Hi, my name is Mike Phelps and Ann. I'm a product manager on
the Microsoft Education team. I'm going to be talking about
what's new in the inclusive classroom and I'll be covering
the Microsoft Learning tool set and the things that are brand
new. Now, if you want to follow me on Twitter for the latest
updates or check out my YouTube channel, many of the things I'm
talking about today I'll be showing there and also all the
updates that I'll be posting in the future about all of our
inclusive and accessible tools you can find there.
Now at a high level, Microsoft's mission in education is to
empower every single person on the planet to achieve more. I
like to say that doesn't mean 84% of the people or 96.4% of
the students. It means empowering 100% of people and
especially during remote learning. This is so so critical
to not leave anyone behind, so this is built into our mission
when we talk about inclusion.
This is how we think about Microsoft in the inclusive world
and working with students, teachers and schools. Let
students grow their independence and their potential. How can we
let teachers reach every single learner? And how can we let
schools build their reputations and have equity and inclusion as
a key part of their strategic vision? And that's where our
platform we believe can help.
In terms of all the Iaccessible technologies, Microsoft already
has and I won't be covering all of them today, but these are the
six categories in how we break this down. You can see learning
visual, hearing, mobility, neurodiversity, mental health,
eh? Really, wide spectrum and we have a ton of free products that
are built in an already available. I like to say built
in mainstream non stigmatising and free. If you've never
explored the wide range there's a great link here and this deck
is also available.
Afterwards. This link has a big sway that's put together or we
cover all these things. A lot of people come to me and say all my
gosh, Mike, I had no idea I had access to all of these great
tools already. I didn't even know. So don't let yourself be
one of those people. Make sure you know about everything we
have because during remote learning this is even more
critical. The way I talk about this is the inclusive classroom.
We inclusively design our tools to work for all students. They
might help certain students more than others, but they work for
everyone, and it's reading, writing, math and communication,
and I'll be talking about a set of these and the new
capabilities coming out today.
One of my favorite sites in the world is the MEC Accessibility
site. This came out in the last couple of months and it is
incredible. It breaks down all of our inclusive tools across
all the categories so you can have everything from reading,
writing and math to speech and language, mobility, visual
impairments, deaf and hard of hearing, and it breaks it down
so you can drill into any category and see all the tools
available for each type. You can go as broad as you want or as
deep as you want, and it's a
great site. Highly recommend bookmarking it.
Now we're going to start off with reading, and in particular
the immersive reader. Now immersive reader was inclusively
designed to take the latest science and research around
reading and focus inclusively on dyslexia originally. But then we
took many of these tools and it rolled out into all sorts of
Microsoft apps, and it's helping people not only with dyslexia,
it's helping with ADHD. It's helping with vision impairments.
It's helping people who are non native speakers or English
language learners. Now the immersive reader's been built
into many products like.
Werdann, OneNote and teams an flipgrid that now we've made
this available as a service that means anyone in the world can
integrate the immersive reader.
So examples of who's integrated the immersive reader into their
tools. You can see Code org recently Canvas, nearpod,
bunsie, wakeland, pear deck, endless list, and we're going to
be adding it to more places. So if you have a partner that you
work with or a provider, make sure they know that they can
integrate the immersive reader as well. The link on how to do
that is right up at the top here, and we're always adding
more and more partners all the
time. Here's the example of code org. You can see right here that
you click the immersive reader and it will launch it, and all
of those capabilities of the immersive reader like Read Aloud
and Translation and Line Focus Picture Dictionary. All those
things are available in this case in Code org.
We're also rolling out the immersive reader into
Outlook desktop and the Windows 10 Mail app. You can
see an example here. Think about all those people who
might be working at home or doing school from home. If
they use outlook on the desktop, they'll now have
that immersive reader and you can see an example here
with the line focus and the read aloud that is rolling
out right now in November and going into December.
Another place that we've recently enabled. This is inside
of OneNote, Windows 10. If you have a form, so I've put a form
here in one note and this can be a form generated from a math
quiz. It could be just a form where you paste the link, but
you can now enable the immersive reader on that embedded form. So
in this case you can have inclusive math on the form that
you generated in a practice quiz. If you've seen the
practice quiz in one note that came out about a year ago, you
could generate a practice quiz.
And inserts and embeds that form onto the page. Now that
form, you can enable the immersive reader. That means
you could read aloud math. You could translate story problems
into different languages. All those things in the form an
immersive reader.
We also have the math solver app. This is a free app. It uses
our OneNote Math engine technology. It's free on iOS or
Android and it lets you take a photo, kinda like photo math of
a math problem, either text or written math, and then use the
immersive reader on the solver. So I'll show what that looks
like play. So here I'm going to launch the math solver app, take
a picture and that's inking. It runs OCR and you can see I
choose to solve that problem, and there's the immersive
reader. Right next to the math solver. So I've launched the
immersive reader. All those things work on this story.
Problems read Aloud picture dictionary. I can even go change
the background color and translate all of those things
from taking a photo of a math problem. So take the photo, it
runs OCR and then you can get the solver step by steps and
then run the immersive reader. And there I've translated it
into Spanish. It's pretty incredible technology. This is
free and it's rolled out very recently. It's called the math
solver. IOS or Android?
We've also announced immersive Reader's coming to PowerPoint.
Here's a PowerPoint slide. I've selected text, right click and
choose the immersive reader. You get all those same capabilities,
but that is now built into PowerPoint for the web.
This will be rolling out probably in late December, early
January, and it's going to come to Power Point Web 1st and we
hope to bring it to other places later. It's also coming to
OneDrive. I've selected a file here in one drive and I go up to
open in the upper left and you'll see open an immersive
reader, so we're really bringing this to as many places as
possible. So now in one drive any document that you select,
you'll be able to open that in
the immersive reader. Another one that we just rolled out.
Think about PowerPoint designer and think about people who have
challenges with lots of small motor movements. Or maybe people
who have challenges getting their PowerPoint slides
organized properly. This is designer for word. It's the same
concept and it uses AI to be able to find small little
details in your document and automatically fix them up and
then suggest templates you can use on top of that to make your
documents beautiful. So hit play here and show the video. I go on
the right hand side and choose
designer. There is some small formatting fixes that it found
and I'm going to try to apply those so small little font sizes
and styles. It automatically picks those up and can fix them
so you can see there is a little error that I made it found that
there is another one, so there's a set of little small details
that it will quickly find and save a massive amount of time. I
can also go over and choose a different style so all these
styles here I can choose it and immediately my entire document
is cleaned up and looks beautiful. And so here's a
couple of examples I'm choosing.
You can see this is the designer in Word for the web.
This recently rolled out and it's going to be available to
everyone very soon. So if you go to the Home tab in Word for
the web, you'll see Designer showing up right here and
that's great one to give prices for. Great for writing.
Now teams teams is really important. It's our hub for
education. Everything can flow through teams, classes, staff,
PLC and all of our assignments. An M365 apps all inside of teams
and there's so many capabilities, everything from
immersive reader to translation, live captions, Accessibility
checker. First off together mode you might have seen together
mode in your teams recently. It's just finished rolling out.
Some people think oh, it's a little gimmicky. Well, it turns
out together mode.
There's science brain science research behind it, and it shows
that when you normally look at all these grids like on zoom or
on teams Gallery mode, it can be very stressful on the brain and
cause exhaustion. So think about students with ADHD and learning
and attention issues. That can be really hard to. Science shows
that with together mode where your eye focuses on the same
person in the same place mapped against that reality background,
it actually is much easier and less exhausting. So for
students. Need that extra support with learning and
attention. Together mode can be a really key feature for them.
Spotlight allows the educator to highlight either themselves or a
specific student, so it's great for focus and attention. So hit
play here as the teacher. I'm going to go down and I'm going
to put attention on Chelsea so everyone can focus on her. I
click the dot dot dot and choose
Spotlight. Now Chelsea's in front of the class. This could
also be the teacher, so you could spotlight yourself in
front of the class and it's really nice to be able to keep
on the focus and attention. You can see the icon here is the
Spotlight icon on Chelsea.
I can also stop spotlighting by going up to the top and click
stop spotlighting, so this is already rolled out right now in
teams meetings it's in teams desktop meetings as well as Mac.
Another one is focused mode. This rolled out recently and
think about students with ADHD and learning and attention
issues. So in this case I'll go to the dot dot dot menu and
I'm going to choose focus and what happens is all those
videos along the bottom will go away, so this lets me focus
really on the content. So if a slide is being shared or
content, I can make all those videos go away when I choose
focus mode that has recently rolled out and is available.
Captions so speaker Attribution and transcription. These are
incredible features for students that are deaf and hard of
hearing. It could be for other reasons why you just want to
have the transcript available, and we've recently rolled this
out with speaker Attribution so we had live captions in teams,
but now it's getting better, so I'm going to hit play here and
show the video. So I'm going to share some content with my class
and I'm going to turn on live captions and you're going to
start seeing the speaker Attribution, so there's my name
that captions are going as I'm talking. I can also start
recording and turn on transcripts so transcription
happens, and also that in a minute now it's other people in
the class are talking down lower. You're going to see that
speaker Attribution there is Abby and Gabby says some talking
and we're talking, and it's describing our name next to
who's talking, which is really
nice. Now when I'm done, I could stop recording and the entire
recording with the transcript.
Is available, I can even turn on the transcripts on the right
hand side here. Start transcription everything in the
meeting is right there with the person who was saying it.
Now at the end, when I'm fully done, I stopped the meeting and
you're going to see the transcript automatically comes
with the video and I can download that as a Word
document. Or VTi can open that transcript so you can see here
the transcript for the meeting is open afterwards and you can
see exactly who was talking and what was being said. So this is
a great inclusive feature that is available. It's coming out in
late November, so right about now and will be rolling out into
December. This is also part of
teams meetings. Breakout rooms, breakout rooms is now fully
rolled out. I know a lot of people were excited about that
and waiting for it. Now why? I breakout rooms? That is because
with breakout rooms, all those features that we talked about
together mode, we could have the live captions spotlight.
Everything that is in a teams meeting for Accessibility is
also available in breakout rooms, so that's just good to
know that all these meetings features that are inclusive and
accessible. Will also work in breakout rooms.
Now coming soon. This is one of my very favorites. I think this
is going to be incredible, specially for signing deaf and
hard of hearing and also focus and attention. It's called
dynamic views and this is a rotator repeating gift. But you
can see you can overlay yourself or the teacher in front of the
screen. But also you're going to see on the upper right here.
There's people who are pin so it allows you to customize
different video streams. An overlay in a way that is dynamic
and makes the most sense for you. So if you have someone
who's using sign language but then you also have the educator.
Those scenarios will work. You want to have the student
overlaid in front of the content. That can work as well.
Lots of different options. Dynamic views will roll out the
very end of 2020, so stay stay tuned. It will be coming soon.
The other one is meeting recap. This is just nice because when
you have the recording in the transcript and other information
that can all be now packaged up in a nice user interface, that's
called meeting recap. This is something that's rolling out at
the end of 2020, and while it's not necessarily Accessibility
and inclusion focused, it is very nice in terms of packaging
this information, like the transcript all up in one place.
That is a quick tour of all the inclusive and iaccessible
features that are either brand new or coming soon, but also to
make sure you know about our quick tips and resources. You
saw a lot of things here and you might say how can I get
training? How can I learn more?
First off, make sure that you know about our interactive
guides for reading, writing, math and communication. There
are many, many capabilities I didn't talk about today, but
these are web based. Any student can look at them, any educator,
any parent, and they are click through an interactive guides.
Highly recommend that you check these out and share them. So if
people want some really quick PD, these are click through an
nice. I also have a YouTube channel like I mentioned in
the beginning. I put lots and lots of short and sweet 234
minute videos on inclusive and accessible technologies. Quick
tip teams and meetings, videos, anything that an
educator wants. I will typically be posting and I
keep posting to my YouTube channel so I suggest you check
this out. Subscribe to this and I'll be posting more and
more on that Channel.
And at the very end, just so you know that we have
resources so immersive reader resources, teams for
education, resources, OneNote, education,
resources, all sorts of great stuff here. And I encourage
you to check these out.
And Lastly, here's a link to this presentation. You can
download it, you can share it. You can watch it over and
over again if you need to. Also, my email address and
Twitter handle highly encourage you to Mail me if
you have feedback, reach out to me on Twitter. I'm highly
active. I look forward to feedback that you might have
and thank you very much for this content session at
Besty. I hope you have a great rest of your time here
in this virtual conference.