This past summer, Microsoft released its Reading Progress app, that enables students to independently read aloud, record themselves, and grow their reading skills while allowing educators to better support students' progression. It has been a game-changer for running records, which now can be done independently through the app. For a full breakdown on Reading Progress and it’s potential, check out our blog post here.
Other than running records, another time consuming task is assessing sight words. Sitting down with students and going through the list of words is a daunting task and can take up a lot of time. But, can we use Reading Progress to automatically grade a list of sight words? The answer is: YES! In this blog post you’ll learn:
(click on any subheading to jump to that section)
How Can Reading Progress Automatically Assess Sight Words?
How Does it Look When Reading Progress Assesses Sight Words?
How Do I set Up Reading Progress to Automatically Grade Sight Words?
I get it! So…What do I need to know? Any troubleshooting steps?
Download Free Sight Word Templates (made for Reading Progress)
See it in action! Assessing Sight Words Using Reading Progress
How Can Reading Progress Automatically Assess Sight Words?
Reading Progress is a ⚡️FREE⚡️ tool that can be found within Microsoft Teams. Imagine if the developers of the Flipgrid Shorts Camera, Immersive Reader and Microsoft Teams all sat down at a table and collaborated on what to do next. Reading Progress uses the technology from the Flipgrid Shorts Camera to record a video of students as they read. The same type of technology that is used in Microsoft’s Immersive Reader then takes the video and intelligently looks for errors, mispronunciations, miscues and more - AUTOMATICALLY. You read that right. The technology does all the work. A full report is provided to the educator, who can go back and view the recorded video and listen back to how the student performed. If the technology marks a student as reading a word correct / incorrect, the educator has the ability to change it on their end.
But how does this look when it comes to sight words? Reading Progress takes the text and listens for errors when being read aloud. So, technically you don’t need to have a full paragraph or even sentence for it to start working. Whatever words appear in the document is what the program will look for. If you put the words: red, yellow, me, and see, it will expect to hear those words read in that order. You don’t even need to put commas in between the words!
How Does it Look When Reading Progress Assesses Sight Words?
Giving Sight Word assessments through Reading Progress is best performed when you assess 10-20 words at-a-time. This makes for a quick turnaround from your students, who can easily get in and read off the words efficiently. Once your students log onto Teams and click on “Assignments,” they are able to select the appropriate Sight Word list and then start reciting them. Here’s how it looks from the student’s perspective.
To the student, the focus is on the words. Once they read through them, they click the “I’m done” button, then “Turn in.” The recording is uploaded as a video and can be watched back by the teacher.
The uploaded video will also produce a full report, only available to the educator. This report will indicate any incorrect words. Educators have the ability to watch back the recording of the student reading off the words. If a word is marked incorrectly, it can easily be changed from the drop down menu. This is also a great place to “jump to a word,” or listen to a specific word that the student missed.
Since we give our students 10 words at-a-time, we can easily grade them with a /10 score. These short assessments are just-right for the students to get through confidently - and it makes listening back to them easier for me!
How Do I set Up Reading Progress to Automatically Grade Sight Words?
Setting up Sight Word Assessments using Reading Progress can be done in several clicks. Follow these steps to get your students started, or click here for a video tutorial:
Launch Microsoft Teams, then click on “Assignments.”
Click on “Create” and then select “Assignment.”
Select the Team that you wish to assign the assignment to, then click “Next.”
Enter an appropriate title for the assignment. For example: “Sight Words 1-10.”
Under “Instructions,” click on attach. Then, select Reading Progress from the drop down menu.
On the next screen, click “Upload Word or PDF” (for a free download of all 220 sight word templates, click here).
Upload your sight word assessment, then take a look at the information on the right. You won’t need to enter a reading level, but you may want to limit the number of attempts your students have per sight word list (see the troubleshooting section below). Change this to fit your preferences, then click “Next.”
The due date defaults to the same day, so adjust it to appropriately give your students time to complete the task. Once you do, select “Assign.”
Your students will receive a notification that the assignment is ready. Now, sit back and wait for them to start submitting it! Once they do, go in through the educators dashboard and view their work! Need to actually “see” how this is done? Check out the tutorial below!
I get it! So…What do I need to know? Any troubleshooting steps?
So this sounds great, but…what could go wrong? What should I look out for? Any tips?
Now that we’ve done this for a while, here are our two most important takeaways:
1. When creating your sight word lists, only use the words that you want the students to recognize. For example, do not add a title to the body of the document. Just list the words. Otherwise, the students will need to read and recognize them when recording. IF they say something wrong, it will mark them wrong.
Takeaway: Just keep it simple! Add only the words!
2. When creating the assignment, change the number of attempts to 1. You don’t want students submitting more than one attempt at the sight words, so be sure to change that setting from the defaulted “unlimited” to “1.”
Takeaway: Explain to the students that they will only have one attempt and that they will need to do their best. If they make a mistake, encourage them to restate the words in their original video. If they stop, they will NOT be able to upload another video (if you have the attempts set to 1).
Download Free Sight Word Templates
(made for Reading Progress)
We’ve made things even easier for you with these sight word templates! This is a direct link to download the entire folder of all the Word documents containing ten words per list (for a total of 22). Just download them, then upload them as your assignment(s) on Teams! 🙌🏻
See it in action!
Coming soon!
-- Stay tuned for more Sight Word ideas that you can use in your classroom! Be sure to follow us on social media (@TheMerrillsEDU everywhere) for more! 👓👗
For more tips, tricks and lesson ideas for making learning more interACTIVE, check out our books The InterACTIVE Class and Flipgrid in the InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
