Immersive Reader is an excellent learning tool from Microsoft that helps students of all ages and skills develop their reading. Immersive Reader provides a wide variety of features to enhance students reading experience. There is the read aloud feature available in both male and female voice which reads out loud the provided text. This is a great tool to help language learners learn how words of a target language are pronounced. It is also great for students with vision problems.
The Immersive Reader has a distraction free interface where the focus is squarely on text. Users are able to change text size, font and increase spacing between lines, letters and words to enhance the visibility of text. Another cool feature is the Grammar Options which once activated enable students to ” split words into syllables so words are easier to sound out”. They also automatically highlight the selected parts of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).
Reading Preferences is another great tool embedded in Immersive Reader. It includes three main features: Line Focus (it is similar to “reading ruler that helps students reduce distractions as they scroll down the page”), a Picture Dictionary which provides graphical representations of the meanings of words in a text, and Instant Translation which supports more than 60 languages. Students can either translate the whole document or single words. Translation also comes with read-aloud functionality allowing students to learn how translated words are spoken in their native tongue.
Immersive Reader is included in many of products of Microsoft( e.g., OneNote, Word, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Minecraft Education Edition, Whiteboard, and several other Office 365 apps) as well other educational tools such as Flipgrid.
