Immersive Reader

If you have students in your class that might be struggling readers, non-native English speakers, or you are simply teaching a difficult passage, parts of speech, or a foreign language, then this is a tool you want to check out. Immersive Reader is built into online Office 365 apps like Word and OneNote. At its core it is a text-to-speech tool, however, it is much more powerful than just text-to-speech. When first enabled it gets rid of all distractions on the page and only shows the text, so students can focus on what is written. It then allows the user to change the font, background color, and line and word spacing. It can identify parts of speech like nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. It can break words up into syllables. It has a built in translation tool for English Language Learners or students studying a foreign language. It has a built in picture dictionary where all the user has to do is click a word and a picture of that word shows up. In OneNote it also has a built in math equation solver and shows the work for solving that equation.