Microsoft to add 'Reading Progress' tool to Teams for Education
Microsoft is adding a new tool meant to help students improve their reading skills to Teams for Education. That tool, called "Reading Progress" is meant for all learners, including second-language students and those with dyslexia, Microsoft officials said.
Microsoft announced Reading Progress and some other Teams-related education enhancements on May 4, National Teacher Appreciation Day. Reading Progress is available in public preview now and will be available to Teams for Education users for free starting this August. Reading Progress is available first in English (U.S.), with English (U.K. and Australian) coming soon, officials said.
Reading Progress will enable teachers to create reading assignments for an entire class or individual students. It has built-in auto-detect features for analyzing results and integrates with the Education Insights dashboard so teachers can see trends and data around metrics like accuracy rate, mispronunciations and omissions.
Microsoft officials announcement a number of other Teams for Education features and tools on the roadmap:
- Group assignments, which will allow teachers to organize students into assignment group (coming in August)
- The ability of third-party apps to issue assignments directly from their apps inside of Teams (coming in August)
- New calendar integrations to allow students to see when their classes are and when assignments are due in the Teams and Outlook calendars (coming in August)
- More and better integration between Learning Management System (LMS) providers like Instructure and Blackboard, and Teams, Teams meetings and OneDrive (expected in August)
- Supervised Chat in Teams that will allow designated teachers to initiate and manage chats with students (coming later in May)
Microsoft also announced today more integration between Minecraft Education Edition and Teams and Flipgrid, Microsoft's educational video platform, which will be available in at the end of May. . Microsoft also will be adding a new Minecraft for Camps and Clubs which lets students use Minecraft Education Edition outside the classroom. camps, clubs, homeschoolers and nonprofits can purchase licenses for Minecraft Education Edition.