Microsoft Corp. today announced some updates to its educational tools ahead of the ISTE EdTech conference in Philadelphia next week.

The updated products include Microsoft’s Immersive Reader tool and Teams for Education, which is a special version of its chat service that helps to foster more interaction between teachers and students.

Immersive Reader, a “full-screen reading tool” that’s sold individually and as part of Microsoft’s OneNote Learning service, is designed to help students with dyslexia and other disorders, as well as those learning new languages. The tool is getting some interesting upgrades, not least an integration with Minecraft: Education Edition, which is is an educational version of Minecraft specifically designed for classroom use. The idea behind the integration is to help students read game text, character dialogue and so on.

Microsoft also said it’s making Immersive Reader available as a “cognitive service,” which means it can be extended to outside applications via an application programming interface. So, developers would be able to integrate Immersive Reader with their apps to help students read text within them. Immersive Reader will also be integrated with other Microsoft products including Forms and Whiteboard, the company said.

Teams for Education, meanwhile, gets new features aimed at making it easier to use. For example, there’s a new “Share to Teams” button that allows educational materials to be shared with a single click.

Microsoft Narrator, another screen reading tool that’s designed for the visually impaired, gets new voices in more than 50 new languages. The voices are accessible without needing to download separate language packs first, and will support both students of new languages and non-English speakers.

In addition, there’s Presenter Coach in PowerPoint, an entirely new tool that provides on-screen guidance for students giving presentations. The tool provides help on things such as pacing, inclusive language, conciseness, profanity, filler words and originality as students speak into a microphone.

Finally, Microsoft said it’s teaming up with U.K.-based Raspberry Pi computer maker Kano Computing Ltd. on a new laptop that only runs Windows in “S Mode,” which means they can only download pre-approved apps from the Windows Store. The device is called the Kano PC, is powered by Intel Corp.’s lightweight Atom chips, and comes installed with various educational apps.

Image: Microsoft