Premier Tools Intro

Premier Literacy

Text-to-speech software or text-readers turn print text into digitized speech. (Not to be confused with voice-to-text or speech recognition, which converts your voice into print text.)
Text readers are often thought of as ‘accommodations’ for readers who have already fallen behind their classmates, however, printed text is a curriculum barrier for many students of all ages. Think about the benefit of audio support for a struggling student, an ELL student, an auditory learner, or a young student.

Research is reporting that text-to-speech improves students’ reading fluency, comprehension, speed, and vocabulary. In addition, writing quality and length of writing increases. Older students report better editing when using text-to-speech than when reading for editing purposes on their own.



As with any new or unfamiliar strategy, there must be time to learn and become familiar with the software and the digital voice. Additional gains in student performance are noted as length of use increases. While there are many free text-readers available, we are going to focus on one that offers a variety of features and benefits and is available for all Rockford school computers and all staff/student home computers. This software is the Premier Literacy software suite.

Premier Literacy software is a suite of programs available free on all school computers and student or staff home computers. The most frequently used pieces of this software offer text-reading capability for documents, websites, email, ebooks and more. Additional built in supports include highlighting, translating, word prediction, summarizing, note taking, and more.

You can download the Premier Literacy software for home use by visiting premierathome.com. Once there, you or your students can choose the software that you want to download, which can be used outside of the school day. In order to download the software, you will need to enter the he username and password for your area. Use the contact feature from the website listed above to do so.