Teacher view of the Poodll Read Aloud Activity

To view the students’ attempts at a Read Aloud activity, click on the activity in the course homepage.

The Read Aloud activity opens with five tabs. 

The Grading tab shows student attempts, and how the program has graded them.

1. Click on the name of each student to view all their attempts and grades.

2. Listen to each attempt by clicking on the play button.

3. Delete any attempt that has poor sound quality or those you do not want to include in the students’ grade.

You can also see the WPM rate for each attempt, the accuracy of word pronunciations (%) and the grade the program has assigned to each attempt. 

Note: In the screenshot above, attempt #4 was not graded by the program because the student was not using a microphone during Shadow Practice and the sound quality was too poor for the machine to recognize the words.

4. To manually grade any of the attempts click on Grade Now. 

The attempt details appear on the next page. 

5. Click on the media player play button to listen to the student’s complete attempt.

6. Scroll down to the evaluation textbox.

The highlighted red sections are words or phrases identified by the machine as mistakes. You can add more errors or delete them by clicking on the Grading Mode button. 

7. To add or delete an error, click on the mispronounced word once to highlight it. This will add or remove the highlights and affect the accuracy score and number of mistakes in the table above the passage.

8. To review the student’s pronunciation of any given word in the passage, click on the word to highlight it, then click on Spot Check Mode. 

9. Click on the highlighted word again to listen to the audio.

Note: The program might playback a few words or syllables before or after the selected word. 

10. To count the word as an error, click on the Grading Mode button and leave the word highlighted. 

11. If it is not an error, click the word again to remove the highlight.

12. The Transcript Check Mode button shows how the program’s AI has interpreted the student's pronunciation and counted it as an error. To view these transcriptions, click on the Transcript Check Mode button and click on any of the highlighted words. 

In the example below, the student has pronounced the single word "antioxidant" as a two part compound "anti—oxidant"; therefore, the program has counted it as an error.

The last button, Clear All Markers, removes all highlights from the graded passage. 

13. Once you finish reviewing and modifying the grades click Save Changes to go to the main activity page, or Save ….and next to view the next student attempt. 

The Reports tab shows the teacher all students' reports. To see the summary of the reports, click on the Reports tab and click on the Attempts Summary Report button. 

The summary of all student attempts is displayed. 

To view each student's report, click on their name. The Grading tab opens for that student and all the attempts' recordings become available, together with information on the number of Attempts, Average WPM rate, Average Accuracy (%), Average Grade (%), Maximum WPM rate, Max Accuracy (%) and Maximum Grade (%) for all attempts.

If teachers prefer to record their own voice rather than using the TTS feature of the program, go to the Model Audio tab.

1. Click on the Record button and read out the passage.

2. Playback the recording by clicking on the Play button.

3. If the recording is satisfactory, save it by clicking on the Save button.

Alternatively, click on the Upload Audio File button if you already have a file with your voice recording.

4. Click on the Save Recording button.

5. To listen to the Model Audio, click on the play button. 

The Mark-up Model Audio function enables you to highlight each chunk of text while it is being read out loud. This can help students concentrate on how the words are grouped in a sentence.

6. To Mark-up words or chunks of text for the learners in the Preview or Shadow Modes, click on the play button of the Model Audio and click on each word that starts and ends a chunk.

Note: The Mark-up function works only if it is performed simultaneously with the audio playback. 

Note: The function does not work if the audio is off. 

7. Click on Save model audio markup when you finish marking up the text.

8. To preview the text Mark-up, click on the play button of the media player above the Mark-up textbox, or go to the view tab and click on Listen.

The Administrator tab allows you to add alternative spellings or pronunciations for the words in the reading passage. The selected words must all be added to the Read Aloud settings when creating the activities, but can be modified according to the data provided in the Summary of mistranscriptions table in this tab. 

Note: This data can only be shown after the students have attempted the activity and the program has analyzed their recordings.

1. Scroll down to the Summary of mistrancriptions table.

4. Review the suggested options in the Mistranscriptions column. Add the suggested alternatives to the Alternatives textbox if you agree with them.

Note: The Read Aloud module is based on artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced text-to-speech (TTS) technology, and while the voice recognition ability of the program has been carefully fine-tuned to cover different language variations, some unlikely mistranscriptions might be suggested based on the incoming data and how it is analyzed and compared against the machine’s database. The program might even pick up ambient noise and interpret them as words. Therefore, we highly recommend choosing acceptable alternatives by combining the mistranscription suggestions made by the program and the teachers' own judgment. 

Read Aloud for Poodll

This resource contains all information you need to have to create and use a Read Aloud activity. It contains help files and videos on all functions. 

Poodll support center: Read Aloud activity settings

Moodle documents: ReadAloud by Poodll