Q: What are Learning Accelerators?

Learning Accelerators is a new category of learning tools included in Microsoft 365 Education that helps streamline the creation, review, and analysis of practice assignments while providing students real-time coaching along the way to help them catch up, keep up, and get ahead. Learning Accelerators tools are designed to help educators unlock the full potential of every student with tools that support foundational and future-ready skills, allowing educators to give individual students more opportunities to learn, practice, and receive targeted coaching instantly in an inclusive environment to support ongoing improvement.

Q: What subjects do the Learning Accelerators cover?

Learning Accelerators cover two core areas: foundational and future-ready skills.

Q. How much do the Learning Accelerators cost?

Learning Accelerators are available with our no-cost version of Office 365 A1, as well as all our Microsoft 365 SKUs.

Q: How do I get started with Learning Accelerators?

Explore our Learning Accelerators guide to help you get started. DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE

Q: Can I use Learning Accelerators on non-Microsoft devices?

Yes, Learning Accelerators only require Microsoft Teams for Education, which is available on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Chrome OS, and iOS (including iPad OS). Teams can also be accessed through most web browsers.

Q: What type of data is provided through Learning Accelerators?

Practice data from Learning Accelerators is automatically collected in Education Insights and Education Insights Premium to make it easier for educators to track progress and take action. Education Insights provides a more holistic view for every student by connecting data from Learning Accelerators with student engagement, assignments, and emotional well-being in one app. Educators have the option of allowing students to see their performance in Education Insights, as well as the ability to customize the feedback they share with students with the Return to Student feature. Get detailed insights into key aspects of developing fluency for a particular skill.

Q: Do you have any evidence on the efficacy of Learning Accelerators?

Reading Progress and Reading Coach have been awarded research-based design certifications from Digital Promise. Our teams have partnered with experts in each field to develop our Learning Accelerator tools. For example, we partnered with reading fluency experts, such as Dr. Tim Rasinski, Pam Allyn, Dr. Mark Seidenberg, and Dr. Timothy Shanahan, to develop Reading Progress and Reading Coach.

Learning Accelerators: Tools for Students

Explore a whole new category of tools

Learning Accelerators are seamlessly integrated into products you already know and love like Microsoft Teams, OneNote, PowerPoint, Word, and more. With these powerful tools, students can start practicing right away, and you can start gathering data to help them get ahead.

Build foundational skills

Reading Coach

Now you can give students more opportunities to practice reading with exercises from Reading Coach in Teams and Immersive Reader. Students can own their own learning with gentle guidance through pronunciation, syllabification, reading speed, and vocabulary recall. Reading Coach is particularly helpful at supporting students with a range of learning differences.

Reading Coach is available now.

Reading Coach in Immersive Reader: 5 things to know
Reading Progress

Reading Progress tracks students’ reading skills, gives educators actionable insights quickly, and focuses students on specific areas for improvement. By streamlining the reading assignment creation, review, and analysis process, teachers can spend more of their time on active instruction.

Reading Progress is available now.

Explore the guide
Reflect

Microsoft Reflect is a tool within Teams that helps students identify and express how they feel in safe and fun ways, building their emotional vocabulary and giving educators the insights they need to provide active support. Students can learn how to navigate all kinds of emotions with the Feelings Monster, who helps find the right words to describe their feelings.

Reflect is available now.

Explore the guide

Jump-start career success

Search Coach

Strengthening information literacy to distinguish fact from opinion is a key skill for students now and in their future careers. Search Coach helps students learn how to form effective search queries, find trusted sites with NewsGuard, and think critically about their results without advertisements.

Search Coach is available now.

Explore the guide
AVAILABLE NOW
Search Progress

Understanding online search tools is critical for students today. Search Progress helps teachers track the development of information literacy skills by creating a window into students’ search activity and behaviours while identifying ways to improve the quality of their search queries over time.

Explore the guide
AVAILABLE NOW IN TEAMS
Speaker Coach

From classroom to career, presentation skills are important. Speaker Coach is a real-time coaching tool that helps evaluate key points of students’ public speaking performances and gives personalized feedback on details like pitch, use of filler words, and pacing without the stress of an audience.

Speaker Coach is currently available in Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn.

Explore the guide
Available 2024
Speaker Progress

With analytics from Speaker Coach, Speaker Progress allows teachers to clearly see data on students’ public speaking performances. They can track how presentation skills are improving at the individual, class, grade, and school levels while saving time for active instruction.

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Insights for teachers

Education Insights provides a clearer picture of student activity across multiple classrooms. It can track assignment turn-in and classroom engagement in a clear, actionable format that allows educators to see trends, help students, and save time.

Explore the guide

Insights for leaders

Within Microsoft 365, Education Insights shows school leaders the bigger picture with data on student activity, class participation, and more, so they can make informed, effective decisions for their institutions.

Explore the guide

I am a huge data person. With Reading Progress, I pull the data in as fast as I can, and I hold the students accountable. When they read a passage, I can pull up their results—how many words there were in the text, how many words they read per minute, how many words they mispronounced, how many they repeated and so forth. I can hear them, they can hear themselves, and this has been a huge help.

Nicole Vickers, Middle School Educator, Sarasota County Schools

View case study

Training

Find additional Microsoft Education trainings

Engage with interactive videos, demos, and guides designed just for educators. Here, you can find information on a range of Microsoft Education products and find resources for professional development.

Visit the Educator Centre

Guide

Explore our Learning Accelerators guide

With these powerful tools, students can start practicing right away, and you can save time creating, reviewing, and analysing assignments to help get them ahead.

Download the guides

Demos

Microsoft Education Interactive Demos

Get the most out of the tools Microsoft 365 Education has to offer across our suite of solutions with these Interactive Demos curated for students, educators, IT professionals, and parents.

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