Can Microsoft's New Software Help Teach Children to Read? 30
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
Microsoft on Wednesday announced Reading Coach (video), software that allows children to practice reading out loud and receive personalized feedback. Reading Coach will be integrated into Word Online, OneNote, Teams, Forms, and many other places in M365 later this summer.
The Reading Coach announcement comes 15 years after a 2007 paper from Microsoft Research employees that described an Automatic Children's Reading Tutor, which could track children's oral reading against story texts, detect reading miscues, measure the level of reading fluency, diagnose the nature of the miscues, and provide feedback to improve reading skills. The same Microsoft team described in a 2008 paper an implementation of the Automatic Reading Tutor software on a PDA running Windows Mobile 6, which they dubbed 'Reading Coach'.
Microsoft's 2022 Reading Coach comes after the release of read-aloud helper software from other tech giants — Amazon's Reading Sidekick and Google's Read Along. Efforts to use software to help develop early reading skills are hardly new — in 1994, CMU researchers described a NeXT implementation of A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens as part of Project LISTEN — although widespread adoption has proved elusive. But with advances in tech, schools seeking ways to help students catch up on unfinished learning from the pandemic, and 1:1 computing for most students, could things truly be different this time? When the 2022-23 school year comes around, will Microsoft's Reading Coach be a 15-year 'overnight success' with teachers and parents?
The Reading Coach announcement comes 15 years after a 2007 paper from Microsoft Research employees that described an Automatic Children's Reading Tutor, which could track children's oral reading against story texts, detect reading miscues, measure the level of reading fluency, diagnose the nature of the miscues, and provide feedback to improve reading skills. The same Microsoft team described in a 2008 paper an implementation of the Automatic Reading Tutor software on a PDA running Windows Mobile 6, which they dubbed 'Reading Coach'.
Microsoft's 2022 Reading Coach comes after the release of read-aloud helper software from other tech giants — Amazon's Reading Sidekick and Google's Read Along. Efforts to use software to help develop early reading skills are hardly new — in 1994, CMU researchers described a NeXT implementation of A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens as part of Project LISTEN — although widespread adoption has proved elusive. But with advances in tech, schools seeking ways to help students catch up on unfinished learning from the pandemic, and 1:1 computing for most students, could things truly be different this time? When the 2022-23 school year comes around, will Microsoft's Reading Coach be a 15-year 'overnight success' with teachers and parents?
May help, but... (Score:2)
The first thing you need, is for parents to care. Parents can barely read, and figure school isn't important? Kids won't bother learning, and fancy software won't change that.
Add to this schools refusing to fail kids, instead passing them along to the next grade. Result: the illiterate and innumerate drag down the education of everyone else.
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Probably the most important thing in getting children to read is - parents reading to them
If parents read to their children - yes, a bedtime story - it will encourage them massively.
This is well known. But it's a challenge for over worked, over stressed, exhausted parents, possibly with reading problems themselves. Not to mention the challenges of single parenting, and drugs.
It's a vicious circle.
It can be broken. Most schools have reading times, where outside folk can read to children. It's well worth volu
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When we talk about reading we talk about getting to the point where a teen can read huckleberry Finn. While I think this is great, it is not a socially necessary skill, and I do not think a kid should flunk school because of it. What an adult need to do is read to get the information they need, select the correct link on a website, and wr
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In the US Literacy Rate for adult is near 90%, which makes sense as there are fewer and fewer options for work that once can do that doesn't require a basic level of literacy, and it is much more difficult to cheat your way around not being able to read while growing up, as well a general sense of peer pressure for you to be able to read, as sending messages via text or messaging apps, is by far the most popular way to communicate with ones friends. I say this, because Children desire to read and write, t
Tried since the 1960s (Score:2)
There have been attempts to use computers to teach people to read since the 1960s. Has any of those been successful? There must at least have been a few that stood out. So Can Microsoft's New Software Help Teach Children to Read? I guess so. There must be enough knowledge about it now.
Re:Tried since the 1960s [but once more unto... (Score:2)
Hmm... The FP wasn't as appealing to me as your comment. I'm going to throw out an idea for a different kind of literacy software, even though there is some risk Microsoft might steal the idea.
So my modified Subject is from Shakespeare. "Once more unto the breach", but since this is Slashdot and I don't want to spend so much time on it, the rest is just cut-and-pasted (from recent email). If anyone knows of such an app, then please send me a URL. Or if you know anyone who wants to develop such an app, I mig
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I know exactly one case where computers were useful for non-computer education: My kid-sister decided to learn English because there was a lot of stuff on the Internet that looked interesting to her but that she could not understand. That is it and the learning was quite conventionally done in school. That said, I was involved in several distance-education (computer) research projects. All failures on the education side. There was an old Italian architect in one of these projects with significant classical
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I have the handwriting of a third-grader, you insensitive clod!
But that's because I've used a keyboard almost exclusively for over 40 years. The last hand-written letter I wrote would have been sometime in the late 80s.
This seems like a mistake (Score:2)
The description sounds nothing like the ordinary process of helping a child learn to read. It also sounds significantly less useful than a parent or teacher following along with the child, offering appropriate cues, correction, and encouragement.
I highly doubt their product will be able to help a bored child stay on task, or know when they need to take a break.
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That's because the product is mainly to introduce kids to Microsoft's alleged software. Reading is merely a convenient vehicle to slap on the advertisements.
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This. These days, everything is about monetization, nothing is about making a good product.
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Other important factor: Literate parents that _read_ to their kids. That way kids learn that a) people they look up to can read and b) there are wonderful things in books. Once you get a kid hooked on stories, they will learn to read well. Fail to do that and they may never really master the skill.
Hehhe (Score:1)
Let's call this phase 1. Once they teach children to read maybe they can move onto teaching adults to read critically.
TL;DR (Score:2)
A potentially useful resource (Score:2)
I watched the demo. I've watched apps like this come & go over the past 20 years. They used to be on CD-ROMs & nowadays they're on online platforms. The app essentially *tests* pupils' knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, i.e. what written words sound like. It doesn't look like it actually *teaches* pupils how to sound out & blend graphemes into words, i.e. I didn't see any worked examples, demonstrations, or explicit focus on multiple related discreet items that can be inferred into g
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M365? (Score:2)
Admittedly I don't follow Microsoft that closely - but have they rebranded again? I thought it was O365, not M365.
Side note... the bundling seems like a silly - and destined to fail - attempt to reposition apps like Teams and Office so that home users might start subscribing. I don't know anyone who uses any of these apps for home use. I do know several people that are still riding older purchased-once versions of Office at home, but they have absolutely no interest in moving to a subscription - and there a
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Marketeers gonna market: What Is Microsoft 365? [pcmag.com]: "Microsoft 365 is a way for businesses, and now consumers as well, to subscribe to Office, Teams, and other Microsoft software. Here are the details you need to know."
On MS-Level? Sure (Score:2)
That meas half-assed, slow, and only exactly the words that were taught, nothing else. And, of course, they cannot read anything from competitors. May as well be a different language.
Maybe (Score:2)
Don't worry, it will be crushed again. (Score:1)
2nd language (Score:1)
Maybe, but it'll definitely give them glasses. (Score:2)