Tag: Music

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NEW: Te Reo Māori Supported With Microsoft Translator

UPDATE 19th December: Great to see that Māori translation is now being supported in a wider range of applications inside of Office365. Today, I see that Mike Tholfsen tweeted that translation to/from te reo Māori is now supported inside of Immersive Reader:

This is another important step to making this language accessible to a wider audience and delivering all of the benefits of Immersive Reader from an accessibility and learning aide perspective.

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Yesterday saw the exciting announcement from Brad Smith that Te Reo Māori is now supported by Microsoft Translator. In his blog post, Brad wrote:

Today, in New Zealand, 15% of the population is Māori yet only a quarter of the Māori people speak their native language, and only 3% of all people living in New Zealand speak te reo Maori.

This new translation support was announced at St Joseph’s Orakei School in Auckland with Satya Nadella in attendance:

What excites me is this is the culmination of 14 years of engagement from the Microsoft NZ team to deliver better native support for Te Reo Māori across the Microsoft offerings. I’ve personally been involved in the project around Ngā Motu, our Te Ao Māori world inside of Minecraft: Education Edition where we worked closely with Whetu Paitai and his team at Piki Studios which not only created the world, but also a fully translated Resource Pack for Minecraft: Education (or Mahi Maina) for an immersive reo Māori experience.

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To learn more about Ngā Motu and the journey of whanaungatanga check out my earlier blog post.

With the inclusion of Te Reo Māori into Microsoft Translator, users can now translate back and forth from English and Māori, but also from other languages into Māori. Powering these translations is Microsoft’s Neural Machine Translation technologies:

Te reo Māori will employ Microsoft’s Neural Machine Translation (NMT) techniques, which can be more accurate than statistical translation models. We recently achieved human parity in translating news from Chinese to English, and the advanced machine learning used for te reo Māori will continue to become better and better as even more documents are used to “teach” it every nuance of the language. This technology will be leveraged across all our M365 products and services.

Here are some tweets around the announcement:

https://twitter.com/MicrosoftNZ/status/1197570824389050369

https://twitter.com/MicrosoftNZ/status/1197634404396331008

More details in this Microsoft News Centre annoucement. You can also see Will Lewis, the Principal Architect for Microsoft Translator, talking about this technology at the 1hr 57min mark of this video in the following Tweet:

https://twitter.com/MicrosoftNZ/status/1197699294456762368?s=20

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Microsoft365

Recording Self-Paced Lessons in OneNote

onenote-for-teachers

OneNote is one of the most popular tools being used in education today and a major reason for this is because of how intuitive it is to create content.

Most teachers and students are familiar with Microsoft Word and it is this familiarity and simplicity that attracts them to OneNote. Having a rich desktop interface to easily drag and drop or cut and paste into is a terrific starting point, but being able to easily insert video or audio clips on the fly takes it to the next level. It is this type of functionality that allows educators to very quickly create self-paced lessons which could be very handy in situations such as:

  • The teacher is away on sick for a day. They could easily create the appropriate lessons in OneNote for the relief teacher to guide the students through.
  • Extended periods of disruption such as Tournament Weeks in secondary schools when often teachers and students are coming and going.

Having the self-paced lesson to work through for students, along with the ease of providing feedback and marking, make this a great way to reduce workload and stress during these times. In the guided tutorial below, teachers are walked through how to create a self-paced lesson for their students:

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Make sure you keep watching right to the end, as it gives some great examples in different curriculum areas including:

  • Music
  • Social Studies
  • Languages (Spanish)
  • Mathematics (Geometry)

You can find other creative ways to use OneNote at the fantastic OneNote For Teachers website.

Lastly, if you liked the interactive nature of the tutorial above that showed precisely where you should click to use the various features in OneNote, then check out the Microsoft Innovative Educators platform that has more tutorials like this.