This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Last year, Reading Coach launched as part of Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams. Reading Coach provides students with personalized and independent practice that Reading Progress identifies a student has mispronounced. Reading Coach has proven to be popular not only with educators, but especially with students. We’ve heard stories from teachers of students “demanding more passages” from the teacher, and that they’ve set personal goals of improvement. To enable students to practice with content that aligns with their interests and focus, without the need for a teacher to make an assignment in Teams, we are rolling out Reading Coach as part of the Immersive Reader in many of our M365 apps. This will be available in school, consumer and work accounts, and in 116 languages and locales.
Now anyone using Immersive Reader, with any content they choose, can go to the Reading Preferences pane, enable Reading Coach to practice reading out loud and receive focused practice exercises. When the Reading Coach switch is enabled, the Play button in the Immersive Reader changes to a Microphone button. Students can select the Edit button near the Reading Coach toggle to customize parts of the coach inluding the voice, feedback style, and more. When the microphone button is selected, a dialog pops up that encourages the student to prepare to read out loud.
Once the student selects Let’s read, a 3…2…1 countdown appears, and practice begins. The student reads out loud for as long as they like while Immersive Reader “listens” to their performance. When finished, the reader selects Stop, and a reading report immediately provides data on their reading speed, accuracy, time spent reading, and any words to practice.
If the Practice Words button is clicked, the Reading Coach pops up to allow personalized practice. The Reading Coach interface is the exact same as the one in Reading Progress in Teams.
The initial set of apps that Reading Coach in Immersive Reader is available include Word for web, OneNote for web, Desktop, Mac and iPad, Teams Assignments, Flip and Minecraft Education. We expect to bring Reading Coach to more apps in the near future.
Updates to Education Insights Premium for Reading Progress
We’re excited to share that Education Insights Premium(including all Reading Progress data) is now included in all versions of Microsoft 365 Education including our no-cost Office 365 A1 license. Education Insights Premium enables education leaders to monitor student academic progress and wellbeing across their organization to help improve learning outcomes with actionable insights. Built with student safety, privacy, and security in mind, it helps schools support students while maintaining compliance with industry standards. Below is an example of a Reading Progress report across an entire school system.
Reading comprehension questions in Reading Progress
Our reading fluency app Reading Progress, launched in Microsoft Teams in fall of 2021. Reading Progress supports educators in increasing the frequency of reading fluency evaluations, helping them to differentiate more powerfully to support students on their fluency journey. The #1 request from educators and schools has been a desire to add reading comprehension questions for the student to complete after they read. We heard educator’s request and are excited to announce that we will be adding reading comprehension question support to reading progress later this year! Using Microsoft Forms technology, educators will be able to assess not only students’ fluency, but also their understanding, right in Reading Progress. Educators will be able to provide students with access to the questions prior to reading if they wish, a scaffolding strategy that can help students learn to read with purpose. The auto-grading capabilities of Microsoft Quiz will also be included to streamline grading of multiple-choice questions. We expect to have comprehension questions in private testing later in late spring of 2023.
Reading with expression (prosody) in Reading Progress
Reading fluency is composed of three pillars – speed, accuracy, and expression. The initial version of Reading Progress uses auto-detect to help track reading speed and accuracy, but historically an educator needs to listen to each student independently to gauge their expression.
With our forthcoming Expression update, Reading Progress will automatically identify students’ performance on aspects of prosody including monotone reading, long pauses, not pausing for a period or comma, voice inflection for question marks or exclamation points, and even the stress of multi-syllable words. Student expression results will be available in the teacher review experience, alongside accuracy and correct words per minute. Later, this information will be added to the student’s view of their returned work and incorporated in Insights so it can be easily monitored over time. Reading expression updates will begin rolling out to Reading Progress in late spring.
With the introduction of Reading Coach in Immersive Reader and the continued evolution of Reading Progress, we hope to maintain students’ excitement for and growth in literacy while supporting educators as they work to help every student reach their fluency goals.
Mike Tholfsen Group Product Manager Microsoft Education
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With global volatility and inflation impacting organizations across all industries, business agility has never been more important. Leaders turn to finance teams to get real-time insight into business performance and recommendations on future initiatives that will help them thrive amid disruption. But finance teams are overwhelmed with manual tasks, cobbling together data, and disconnected teams. Achieving game-changing business agility begins with augmenting the human ingenuity of your people with intelligent process automation.
When it comes to reimagining processes with AI, automation, and analytics, many finance leaders don’t know where to start. This year, at the third annual Finance Reimagined digital event, we will delve into real-world best practices from Microsoft and industry leaders that will help you prioritize the right cost optimization, growth acceleration, and workforce transformation initiatives.
Finance Reimagined 2023
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)
Finance Reimagined: Bringing the future of finance into focus
Finance Reimagined is a virtual event bringing together finance leaders from around the world. On February 28, 2023, from 9:00 AM to10:15 AM PT, you can unpack the latest trends shaping the future of finance including the strategic evolution of the role of CFO within organizations, maintaining commitments to multiple stakeholders and bottom lines against a challenging economic environment, and the opportunities to drive transformation through the partnership of human ingenuity and AI.
Discover what’s top of mind for CFOs and financial leaders
You’ll discover best practices, trends, and priorities that are top of mind for CFOs and finance leaders. We’ve lined up experts from Microsoft, IDC, Avanade, EY, HSO, KPMG, and PwC to deliver actionable insights on how to strike the right balance between the following:
Human and AI
Find harmony between automation and your organization’s most important assetyour people. We will tackle one of the top concerns for CFOs today: workforce optimization. The heart of productivity sits in employee well-beingor the organization’s ability to increase creativity, job satisfaction, and ultimately, happiness. Human ingenuity is now business’ greatest investment to drive long-term vision and needs to be incentivized. Automation changes the way we work, thus organizational structures, required competencies, and roles must change as well. Get tips at Finance Reimagined on how to prioritize automation initiatives and how to use them to augment your people resources.
Cost optimization and growth acceleration
Embrace a dual role of gatekeeper and innovator to bring more strategic value to your organization. You’ll hear from a panel of finance leaders at Microsoft as they respond to trends from a recent study of more than 500 senior finance leaders from across all industries. Learn how Microsoft is empowering our finance leaders to do more with less to guide teams through these uncertain times. We will discuss tactics to optimize cash flow, increase operational effectiveness, and reinvest to meet growth expectations.
The speed of business and risk mitigation
Organizational health has become increasingly dependent on data and tools to facilitate agile, data-driven decision making. Finance teams are doubling down on their efforts to keep up with our world’s increasingly volatile and interconnected markets that demand more fluid operating models, extending beyond the walls of an organization. This means that the role of the finance leader has evolved from being an economic guardian inside the walls of an enterprise to designing new business models that focus on delivering customer value outside of an enterprise. This evolution is only possible through a tight partnership between the CFO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure data security while activating insights at every level of the organization. Join us for a discussion with the CFO and CTO at Robert Walters, a global recruitment and talent management company with a team of experts spanning 31 countries and serving more than 4,300 clients, to hear how they partnered to speed the time to insight within their organization.
Register today to attend Finance Reimagined for your look ahead at the emerging trends and essential insights defining how tomorrow’s businesses will thrive. We hope to see you there.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
OpenSSL has released a security advisory to address multiple vulnerabilities affecting OpenSSL versions 3.0.0, 2.2.2, and 1.0.2. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to obtain sensitive information.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the OpenSSL advisory and make the necessary updates.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Managing and monitoring devices across your organization can be complicated, especially for small or medium businesses without dedicated IT staff. That’s why Surface partnered with Microsoft 365 and Intune teams to give you powerful insights that simplify managing and monitoring your devices. Our enhanced features make it easier than ever for IT admins to oversee devices via a premium dashboard experience.
Tailor-made experiences
Keep track of your Surface device inventory, view powerful insights, plan your Windows 11 update cadence, create support requests and place bulk device returns – all in one location. Using role-based access rights, we have set predefined access rights based on the M365 user’s role.
Optimized support process
Experience the enhanced process to create support requests for multiple Surface devices at once. The latest feature addition enables you to create a single request1 for multiple Surface devices for eligible device returns or repair needs.
Created to meet your needs where you are
Surface Management Portal: If your Surface devices are enrolled through Intune, they’re automatically enrolled into the Surface Management Portal. In Endpoint Manager, go to All Services > Surface Management Portal. This includes the comprehensive feature set of Intune and Endpoint Manager.
Microsoft Hardware Support Portal: If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can have your support service needs fulfilled via the Microsoft 365 admin center. In Admin center, go to Support > Microsoft hardware support. This does not require your devices to be enrolled through Intune.
Experience the Surface centralized solutions for IT today.
References
1. Single-request support feature for multiple devices may vary based on region and device model.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Service leaders face continual challenges in evolving the service organization to meet customer expectations, putting their brand value and customer loyalty at riskas a recent study shows, 96 percent of customers will leave a business after a bad customer experience.1 They feel either lost with disruptive changes in the contact center and customer service marketplace, or helpless on where to start, or confused on what to adopt and what to disregard, or fear being all over the map while making investments aligned with the business goals.
Service sophistication model
Assess and improve the effectiveness of your organization’s current service experiences.
Evolve service organizations to meet customer expectations
The business goals differ across service organizations, as some are managed as a siloed cost-center, some are intent on matching up with industry peers on competitive metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), some have embraced digital transformation to the extent that it enables data visibility and automation across the organization, and a few view them as profit centers, ready for the future with AI-powered experiences.
Regardless of where they are in this spectrum, service leaders always want to know:
What is happening in the customer service and contact center market today, and how does it matter to us as a service organization?
How can I assess where our service level is positioned, and how can we prepare for the future?
What service solutions are available to help us?
We had a chance to discuss this topic with a leading analyst. Watch our guest Kate Leggett of Forrester discuss the state of service and how to elevate and deliver more sophisticated customer service:
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Deliver the best customer service experience with consolidated solutions
As they say, change is the only constant, and it aptly applies to the different categories that define the contact center and customer service market today. Broadly speaking, the lines are no longer distinct between unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact center, and the customer relationship management (CRM) market categories. They are all transitioning to cloud, and the capabilities are overlapping to the extent possible. They are powered by contact center AI (CCAI) and carrier voice technology innovations that drive the efficiency and experience of customer service interactions. This also shifts the preference from best-of-breed solutions which have a side effect of fragmentation, to the possibility of consolidated solutions that can deliver the best experience.
Given the myriad capabilities from the technology innovations and market categories, and the fact that service organizations are across the spectrum, what service leaders need is a convenient way to map them to different service levels of sophistication. Essentially, a service maturity model that groups major capabilities and maps them to appropriate levels in the spectrum. This allows service leaders to visualize where they are relative to the market and determine at what level they’d like to be based on their business goals, investment, and timeline. In addition, they can decide practically and prioritize on the capabilities that matter to themacross voice and digital channels, self-service, agent productivity, and service operations.
Receive a customized service level guidance report
We are with you on this evolution. Microsoft is pleased to provide the service sophistication model to help service leaders chart their course. It is a simple web-experience that should take less than five minutes. The model groups capabilities into personalized customer engagement, including omnichannel access and routing, scale, and automation with self-service, empowering agents with productivity tools and AI-powered and analytics-driven service processes and workflows. And the service leader would look at four different levels of service in each group and pick the option that best describes their organization. As an example, do they have just a call center, or do they include some self-service capabilities, or do they already deploy a contact center with digital channels, or are they ahead with AI-powered personalized experiences? Once they answer a few questions, they will receive a customized guidance report on where they are and where they can go incrementally to the next level.
Transform your customer service journeys with the leading capabilities
Sometimes, evolution is about leaping ahead rather than taking incremental steps. What if you want your organization to transition to an altogether new experience? We also offer you the full picture on the possibilitiesjust take a moment to register and download the service sophistication model whitepaper. It’s worth the read to understand comprehensively the spectrum of service levels and capabilities, the pain points and metrics that matter, where the industry is going, and where service leaders can take their organizations.
Personalize the customer service journey with Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft is in a unique position to bring together the service solution that addresses the different categories and the spectrum of capabilitieswith Microsoft Teams for unified communications and collaboration, omnichannel and CRM capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and CCAI with Nuance, along with Azure cloud.
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Evolve at your pace with an architecture that fits your service experience
The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform brings these products together, along with partner innovations, as an open, flexible, and collaborative platform that allows service organizations to keep their existing contact center infrastructure, and create the best experience for their customers.
On a final note, our guidance is not just about service levels of sophisticationwe also have an array of reference architectures to fit different customer scenarios.
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