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Winning hackathon project is now helping millions of people worldwide to read and write
For years, Merlyne Graves spent several hours every weekend reading text aloud and recording it for her students who struggled with reading.
Graves, a fourth-grade English language arts teacher at Garfield Preparatory Academy in Washington, D.C., would line up 10 unused iPods she borrowed from the school, then read and record the text her class would work on the following week. Her improvised method helped introduce struggling readers to the text, but it was time-consuming and limited. That changed last December, when Graves got a Surface Pro and tapped into Microsoft’s online educator community. She discovered Microsoft Learning Tools, a set of free features created to help improve reading and writing, especially for people with learning disorders such as dyslexia and dysgraphia. Immersive Reader, the tools’ main feature, allows users to have content read aloud to them, change text size and background color, break words into syllables, increase space between letters, highlight one or more lines of text and highlight parts of speech. Graves immediately knew she’d found exactly what her students needed. “I thought, ‘This is going to be so awesome for my kids who struggle,’” she said. After just a few weeks of using Immersive Reader in her classroom, Graves noticed an improvement in her students’ reading. Struggling readers showed better fluency — reading quickly and accurately with proper expression — and stronger readers were able to focus on inferencing and higher-order thinking, she said. “I’ve noticed a change in a lot of their reading,” she said. “It is definitely making a difference.” That impact is being felt in classrooms around the U.S. and the world. More than 13 million people worldwide are using Learning Tools, up from 100,000 just a year ago. The tools are being used across applications and platforms in more than 40 languages. Their remarkable growth, from an employee hackathon project less than three years ago to a solution now used by millions of teachers and students worldwide, has surprised even their creators. “What came out of it was, frankly, more than what we initially anticipated,” said Jeff Petty, Microsoft’s Windows accessibility program lead, who was part of the hackathon team. “We had high hopes, but I don’t think we thought this was going to be as big as it is.”Petty soon met Mike Tholfsen, principal product manager for Microsoft Education, and put together a team of more than a dozen people to work on a dyslexia-focused project for Microsoft’s 2015 company-wide hackathon. The team included engineers from Microsoft’s office in Vancouver, B.C., who had developed a prototype for a dyslexic mode in OneNote. The combined team created an extension for OneNote that offered text-formatting tools to make reading, writing and note-taking easier. The project won the hackathon, edging out more than 3,300 others.
At the time, Tholfsen was the product manager for OneNote Class Notebook, an app that allows teachers to collaborate with students and set up personalized workspaces in a combined digital notebook. He’d been talking with teachers and school leaders around the country and using their feedback to grow the app. “I’m a huge fan of talking with teachers, meeting with teachers, bringing engineers to conferences to build empathy,” Tholfsen said. Tholfsen took the same approach to building out the OneNote extension, using feedback from educators to improve the tools’ features. Originally, Immersive Reader was designed only with black and white backgrounds, but after teachers told Tholfsen that some students with Irlen syndrome — a disorder that impacts the brain’s ability to process visual information — preferred reading with backgrounds in specific colors, the design team incorporated the colors into Immersive Reader. “That’s been one of our most popular features so far,” Tholfsen said.“You have no idea how much this has impacted people’s lives — and not just students, but anybody who has struggled with a reading disability.”
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – Etihad Airways, the national airline of the UAE, has once again successfully passed the biennial IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA).
Booking last minute? Emirates introduces special summer fares to 60 destinations
Emirates is offering travellers who haven’t booked their holidays yet a chance to avail special fares during the summer to 60 destinations within its global network. The offer applies to bookings starting today until 5 July 2018 and applies for travel until 31 March 2019.
Economy Class passengers can enjoy fares to London starting from AED 2,125; to Bangkok starting at AED 2,295; to Mumbai starting at AED 1,095; to Auckland starting at AED 6,435; and to Newark starting at AED 3,975. Business Class passengers can enjoy fares to London starting from AED 12,435; to Bangkok starting at AED 9,065; to Mumbai starting at AED 3,065; to Auckland starting at AED 16,395; and to Newark starting at AED 16,775. Emirates Skywards members can also now pool up to 100% of Skywards Miles earned on Emirates flights with family members with ‘My Family’, allowing them to redeem rewards faster than before. Passengers can also enjoy Emirates’ Home Check-in service which allows customers to check in for their flights from anywhere in Dubai. The service is available for customers across all classes travelling on Emirates flights and enables passengers to complete the security check and check-in, from the comfort of their home. Travellers on Emirates flight will enjoy the airline’s award winning in-flight entertainment system with up to 3,500 channels, as well as regionally inspired meals on-board prepared by award-winning chefs. For more information on Emirates, including how to book flights and a complete list of terms and conditions, visit www.emirates.ae, travel agent or through the local Emirates Sales Office. Terms & conditions apply.