Microsoft Flip
Flip is an educational video discussion platform that can be used by teachers, students, and families to create and share videos. The functionality of this platform is appealing in that teachers can post any type of resource by presenting a topic or sharing questions, which can then be answered by the students in the class with short videos of their own making. Through Flip, teachers can create “grids” to facilitate discussions using short videos produced with their mobile devices. Each grid created with Flip is like a noticeboard where teachers can pose questions, called “topics”, and students can post video responses that are displayed in a tiled grid. Grids can be shared with classes, small groups or a community of users interested in a certain topic. Each grid can contain an unlimited number of topics and each topic can contain an unlimited number of answers. Topics can refer to a text or include a resource such as an image, video, animated gifs, emoji, or attachment.
Microsoft Immersive Reader
Microsoft’s Immersive Reader is a free tool to assist with reading and comprehension. It provides a full-screen reading experience and improves the focus on the text by changing font size and style, text and line spacing and background colour. It is designed to increase readability of text in Microsoft applications through the use of assistive technology accommodations for people with print disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and vision impairment. It’s an interactive reading tool designed to help students improve their reading, comprehension and grammar skills. It also makes texts more accessible to learners at any level. Immersive Reader can be used alongside the Accessibility Checker to improve the layout of documents, or can be used to make a document more accessible without editing the document further.
Immersive Reading operation: it reads texts aloud to students while simultaneously highlighting the word being read. This allows the text to become accessible to students of different ages and abilities and helps emerging readers learn to recognize new words. Whit it is possible to choose different narration speeds and voices. Users can also adjust the spacing between words and font size; highlight specific parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; break apart the text of words into syllables; hear audio recordings of words spoken in different languages; translate text and see words represented as pictures.
Microsoft Teams
Teams is a digital hub offering meetings, content, and apps in one location. Teachers can create collaborative classes, interact in professional learning communities, and communicate with school staff.
Microsoft Teams includes a range of built-in accessibility features to simplify lessons and homework for students, including those with different abilities, students with visual or hearing impairments, and English language learners.
Reflect in Teams
Reflect in Teams is a check-in app to support connection, expression, and learning. It helps students recognize and navigate their emotions by providing regular opportunities to share and be heard.
Reflect is a tab in Teams for Education that can help broaden learners’ emotional vocabulary and deepen empathy for their peers while also providing valuable feedback to educators for a healthy classroom community.
This free check-in app uses emojis and characters to help students develop emotional granularity (an individual’s ability to differentiate between the specificity of their emotions). Research demonstrates that explicit teaching of social and emotional skills improves student academic and behavioural performance and has life-long positive impacts.
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