Read Along in Google Classroom

With the Read Along feature on Classroom, teachers can assign reading assignments effortlessly and get insights into the reading performance of the class overall, as well as individual students. This includes data on accuracy, speed and comprehension for each assignment. 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.
• Optimise their in-class attention to focus 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 is available globally with Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Education Plus editions. Read Along is available in American English, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Read Along also offers English language learners support in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Malay, Spanish and Urdu.

Teacher experience

Provide fun reading assignments and track students' reading progress in three easy steps.

1. Assign from a set of diverse year-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 the 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. To find specific reading materials, enter the keyword in the 'Search library' bar at the top right.

   Tip: Keyword searches via the search bar are only available for existing English content.

6. Choose content based on your requirement: On the left, under 'Learning material type', select Decodables, Levelled reads or Activities.
   • If you select 'Decodables' or 'Levelled reads', you can further filter your results by:
     • Showing learning material:
       • All
       • With questions
     • Category:
       • Fiction
       • Non-fiction
       • Poetry
   • A target year level or the appropriate Lexile® measure.
7. Select a reading mode:
   • Listening
   • Read aloud
   • Silent
8. Support for English language learners (ELLs):
   • For English language learners, Read Along provides support in several languages. When the student reads in English, they receive the assistance that they need in their home language (if available).
   • This functionality is available for a subset of the books in the Read Along library. If you want to choose content with ELL functionality:
     1. Select the language support that you're looking for.
     2. In the left menu, you can find the books that have language support (along with English).
9. Click the reading material that you think is appropriate.
10. To browse the material, click the left or right arrows.
11. To check the student experience, click Try student view.
12. Click Attach Assign.

Tip: You can assign to a subset of students, and give a due date and mark that 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 reached the minimum reading threshold for their data to be shown on the dashboard – a minimum of 100 words or 50% of the word count of the reading material.

The reading report has three 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, read incorrectly, and skipped. The accuracy percentage is calculated by dividing the number of words read correctly by the total number of words in the book. This also includes the top 10 words that the selected student struggled with. This can help you understand and see patterns in what kind of words the student struggles with.

• Comprehension: This section details the actual questions, the type of questions, whether the student could answer them on the first attempt, and whether the rest of the class found it easy or difficult. The app lets students try 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 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 a 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 four charts on accuracy, comprehension, speed and completion for the last five 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 in terms of accuracy, speed and comprehension. This is distributed across different buckets.

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

Tip: This isn't an exhaustive list of words that students struggled with.

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

Internet requirements for certain languages

• Most languages in Read Along process voice data directly on your device. However, some languages, such as Indonesian, Malay and Thai, require an active Internet connection to function.
• For these languages, voice data is temporarily sent to Google servers for real-time speech recognition and text-to-speech processing.
• For the best experience when you use Read Along with Indonesian, Malay or Thai, you must have a stable Internet connection.
• For details on how Google handles user data, go to the Google Workspace for Education Privacy Notice.

What your students see

When students click on 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 languages available.

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 get Diya to:

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

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

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

4. To turn the page in the story:

   • Move forwards: Click Read story's next page.

   • Move backwards: 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 on the left.​

Tips:

• To continue with the story, the students are asked to keep trying until they answer correctly.
• For every correct answer on the first attempt, higher points will be earned.
• If they leave midway through the story, they can come back and resume from the point where they stopped reading.
• When students complete their reading, they are taken back to the Classroom to hand 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 already turned on for your domain, you can go to the Admin console to turn it on and get access by following the steps below.

Enable Read Along

1. To turn on Read Along, make sure that 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 organisation, click On for everyone.
6. Click Save.

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