Pear Deck: Differentiate with the Immersive Reader Tool

By Nicole Norwood, Weaver Elementary

In today’s digital learning environment, Pear Deck and Immersive Readers have become essential for student engagement. This post will explore how it works and how you can use it effectively in your classroom.

What Is Pear Deck and Immersive Readers?

• Pear Deck’s integration with Microsoft’s Immersive Reader feature allows for differentiation in the classroom.

• The Immersive Reader feature can be easily embedded into your Pear Deck lessons for student accessibility.

Why Use It in Education?

Immersive Reader gives students access to a powerful set of tools with wide-ranging benefits that include:

• Increasing fluency for multilingual learners

• Helping build confidence for emerging readers learning to read at higher levels

• Offering text decoding solutions for students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia

• Providing translation of words or the entire text

How to Get Started:

1. Enable the integration in Pear Deck teacher settings:

To use Immersive Reader, simply go to your Pear Deck settings page (Pear Deck Home > My Account > Settings). Go to the Immersive Reader setting and turn it on. This setting applies to all future Sessions until you turn it off.

Once enabled, students will have access to supports such as line focus, translation, and picture dictionary.

2. Help students access and understand Immersive Reader:

When participating in a Pear Deck Session, students can activate Immersive Reader by selecting the icon in the lower right corner of the Student View. Doing so allows them to view the text from the Pear Deck slide in a format that helps the student follow along as it reads the text aloud, word by word. Each word is highlighted as it is read, further supporting the aural-visual connection.

3. Use Immersive Reader to help students adjust pace and text:

Students can also adjust settings in the Immersive Reader interface such as the pace of dictation, text size, and spacing between words. Learners can change the reading voice and the background color, which helps give students a sense of ownership of their learning.

4. Syllabic breakdown:

The Immersive Reader has a grammar component that highlights nouns, verbs, and adjectives and breaks down words by syllables.

5. Translation capabilities:

For English Language Learners, Immersive Reader can translate words or the entire text into over 60 languages, over 40 of which can be read aloud.

Best Practices & Tips:

Immersive Reader moves through the text boxes in the order they were created. It you have multiple text boxes on one slide, be conscious of what order they should be read - or better yet, utilize one text box with intentional spacing.

Immersive Reader cannot read text within an image. To make that text accessible. create a text box under those images to "reinforce" text, just as you might write a caption for a picture. If you decide you don't want anyone to see the repeated text below, simply change the text's color to match the slide's background color - which effectively makes it "invisible."

For better grammar comprehension for students who may have trouble viewing specific colors, be sure to explain to learners they can adjust the colors for various parts of speech in the sidebar as seen in this screenshot.

If you're building a Pear Deck Multiple Choice slide, Immersive Reader won't be able to see the options you've created for students, Add the options onto the slice as text boxes as well to ensure all students can utilize Immersive Readers' capabilities and understand the options to choose from.

By incorporating Pear Deck and Immersive Readers into your teaching practice, you can differentiate and allow greater accessibility to all learners. Give it a try, and watch how it enhances learning in your classroom!

Links to Resources:

• Immersive Reader Integration FAQs

• Video for Setting Up the Immersive Reader in Pear Deck

I encourage you to use this tool within this grading cycle! I would love to hear how it is working in your classroom. Also, let me know if you need any support in implementing the Immersive Reader in Pear Deck.

I used AI for brainstorming only and crafted the content myself.