Accessibility

Today is International Literacy Day, a day designated by UNESCO to highlight and raise awareness of the importance and incredible benefits literacy has for individuals and society. Literacy means more than just learning to read and write at school.

Imagine listening to a presentation but not quite being able to hear it. Or perhaps you can hear it but you’re not fluent in the language the presentation is in, so you don’t know some of the words.

Recently I had the opportunity to join many of my colleagues at ISTE, one of the world’s most influential education events.

Millions of students have limited access to the internet at home, leaving them struggling to access interactive online lessons and forcing them to find offline workarounds on devices lacking storage for video and other resources.

Thanks to the evolution of education technology, more students with learning difficulties are finding accommodations that help them thrive in the classroom and in life.

One school district’s investment in Microsoft’s educational technologies helped transform how learners learn and how teachers teach.

Each day, teachers and school leaders are faced with the challenge of meeting the needs of a growing audience of diverse learners to help them reach their full potential. Nearly half of teachers work one-on-one with students who require accommodations.

The move to online learning during the pandemic, followed by the slow and unsteady return to in-person and hybrid instruction, has permanently altered how educators create and share learning content. As students return to classrooms, technology has been further integrated into the overall education experience.

Since the return to in-person learning, educators have been working to evaluate students’ knowledge levels compared to pre-pandemic benchmarks, along with how to help students catch up, keep up, and get ahead.

Here’s how Microsoft’s Reading Progress helped students at Sarasota County Schools catch up and embrace reading—and how the tool can help other students, too.

Immersive Reader provides a variety of ways to assist students with reading, such as the ability to change font sizes and line spacing, color code parts of speech, and have text read aloud to them by a computer.

As we continue to reimagine education to meet unprecedented challenges, the new year brings new opportunities to empower every learner on the planet. We’ve heard repeatedly from teachers and leaders that they’re working hard to provide access to equitable education to all learners they serve.