Read Along in Google Classroom

Important:

• This experience is only available in English.
• Read Along in Classroom is only available for T&L and EDU Plus plans.

With Read Along as a feature on Classroom, teachers can assign reading assignments effortlessly and get insights into the overall class performance and individual students reading performance. This includes data for each assignment on accuracy, speed, and comprehension. Using Read Along to assign stories can help teachers to:

• Understand students' progress better and on a continuous basis.
• Modify their teaching approach with regular and actionable data.
• Focus their in-class attention optimally on students based on their learning needs.
• Share student progress with parents and school leaders.

Read Along is designed to engage readers and it:

• Has a library of diverse reading materials (fiction, non fiction), eye catching illustration, and an engaging reading experience.
• Provides real-time feedback.
• Offers assistance and avenues for help when they struggle.
• Encourages and rewards them with stars and badges when they do well.
• Guides them along as they progress.

Get Started with Read Along in Classroom

Important: This experience is only available in English (US).

Teacher experience

Provide fun reading assignments and track students’ reading progress in 3 easy steps.

1. Assign from a set of diverse grade appropriate reading materials such as fiction, non fiction, and decodables. Learn how to assign reading materials.

2. View reading data for individual students, like reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. Learn how to view reading data.
3. Track progress of the students across multiple assignments. Learn how to track reading progress over time.

To learn more about how to use Read Along in Google Classroom, watch these videos:

• Learn more about reading assignments and student experience.
• Learn more about reading data and the progress of students.

Assign reading materials

1. Go to Google Classroom.
2. Enter your class.
3. Click Classwork Create Assignment.
4. In the list of attachments below, select Read Along.
5. Choose content based on your requirement: Decodables or Leveled reads at the top.
6. If you select Leveled reads, you can further filter based on the target grade level or the appropriate Lexile® measure.
7. Support for ELLs (English language learners):
   • For the English language learners with a different home language (like Spanish or Portuguese) - Read Along provides support in that language for the student while reading English.
   • This functionality is present in limited content (and expanding). If you want to choose content with ELL functionality:
     1. Select the language support you are looking for.
     2. On the left menu, you can find the books that have the language support (along with English).
8. Click the reading material that you find appropriate.
9. To browse the material, click the left or right arrows.
10. To check the student experience, click Try student view.
11. Click Attach this story.
12. Click Assign.

Tip: You can assign to a subset of students, give a due date and grade you want to return to the students.

View Reading Data (Individual Assignment)

1. Go to Google Classroom.
2. Enter your class.
3. To view reading data, click Classwork.
4. Select the assignment.
5. Click Review work.
   • You can also select any student. You can find a list of students on the left and their reading data on the right.

Tips:

• Not started: Students who have not started their assignment yet do not have any data shown next to their names.
• Need more reading: This shows next to the names of students who haven’t read the minimum threshold of reading from a student to be able to show their data on the dashboard which is a minimum of 100 words or 50% of the word count of the reading material.

The reading report has 3 sections.

• Accuracy: How well the student has read the book. This is split into sub components, like the number of words read correctly independently, read with assistance from the app, incorrectly read and skipped. The accuracy percentage is calculated by dividing the number of words read correctly by the Total number of words present in the book. This also includes the top 10 words that the selected student struggled with. This can help you understand and form patterns on what kind of words the student struggles with.

• Comprehension: This section details the actual questions, the type of question whether the student could answer in the first attempt or not and whether the rest of the class found it easy or difficult. The app lets students attempt again if they didn’t get it on the first go, but doesn’t count them as correct for this report.
• Overall progress: This section displays an overview of the progress of the stories. It displays metrics such as accuracy, comprehension, completion, and speed for the last five stories. It also displays the data for various time periods. It lets you track the performance of their stories over time and identify areas for improvement.

Track reading progress over time

To understand how the specific student is growing in various reading skills, identify students at risk, and track their reading progress over time, scroll down to Overall progress.

This shows 4 charts on accuracy, comprehension, speed, and completion for the last 5 reading materials assigned to the specific student.

Track overall class performance

To track overall class performance, on the left panel, click ALL STUDENTS.

Class distribution: How your class has done on the given assignment with regard to accuracy, speed, and comprehension. This is distributed across different buckets.

Words need practice: This includes the top 10 words most students have struggled with. This can help you understand and form patterns on what kind of words your class is struggling with.

Tip: This isn’t the exhaustive list of words students struggled with.

Comprehension: This section details the actual questions, the type of question , and how many students have answered or not on the first attempt. The app lets students attempt again the questions if they didn’t get it on the first go, but doesn’t count them as correct for this report.

What your students see

When the students click the assignment, the Read Along attachment opens the reading material in a new tab. To start reading the assignment:

1. Click Start Reading.
   • Tip: If ELL support is displayed in the book for other languages, the student can select from the available languages such as Spanish or Portuguese.

2. When they start, they have to read the material aloud to Diya.
   • Tip: To work properly, Read Along needs access to your microphone. Learn how to use your camera and microphone.

3. Use Diya to help you read the story. To have Diya:

   • Read a line in the story: Click Diya’s picture.

   • Read the word, tell the meaning and break down the word to you: Click the word.

Tip: Students are rewarded with stars when they do well.

4. To turn the page in the story:

   • Move forward: Click Read story’s next page .

   • Move backward: Click Read story’s previous page .

As students progress through the story, they will be presented with questions to help with their reading comprehension. To answer the question, they need to drag the appropriate response to the drop area provided on the left.​

Tips:

• To continue with the story, the students are asked to attempt again until they answer correctly.
• For every correct answer on the first try, higher points will be earned.
• If they leave mid-way of the story, they can come back and resume from the point they left reading.
• When students complete their reading, they are taken back to the Classroom to turn in the assignment.

For admins

Students and teachers can use their Google Workspace for Education account to access Read Along.

Important: Read Along in Classroom is now a Workspace Service, if this is not turned on for your domain already, you can go to the admin console to turn this on to get access by following the steps defined below.

Enable Read Along

1. To turn on Read Along, make sure you’re signed in to an administrator account. Learn how to sign in to your Admin console.
2. In the Admin console, go to Menu Apps Google Workspace.
3. Click Read Along.
4. Click Service status.
5. To turn on a service for everyone in your organization, click On for everyone.
6. Click Save.

Learn more on how to turn Google Read Along on or off for users.