Microsoft today made Reading Coach, its AI-powered tool that gives learners with personalized reading practice, available for free of charge to anyone with a Microsoft account.
As of this morning, Reading Coach is accessible on the internet in preview — a Windows app is forthcoming. And shortly (in late spring), Reading Coach will integrate with learning management systems reminiscent of Canva, Microsoft says.
“It’s well-known that reading is foundational to a student’s academic success; studies show that fluent readers are 4 times more prone to graduate highschool and improve jobs,” Microsoft writes in a blog post. “With the most recent AI technology, we’ve a possibility to offer learners with personalized, engaging, and transformative reading experiences.”
Reading Coach builds on Reading Progress, a plug-in for the education-focused version of Microsoft Teams, Teams for Education, designed to assist teachers foster reading fluency of their students. Inspired by the success of Reading Progress (evidently), Microsoft launched Reading Coach in 2022 as an element of Teams for Education and Immersive Reader, the corporate’s cross-platform assistive service for language and reading comprehension.
Image Credits: Microsoft
Reading Coach works by having learners discover words they struggle with essentially the most and presenting them with tools to support independent, individualized practice. Based on an educator’s preferences, the tools available can include text to speech, syllable breaking and movie dictionaries.
After a learner practices in Reading Coach, educators can view their work, including which words the coed practiced, what number of attempts they made and which tools they used. Educators may share this information with students in the event that they select.
Recently, Reading Coach received a spruce-up in the shape of a “select your personal story” feature, powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, that lets learners tap AI to generate their very own narrative adventure.
Akin to the AI-generated story tool on the Amazon Echo Show, Reading Coach’s “select your personal story” has learners select a personality, setting and reading level and have AI create content based on these selections and the learner’s most difficult words. (Microsoft says that story content is moderated and filtered for things like “quality, safety and age appropriateness.”) Reading Coach provides feedback on pronunciation, listening to the learner read the story and awarding badges that unlock recent characters and scenes as they progress.
Learners who opt to not create their very own story can pick from curated passages in ReadWorks, a library of resources for reading comprehension.
“Reading Coach intrinsically motivates learners to proceed advancing their skills in several ways,” Microsoft continues. “With the usage of AI in an impactful, secure, responsible way, we consider that personalized learning at scale is close by.”
Microsoft’s rosy view of AI for teaching reading comprehension isn’t shared by all educators, it’s key to notice. Experts say that there isn’t a foolproof tool in the marketplace for measuring comprehension, which involves assessing what students know and the strength of their vocabulary in addition to whether or not they can sound out and pronounce words. Students can inadvertently affect evaluations by pressing a flawed button. Or they may get uninterested in a task a tool’s presenting to them and disengage, resulting in a low rating.
All that being said, teachers don’t think tools like Reading Coach can hurt. In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 44% of educators said that they think adaptive tech does a greater job of accurately assessing a students’ reading level than non-adaptive software or pen-and-paper methods.
