With remote learning, has come new challenges—not only for students, who may be learning online for the first time, but also for teachers, who must learn to support them in the process. Instruction, discussion, and feedback have all moved online overnight and the web experience needs to be as smooth as possible for it to work. The new Microsoft Edge browser provides teachers and students with that experience. It has the performance and compatibility needed to reduce friction during online instruction and new tools to enable learning—all while keeping users secure.
Looking to try the new Microsoft Edge? Visit here.
Are you an IT professional looking to deploy for your school? Visit here.
Performance that students and teachers need
Teaching online has its own learning curve—teachers need an easy-to-use browser that reduces friction online so they can focus on teaching instead of on troubleshooting. Microsoft Edge is built on the same open source technology as Google Chrome to ensure world-class compatibility and performance for websites and extensions. Educational sites just work, saving teachers time from having to reach out to IT. And those key learning extensions? They’ll work too—even if they are from the Chrome web store.
Protection from external threats
When students are learning online, they deserve a safe browsing experience. This is especially important now given the amount of time students spend learning on connected devices. The new Microsoft Edge comes with SmartScreen built-in, to help protect students from phishing and malware attacks while they work and learn.
Get to collaborating faster
With online collaboration becoming the new norm, it’s important that students and teachers can both access what they need and save time doing so. Students and teachers can login with their school profiles on Microsoft Edge to gain access to saved favorites, settings, and passwords. They can even personalize Microsoft Edge with Office 3651 so when they open a new tab, they’ll see recent files, shared documents, and pinned sites. Office 365 apps, like OneNote and PowerPoint, can also be launched directly from this experience, saving even more time. And if students and teachers can’t find a file, they can use Bing1 to search for school files, just like if they were searching on the web.
Reading online, now more accessible
Reading online can be tough, particularly for students used to reading physical books. Enter Immersive Reader, a learning tool in Microsoft Edge that helps students read and access content on the web without distractions. When students open Immersive Reader, they can:
- Have text read to them (even in multiple languages!)
- Adjust text size, text spacing, and the page background for easier reading
- Isolate lines of text onscreen for better focus
- Get help with grammar by breaking words down by syllables and parts of speech
Soon, students will even be able to highlight any text on the web and bring it into Immersive reader with only a few clicks, making the web even more accessible for student learning.
As the saying goes (or at least it does these days), behind every browser is a great teacher. It’s National Teacher Appreciation week and we couldn’t be more thankful to all the educators around the world who have quickly adapted to these changing times. Their continued mission to educate all students hasn’t changed, and neither has ours—with the new Microsoft Edge, we hope to empower every student on the planet to achieve more.
1 After installation, Microsoft Edge requires additional steps to configure for K-12 education. To understand these requirements or how to enable specific features, please visit https://aka.ms/EdgeEduReference
This post was originally published on this site.
