The Californian giant has just made its AI-powered tool, Reading Coach, accessible to everyone, by making it available for free. A truly nice initiative, which will allow many people to benefit from this assistant for learning to read.
AI as an educational support tool is an entire area that still remains to be explored. In France, for example, the Ministry of National Education wants to implement the MIA tool at the start of the 2024 school year to support high school students during their school year. The potential of this technology to support the learning process is truly promising.
Microsoft’s Reading Coach tool, for its part, offers personalized reading exercises to learners and integrates several rather well-thought-out features. It is now available for free in web version, and Microsoft will launch a dedicated application in the future. Reading Coach will also be integrated into Canva in the spring.
The genesis of Reading Coach
Reading Coach works using the Reading Progress plugin, intended for the educational version of Microsoft Teams. Its primary objective is to support teachers who are working to improve reading fluency among their students. Reading Progres having been a great success, Reading Coach was launched in 2022. It is an integral part of Immersive Reader; virtual language comprehension and reading assistant; and Teams for Education, a special version of Teams for schools.
The effectiveness of Reading Coach is based on the correct identification of the words posing the most difficulty by learners. This then provides them with specific tools so that they can adopt more autonomous and individualized practices. These are quite varied: illustrated dictionaries, syllable segmentation or reading aloud.
The key word: interactivity
Reading Coach also allows teachers (or parents, teachers are not necessarily the only ones concerned) to monitor the work of their students: tools used, number of words worked, number of attempts, etc.
Recently, Reading Coach was enhanced with a pretty nifty new feature called “ choose your own story » (choose your own story). This works thanks to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service. It allows learners to imagine their own adventure from scratch with the help of AI. Choice of setting, characters and reading level. Once all these elements are taken into account, the AI then creates content to read based on them. In terms of customization, it’s great! A student will always have more pleasure reading a story that resembles them.
Reading Coach is also able to listen to the story read aloud and provide feedback on spoken pronunciation. The fun side is strongly emphasized since as progress is made, reward badges reward the learner and new settings or characters are unlocked. For those reluctant to create a story, the ReadWorks resource library integrated into the tool even offers passages already prepared.
In a recent survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, 44% of teachers surveyed believe that adaptive technologies (like Reading Coach) are more effective in assessing students’ reading levels compared to traditional methods. Microsoft’s initiative, wishing to put technology at the service of education, is a very laudable step. It must be seen as support, and not as a replacement for traditional methodologies.
Sources: Tech Crunch, Microsoft, EdWeek Research Center
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