At St. Andrew’s Scots School, a bilingual Spanish-English school in Buenos Aires, we believe that all students deserve the same opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. We understand that assessing and teaching all students in the exact same way makes no sense and can be particularly detrimental for students with learning differences.

We set clear guidelines for modifications to instruction and assessments that enable all students to show what they know and can do. These adjustments are not intended to lower educational standards or achievement goals but rather to create clear pathways for students to be successful and demonstrate the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired.

We offer these accommodations for students who have been diagnosed with specific learning disorders (dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder, dyscalculia, executive functioning deficits, etc.), emotional issues that may impact their academic development and/or health problems that may make it hard to assess their abilities.

One tool we’ve come to rely on—and that we find so effective for personalizing instruction and helping with reading tasks—is the Immersive Reader. Using Office Lens and the Immersive Reader, students can take a photo of any text with their cell phone and then easily upload it to their laptop where text is enhanced. The application has a variety of functions such as: regulation of reading speed highlighting lines and words, translating text into several languages, identifying parts of speech, (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.), changing font size and style, and more.

As of May 2019, the Orientation Team at St. Andrew’s Scots, formed by Mariel Pons, María Paula Romano, Jonatan Olmos, Ingrid Gullon, Martina Brea, Marcos Novaro Hueyo and myself, have been exploring the benefits of using Immersive Reader with dyslexic students.

We believe that Immersive Reader is a powerful tool that our students can use to strengthen their reading comprehension. It deepens engagement and supports diverse learning styles.

Students with dyslexia who have been using Immersive Reader have shared their feedback:

The app helps me a lot when I study because ‘it reads (to) me’ what I don’t understand. Reading is not my strength; when I read to myself, I don’t understand, but when someone reads to me or when I hear what I read with the app, I understand it so much more.

Felisa, Y7

Immersive Reader is very useful, especially in History, a subject that requires a lot of reading and text analysis. Reading turns out to be much more agile and quick. The word and line focus is very useful not to lose (my place).

Lola, Y10

Mariana Mercedes Gazaneo is a teacher at St. Andrew’s Scots School. She says that implementing Immersive Reader has been so gratifying because you can see previously reluctant readers come around to enjoying reading on their own.

She is also the mother of a 16-year-old, and she experienced the same gratifying feeling when her son, Ignacio, used Immersive Reader for the first time to read “The Odyssey” at home. When he finished the book, he said, “Mum, this is the first time in my life that I read a whole book on my own! I can’t believe it! Incredible!”

Mariana says the idea that Ignacio can now enjoy a Homer classic on his own fosters his independence and boosts his self-esteem.

At St. Andrew’s Scots School, we’re so glad to have discovered Immersive Reader, and we are thrilled with how it is helping to ensure all our students experience the joy of reading.

The post The power of differentiation: Immersive Reader in a Buenos Aires school appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.

After attending Microsoft E² Educational Exchange 2015 in Seattle and learning the possibilities OneNote Learning Tools had to offer, I had to encourage my learning community to explore the potential for using this technology in variety of ways.Using technology to assist learning helps students in their emotional well being, self-confidence as well as self-esteem.

“Children with learning disabilities face issues when it comes to developing reading, writing, and mathematical skills,” says Mercedes Quarneti, our school’s educational psychologist. “They often require extra time to complete their tasks and individual support during classroom activities. Using the right assistive technology has been life changing for Lola, who has become a confident independent learner, proud of her achievements.”

Analyzing complex reading text is quite challenging for dyslexic readers. Two years ago, Lola finished her primary school. She had struggled learning to read and write in her early years and was later diagnosed with Dyslexia. Starting secondary school was quite frightening for her and her parents. Lola was wondering how she would be able to cope with the challenge of reading and understanding more difficult, complex texts, as well as the writing demands of secondary school.

At that point, St George’s College North had already launched a “Bring your own device scheme” as part of its learning program. The Learning Centre team and the IT coordinator worked together in order to assist Lola with her learning difficulties. After exploring several options, they decided that using the Immersive Reader in OneNote Learning Tools was the best assistive technology for Lola because it is designed to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia in the classroom.

She used this tool to access and record written information in a very efficient way. Some dyslexic learners have writing coordination and organizational difficulties which affects their handwriting and causes them to take more time than expected to finish their tasks.

To sum up our experience using the Immersive Reader, Lola has recorded a short video for you to watch:

Using different software, such as the Office Lens app and the OneNote Learning Tools, has allowed several students to have fun while reading from books.

Once students learn how to use the Immersive Reader efficiently, they are able to organize all of their material into different folders, and are able to concentrate on content rather than on the process of learning. As a result, their confidence and self-esteem increased enabling them to record information using the microphone, see and hear written text on screen, improve their typing skills and therefore become more efficient and independent.

Steps to start using the Office Lens immersive reader

If the material you want to read is in hard copy, the first step is to download an app called Office Lens. This app can convert images Word and PowerPoint documents that you can edit.

The text is then copied and pasted into OneNote Learning Tools.

We hope you found this helpful!

This guest post was written for the Microsoft Education Blog by Jennifer Verschoor, Teacher Trainer, St George´s College North, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The post Using OneNote Learning Tools is a school life-changing experience appeared first on Microsoft Education Blog.