How to help students who are struggling with reading and writing

Using technology to enhance learning

Technology can help your students learn. Using technology in a smart way, you can help your students. Let’s look at some of the tools that are available for those of us who use Microsoft Office 365. In Norway, I would think that is most high school students.

Do you have students with dyslexia? Approximately 10% of the world’s population has dyslexia, a common specific learning difficulty that can have a profound impact on learning and literacy skills. Seventy to 80% of people with poor reading skills likely have dyslexia. It’s the job of educators and administrators to find and support students who are struggling academically, no matter their age.

Text-to-Speech Tool development

Dictation tools have been around for a while. The ability to allow a person to put their words directly into text by using their voice is an invaluable asset for individuals suffering from mobility impairments or dyslexia. Microsoft has made the tool accessible on Word and on OneNote Online. This is a feature that will be accessible to users from any browser for free.

The Dictate function allows you to use the voice to text capacity of OneNote. The room does need to be quiet and you will need an internet connection for this to work well. You can also choose the language that you want to type on screen and it will convert your spoken word to that language. After you have dictated your text, you can easily get it translated into any other language. Some might think this is cheating when used in school. I think it is a great tool for students who are struggling with reading and writing. It is the ideas they have that count? Right?

Immersive Reader Expansion

Microsoft’s Immersive Reader, a part of OneNote Learning Tools, is being further developed to aid those with learning disabilities. At present, the Immersive Reader is already an exceptionally useful tool for individuals with dyslexia. It allows students to read alongside a voice that can be customized in terms of speed. Also, it lets students highlight particular types of words by changing colors. It has a built-in picture dictionary to help kids learn word meanings without having to go through a dictionary.

Immersive Reader provides text-decoding solutions for people with dyslexia. You can get the text you are working on read out aloud for you. The ability to show syllables, verbs, nouns and adjectives from any text is also accessed in the immersive reader.

Foreign Language Translation

Microsoft is also taking on the challenge of making multiple languages accessible on Immersive Reader. Users will be able to translate entire sentences into and from other languages in real-time within Immersive Reader. This will be integrating syllables, parts of speech, picture dictionary, and read aloud functionalities.