to improve their fluency using Reading Coach.
We are blown away by them!
Keeping skills fresh over the summer
In the United Kingdom, students in Carly Richards’ Year 3 classes used Reading Coach over the summer. She said students call Reading Coach “the reading game” and asked their parents to use it repeatedly. As they entered the new school year, struggling and shy readers returned to class willing to raise their hands and read aloud in front of their peers.
Richards loves that Reading Coach is adaptive for learners at various levels and gives them agency over their reading content.
Making reading less of a chore
Florida-based teacher Kimberly Niebauer said that her third graders at Loretto Elementary of Duval County Public Schools don’t see reading as a chore anymore. Students who started out early gained two levels of reading after using Reading Coach alongside other tools. One student has even gained two years of reading proficiency since she started using Reading Coach in spring 2024.
Niebauer said her students love the customizability of Immersive Reader in Reading Coach and are excited to share feedback with Microsoft.
Improving speech skills
Mother Loretta Jie celebrated her six-year-old son Zachary’s Radiant Reader award after he previously struggled with reading and needed speech therapy. Eight months into using Reading Coach twice a day, Zach is not just a fluent reader, but has excellent speech, and his therapists were surprised by his quick gains. Zach is more confident and assured, speaks up more easily, and loves that people understand him now.
Jie is thankful for Reading Coach helping Zach in his reading journey.
Availability
Reading Coach is available to all individual consumer users and Microsoft 365 Education users when logged in as a consumer or Entra ID on www.microsoft365.com. To get started, simply go to https://coach.microsoft.com and click "Get started" to log in with your school or personal consumer account.
NOTE: IT Administrator can disable the application from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Feedback
We’d love to hear from you! Share feedback at https://aka.ms/readingcoachfeedback.
Educators can join the Educator Community at https://aka.ms/readingcoach-educatorcommunity to share feedback and connect with other literacy educators.
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