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Learning Tools For Microsoft OneNote May Be One Of The Most Disruptive Education Technologies Yet

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Last week, Microsoft quietly released a public preview of “Learning Tools for OneNote.” This Microsoft hackathon winner is an add-in for OneNote designed to improve the reading and writing experience for students. When Jeff Petty, the accessibility lead for Windows for education, showed me the tools, I was blown away. Learning Tools for OneNote was originally created for dyslexics, but it is game changer for everybody. It illustrates just how powerful the education technologies of the future can and will be.

Just about every day some entrepreneur or their PR/marketing person sends me notice of some new education technology. Sometimes it is a game, sometimes an adaptive learning engine, sometimes a tool for quizzing, or polling, or managing data. Most of these are really just digital versions of traditional classroom tools and practices. They are more efficient iterations of technologies that already exist. Consider for example, smartphone-based classroom polling platforms. While they certainly add speed, ease, anonymity, and instant data analytics, they are hardly innovative: children have been raising their hands for decades.

Learning Tools for OneNote, however, is an example of that rare piece of edtech that actually promises to bring something new to the learning experience. And ironically, it does it by leveraging a variety of already existing Microsoft technologies like Bing’s speech recognition, simultaneous audio text playback, and natural language processing. It uses these technologies to make reading and writing more accessible to all students.

(Photo credit: Microsoft News Center)

Although the Learning Tools product was created as part of a project that aimed to help students with learning differences, any educator who tinkers with these tools will see that if they are creatively incorporated into early literacy curricula, they will make a huge impact for all students. This is truly an example of universal design—the practice of imagining solutions that naturally serve the full spectrum of diverse users. Instead of creating specialized or adapted solutions for different users, a practice which inevitably creates a privileged norm and an underserved “other,” universal design, or “design for all,” creates one solution that works for everyone. Wikipedia writes: “Curb cuts or sidewalk ramps, essential for people in wheelchairs but also used by all, are a common example.”

Universal design seems especially important when it comes to literacy. Reading is an essential competency. Once a student gets too far behind in reading, they will soon find themselves behind in every subject. After all, in math and science using the text books also requires literacy skills. Microsoft has imagined a technology that can truly make learning reading, writing, and comprehension easier for everyone.

The software basically just adds a collection of tools to OneNote, many of which allow users to format text in a plethora of ways. For example, one of the tools shows text in newly created “fluent fonts,” allowing readers to adjust both the letter spacing and the number of words on the line.

Researchers have known for years that reading happens faster and with better comprehension when the text is presented in different visual styles. In fact, special education teachers have embraced tools like tablets and e-readers because they allow dyslexic students to change fonts, background colors, and spacing. OneNote’s Learning Tools now take readers a significant step beyond the flexibility of ebooks, because you can use them to read anything. You can either copy text into a note, or you can use the Office Lens app to photograph a page of a book and the OCR (optical character recognition) engine will convert it into text that the learning tools can manipulate.

There’s more. This toolbox can do more than just manipulate spacing and color. Using Microsoft’s natural language processing technology, Learning Tools for OneNote has a reading comprehension mode that can identify and highlight parts of speech—verbs, nouns, adjectives. I can imagine how my eight- and ten-year old children could use this to analyze their own writing, increasing their grammatical understanding.

Learning Tools for OneNote can also separate words into syllables—a particular kind of text-segmentation that has been shown to improve both phonics and spelling skills. Anyone with a kindergartener has likely seen their children practicing identifying syllables. Imagine how powerful it would be if students could reinforce this practice by reading text that can show bullet marks between syllables. For some children with learning differences, within-word segmentation has been shown to improve comprehension, albeit at the expense of speed.

Learning Tools can also identify subordinate clauses and mark them using visualizations. Linguists understand that one of the differences between written and oral language is that we provide subtle grammatical cues when we speak—shifts in intonation, for example. For new readers and dyslexic readers, it is often hard to follow the syntax of a sentence without these verbal indicators. Learning Tools for OneNote can automatically insert markings that define subordinate clauses.

Learning Tools also includes a new dictation tool that uses the same speech recognition engine as Microsoft’s Cortana. This makes it much more accurate than what you used to find in Dragon Naturally Speaking, or Microsoft Word. This tool is not just listening for words and comparing them against a database, it is also listening for meaning and syntax. I wrote the majority of this post speaking to the dictation tools and found that I only had to adjust a few words here and there, and insert punctuation.

As we get move closer and closer to the inevitable edtech revolution, it is becoming increasingly clear that any products not prepared with accessibility options for children with learning differences just won’t be able to compete with those which feature universal design. Developers capable of creating truly accessible products, like Learning Tools for OneNote, will undoubtedly dominate.

Listen up developers: District, university, and enterprise customers may love your product, but if it doesn’t serve all students—if it’s not designed for all—it will never make it through the complex institutional evaluation processes that ordinarily precede large-scale purchasing. That may be frustrating to small independent developers and bootstrap start-ups, but in the long run it is in the best interest of the students.

Listen up teachers: If you want to try out Learning Tools for OneNote you can download the add-in here: http://www.onenote.com/learningtools. If you already use OneNote, it is worth it just to get the improved dictation tool. If you have students with learning differences, you’ll want to teach them how to use these tools immediately. And I suspect that just the ability to photograph a page of text, project it big enough for students to see, and identify parts of speech on-the-fly, will change the way you think about teaching basic grammar.

 

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