We strive to make classroom tools accessible to every student, helping them feel supported regardless of any challenges they may face. With the latest updates to Microsoft Teams, we continue our work to empower students with solutions designed for their diverse needs and situations. We’ve highlighted our favorite updates below:

Ukrainian language support for auto-detect in Reading Progress

As educators welcome students who have fled Ukraine, finding ways to ensure their inclusion and continued learning is essential. We are proud to announce that we have globally rolled out auto-detect speech detection for the Ukrainian language in Reading Progress. This brings our total number of supported languages and locales to 105.

Reading Progress, a free tool that supports educators in building students’ reading fluency, allows you to translate passages into any supported language right in Microsoft Word. You can use the auto-detect feature in Reading Progress to mark the student’s reading accuracy and fluency in any of our 105 supported languages, allowing them to continue developing fluency in their native language while also providing some context to help them engage in content learning with their classmates in a novel language.

This means that with auto-detect in Ukrainian, educators who do not speak Ukrainian can still get a sense of a student’s reading level and adapt to support individual student growth. In addition, Reading Progress recordings allow educators to check students’ progress more regularly while freeing up time for relationship building and providing the differentiated support that students in crisis need.

Immersive Reader and Microsoft Translator also support for learning in the Ukrainian language and are available in tools across Microsoft 365, helping educators to differentiate and providing an entry point for displaced Ukrainian students no matter the reading level. With Immersive Reader, we support Ukrainian read aloud, as well as Ukrainian translation between 100+ languages.

Read Aloud support for Somali and Zulu in Immersive Reader

We are excited to announce that Read Aloud for the much-requested languages of Somali and Zulu is now rolled out globally in Immersive Reader.

Explore the languages supported by Immersive Reader, then head over to the Tech Community blog to read more about the latest updates.