Another great literacy tool – itslearning adds Immersive Reader to the platform

Immersive Reader is designed to help students with learning and reading difficulties

itslearning is proud to introduce another great literacy tool – the Immersive Reader. This powerful tool has been designed to help students of all ages and abilities, including those with dyslexia, dysgraphia, emerging readers, non-native speakers and people with visual impairment.

Users first had a chance to see the Immersive Reader in use at our user conference in Norway last year. There were a lot of ‘oohs and aahs’ when they saw the demo version. And, of course, the first question from the floor was, “When can we have it at our school?”

Well, we’ve been working very closely with Microsoft and now all itslearning users will be able to use the Immersive Reader, directly in the platform. It’s part of our mission to make itslearning accessible to every student.

Better accessibility with the Immersive Reader

Here’s why this is a game changer in the classroom:

• Read aloud text. Choose between a male or female voice and even change the speed.
• Translate text in a snap – especially useful for non-native speakers. The Immersive Reader integrated into itslearning currently has 68 built-in languages. Choose whether to translate just one word or the entire document.
• Clean interface. Minimum distractions and you can personalize the background for better accessibility if you have trouble reading on a white background.
• It lets you change the font size and text spacing. You can even split up words into syllables – so they’re easier to read.
• Highlight parts of speech (nouns, verbs etc).
• Remember the reading ruler? Well – Immersive Reader has a digital version that highlights specific lines to make reading so much easier.
• Picture dictionary. Non-native speakers and emerging readers can get imagery for words in the text. Learning a new word just got so much easier.
• The Immersive Reader even supports maths and equations!

Learning a new language just got easier

The Immersive Reader is great in classrooms to promote reading and listening comprehension. It’s wide range of supported languages and read aloud features help students improve reading and listening comprehension. Teachers can also engage their students by using the Immersive Reader to analyze the accuracy of the translated text. It’s a fun way to learn and improve one’s grasp of a new language.

How does it work in itslearning

Immersive Reader is currently free and available to all itslearning users without any additional plugins or cost for this school year. You can help us improve the tool by testing it out and giving us your feedback via our Ideas Portal.

You can use the Immersive Reader in

• Announcements
• Assignments (to read the assignment description text)
• Notes and resources

You can watch an extended video by clicking this link.
 

Look for this icon.

Click on it to start using the Immersive Reader. It works on all devices, including mobile phones.

Data protection

We understand that parents may be concerned over cloud applications collecting user data from students.

That’s why before we even began to include the Immersive Reader in itslearning we referenced data privacy laws and consulted with our in-house data privacy expert. itslearning has a contract with Microsoft as sub-processor, including “Microsoft Online Services” so they are contract bound by the same data privacy laws that bind us as a learning platform provider.

Microsoft states: “Plain Text is sent out of the service to our O365 Compliant service. The data stays in Europe though, in our GDPR-compliant datacenters. Also, we do not store anything in our service, so your plain text goes to our service, we render the Immersive Reader, and nothing is ever stored in our service. No customer ID, etc. or content.”

You can also read more about our data commitment here.