Immersive Reader is a reading assistant from Microsoft to help people with reading and/or learning disabilities understand text better. It is also a great resource for anyone learning a new language.
It is integrated with itslearning with the aim of helping students better understand content and be able to work more independently. It will make text more accessible and gives the student options to personalize their reading experience.
The Immersive Reader is available in these three sections in itslearning:
- Announcements (both in Home and in Course overview)
- Assignment (reading the assignment description)
- Note
When a student clicks the Immersive Reader button, the text from that area will be opened in a new window. They can determine preferred settings such as background color, font and text spacing.
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.
- Change 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).
- Immersive Reader 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/language just got so much easier.
- The Immersive Reader even supports maths and equations
Watch the video
Known issue
If the Immersive Reader shows up in the wrong language when opened, delete OneNote webpage cookies in the browser, which should fix the problem.