Immersive Reader

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By Koralina McKenna, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist

Last year I did a project with my middle schoolers that required them to break words into syllables in order to create a beat for a song. I had a feeling the syllable part would be an unexpected, yet expected, hurdle. I hate to be right, but I was very right. The struggle over syllables took away from the project as a whole and wasn’t necessary for understanding the content but was necessary to complete the art integration component of the project. We limped through and all was well.

Fast forward to this year; I was reviewing various accessibility tools for a PD I was presenting and came across one that has fallen off my radar - Microsoft's Immersive Reader. As I explored the tool, I came across a feature that allows you to break every word on the page into its syllables. You can imagine the amount of shaking my head I did as I thought back to that ill fated project from last year. Such a simple little tool, yet so much morale could have been saved. The more I found, the more I immediately bookmarked potential uses. Immersive Reader will identify the part of speech (i.e. verb, noun, adjective, etc.), which would have been extremely helpful during my quarter 1 project that required students to add imagery to a poem about the interactions between body systems.

Screenshot of Immersive Reader breaking down syllables

If you know me, you know I love Lumio by SMART and Discover Education Studio Boards. If you don’t know me, it would only be a matter of time before you learned this fact. Both of these applications have immersive reader support built directly into their software. Making it easy to use for students and teachers. Nearpod also utilizes Immersive Reader. Lastly, if you happen to be an English teacher, intervention teacher or a teacher whose students type or read long texts; Immersive Reader is built into Microsoft Word, which can be accessed by students on their Chromebook thanks to OneDrive.

I encourage you to check out this simple, yet power tool hiding in your toolbox. Because as it turns out sometimes the most transformative classroom applications are the simplest ones.



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