Discover other Literacy in the Digital Age tools

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Microsoft Lens

What is Microsoft Lens?

Microsoft Lens (formerly “Office Lens”) is a great way to capture information from documents, whiteboards, handwritten memos, books, magazines or anything else containing text that you want to import but not manually type out yourself.

Examples of how Microsoft Lens can be used:

Scanning a piece of text from a novel, magazine or manual you would like to import in Reading Progress to use for an Oral Reading Record activity.
Scanning a piece of student work written by hand that you would like to project on your Smartboard or share with a parent.
Scanning a newspaper article and attaching it to a Teams assignment as a Word Document.

Video describing the scanning functions of the Kyocera Photocopier, a common model in our schools.

(Head over to the 2-minute mark to learn about the OCR feature)

To learn how to do this on a Canon Copier, watch this video!

Learn how to use the app in this video

Check out the official How-to Guide as well on the Microsoft website!

Did you know you can also use a photocopier to do the same thing?

To allow a document to be used in a variety of ways, you are looking for the "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) feature on your photocopier. This feature is often found in the "File Type" setting in the scanning menus.

Find out how to do this in the video on the left!

If your school has a different model than the two found on the left and you are unsure of where to find the OCR feature on your photocopier, ask your school secretary for help.

Immersive Reader

How to use Immersive Reader in under 5 minutes!

A deeper dive into the tool! (15 minutes)

What is Immersive Reader?

Microsoft's Immersive Reader is a free tool, built into Word, OneNote, Outlook, Office Lens, Microsoft Teams, Reading Progress, Forms, Flipgrid, Minecraft Education Edition and the Edge browser, that implements proven techniques to improve reading and writing for people regardless of their age or ability.

By allowing all students to have text read to them; to change the fonts, spacing and colour of paragraphs; and to use a variety of focusing tools, Immersive Reader can help improve comprehension by...

Supporting fluency for English language learners or readers of other languages
Helping to build confidence for emerging readers as they learn to read at higher levels
Offering text decoding solutions for students with dyslexia and other learning needs
Providing individual word or whole text translation into over 100 languages (over 40 of which can be read aloud)
Providing scaffolding to ensure students with a variety of learning needs have access to grade-level texts

Try the Immersive Reader Interactive tool yourself!

Use this interactive tool to experience all of the features your students can find inside Immersive Reader.

This exploration takes between 20 and 30 minutes.

Sources of Texts

Whether it be used as a hook, as an Oral Reading Record text to be used in Reading Progress, as a conversation starter or as a source of information, finding the right text can sometimes be tricky. Peruse the different banks of texts below to find age- and level-appropriate texts for your class!

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