Have you ever made the mistake of admitting to not liking or having experienced something that is all the rage at the moment? Like when I recently expressed that I’ve never listened to a podcast, and my friend insisted that I must be lying.
I get it. Everyone loves podcasts. Everyone listens to podcasts. Everyone and their cat has a podcast!
The problem for me is that I’m a visual learner. I need to see things. So listening to something without a visual component…my mind wanders. I may start the first few minutes listening to the ladies from The Office talking about behind the scenes things.
But without fail, within a few minutes my mind will start going off on tangents. Which will lead to other tangents. And after awhile, I’ll realize I’m listening to a podcast and wonder how I got to thinking about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow when Jenna Fischer is talking about having to keep her composure during a certain scene.
That being said, there are many people out there who are the OPPOSITE of me. Show them something and it just doesn’t click in their brain, but if they hear it explained – it all just makes sense!
So this tip is for those people.
I mean, you can all read it. I’m just saying that some of you may find it more helpful than others.
Microsoft Teams has a feature called Immersive Reader. It is used a lot in educational settings, because it has some cool features like being able to take something that someone has written (in Chat, or in a thread or Channel) and highlight the words and label the nouns, or the verbs – thus making it very helpful for people in school.
It also will read any post to you. So if you have a lengthy post from someone that you’d rather listen to, you can! Or if you just have instructions typed out that you need to hear but have your eyes on what you are doing, you can listen then too!
In order to do any of these, find the message you’d like to use the Immersive Reader on and click on the ellipsis (we should all know what this is by now!) and select Immersive Reader.
This will open up the message up to look like this:
If you want the parts of speech labeled, you would click on the menu at the top right that looks like lines with a star shooting through it, the one in the middle.
This will pop up the menu on the right hand side and you can choose to toggle on what you would like to have labeled. You can even color coordinate them!!
If you want the message to be read to you, you just hit the play button at the bottom.
The nice thing is that you can customize this as well. If you click on the speaker/gear icon to the right of the play button, you can choose a male or female voice
You can also adjust the speed. You can make it slower if you need more time to follow along, or you can speed it up to 2.5 times faster than normal! Which makes it fun for Gilmore Girl fans like myself.
So there you have it folks! That’s the Microsoft Teams Immersive Reader function.
And as always – if you have any specific Teams questions, let me know and it might be a future tip!