September 2026 Product Update: Back to School with Imports, Sharing, and Instant Reports
Everything that shipped over the summer: import passages from a PDF or photo, bring in your roster from a spreadsheet, share passage collections by link, archive students in bulk, get instant reports that never lose a recording, and more reliable AI scoring — plus a back-to-school credit extension and a new Educator Advisor program.
Welcome back.
For most of you the new school year is a few weeks old: rosters are settling, beginning-of-year benchmarks are underway, and the first intervention groups are taking shape. We hope the summer gave you some real rest before all of that started again.
In June we said product development would probably slow down over the summer. July was quiet, as promised. Then August arrived, and the two weeks before school started turned into our busiest stretch of shipping so far. Almost everything below came from what teachers asked for in the spring: getting passages and students into the app faster, sharing work with colleagues, and never losing a recording.
This has also been our biggest year of growth, and it happened the way we hoped it would — teachers telling other teachers. Thank you for that.
We shipped so much this summer that we lost track of who asked for what — sorry about that. If you sent feedback this year, thank you. Most of this started with you.
Here is what is new.
Import passages from a PDF, a photo, or pasted text
Most of the passages you already own live in a PDF: a benchmark packet, a curriculum unit, a set of leveled texts a colleague sent you. You can now drop that file into ReadingFluency.app and let AI pull out each passage for you.
Open Passages, click the arrow next to New Passage, and choose Import passages. Creating and importing now live on the same page, so you can switch between the Create and Import tabs without losing your place.
The importer accepts a PDF, a photo of a printed page, a CSV, or text you paste from any document. Set the grade and language once and they apply to every passage the AI finds. A whole packet becomes separate passages in one step.
Nothing lands in your library until you review it. The importer lists every passage it detected, shows the full extracted text, and lets you fix titles, override grade or language, and uncheck anything you do not want. Passages already in your library are flagged Already in your library so importing the same packet twice never creates duplicates. You can also drop the whole set into a new or existing collection before you confirm.
AI extraction is a starting point, not a final answer. Word counts drive WCPM, so read the extracted text before you import — scanned PDFs, multi-column layouts, and heavy footnotes are the usual trouble spots. If the AI service is busy, the importer now falls back to alternate models automatically instead of showing you an error.
For the full walkthrough, including printing passages with running word counts for paper assessments, see Import Passages from a PDF with AI.
Bring your roster in from a spreadsheet
Setting up a new class used to mean adding students one at a time. Now you can drop in a CSV, TSV, or Excel file, or paste rows straight from Google Sheets or Excel.
Go to Students, click the arrow next to Add Student, and choose Import students. Adding one student and importing a class now share one dialog, so you are never hunting for the right button.
Just like passages, you review before anything saves. Names, roster numbers, student IDs, and tags are all editable in the review table, and students already on your roster are flagged Already on roster and start unchecked. The same file twice never means duplicates.
Free workspaces can import up to 50 students at a time; Teacher Plus and district workspaces have no limit. The expected columns are Name, Roster #, Student ID, and Tags — only Name is required.
See Add Students and Roster Groups for the details.
Archive last year's students in bulk
This one is timed for right now. If your roster still shows students who moved on in June, you can clean it up in one pass without losing their history.
Tick the checkbox on any student card and an action bar appears at the bottom of the page. Select as many students as you like, then Add to Groups, Archive, or Delete them together.
Archived students leave your active roster, the dashboard grid, and the host-session picker, but every assessment they ever completed stays in the workspace. They wait in an Archived tab at the end of the roster group strip until you restore them — useful when a student transfers back mid-year or when you need last year's data for a meeting.
The same Archive, Restore, and Delete actions are on each student card menu and on the student detail page. You can also create a new roster group straight from the Save button when adding students to groups.
Send a passage collection to another teacher
Grade teams usually end up with one teacher who builds the benchmark set. Collection sharing turns that set into a link.
Select a collection on the Passages page and click the share icon next to its name. The link opens a read-only page listing every passage in the collection with its full text, grade, language, and tags. There is no sign-in wall to read it.
A colleague who is signed in can click Add to my library and every passage is copied into their own workspace, grouped into a new collection. The copies are independent: nothing in your workspace changes, and editing a passage on either side does not affect the other. If they add the same collection again later, their copy is refreshed instead of duplicated.
You stay in control of the link. Reopening the share dialog republishes whatever the collection contains right now, Regenerate issues a new URL and breaks the old one, and Revoke turns it off entirely.
One thing to keep in mind: anyone with the link can read and copy the full text of every passage. Passages you wrote or generated in the app are yours to share. Published, purchased, or district-licensed materials usually are not, so check the license before sharing a collection built from a curriculum packet.
Full walkthrough: Share a Passage Collection with Colleagues.
Instant reports, and no more lost recordings
Two of the most frustrating things that could happen during a 1:1 assessment were waiting on an upload before you could see the score, and losing a recording to a dropped connection or an accidental refresh. Both are fixed.
The report opens instantly. When you stop a reading, the scored report appears right away while the recording uploads in the background. A small "Saving to the cloud" indicator shows until it lands. If you are offline or the school Wi-Fi drops, the recording waits safely on your device and syncs the next time you open the app.
Interrupted recordings can be recovered. While you are recording, audio and your live marks are saved to the device every few seconds. If the tab crashes or the page reloads mid-read, the next time you open that passage you can recover the attempt as a completed assessment or discard it.
Recording starts faster. Pressing Start now reuses the microphone preview from the audio check instead of asking for the mic again, so the countdown begins immediately.
Auto AI analysis is optional. A device-local setting in the reading session lets you queue AI analysis automatically after every saved recording, so you can move on to the next student without coming back to click Run.
Correct where a reading ended
Students stop early. Timers run out mid-sentence. Sometimes you tap one word too far.
You can now correct a saved assessment's ending directly from the report, including on whole-passage assessments where the student stopped before the end. Select the actual last word, and WCPM, accuracy, the score cards, the student's trend chart, and CSV exports all update together — no re-recording and no manual math.
Editing the ending never spends AI-analysis credits on its own. If you want the AI feedback refreshed for the new range, that is a separate click.
AI scoring is more reliable on long or interrupted readings
Several teachers reported readings where a student clearly read most of the passage but the AI marked whole sentences as missed. We traced these to how the aligner handled gaps: when a student paused for a long time, skipped a line, or a section was hard to transcribe, the scorer could lose its place and never recover.
That is fixed. The aligner now recovers after gaps and mistranscribed stretches instead of collapsing the rest of the passage to missed, and it no longer fabricates scores when the audio does not match the passage at all. The two worst cases teachers sent us — a 541-word reading scored at 4 correct, and a 536-word reading with seven sentences marked dead — now score correctly.
A few related fixes:
- Your hand scoring is never lost. If AI analysis fails or is still pending, the marks you made during the reading stay on the report.
- Stuck analyses clear themselves. An analysis that hangs is marked failed by an hourly sweep and the 2 credits are refunded automatically, instead of waiting for someone to open the report.
We are also testing a second-opinion pass where the AI re-examines only the words the aligner flagged, using the original audio. In an offline run over 30 teacher-reviewed recordings it cleared most of the aligner's false flags, so we are validating it against teacher corrections in the background before it changes any scores. If an analysis still looks wrong, use Analysis Off? on the report — those reports are exactly what we use to keep improving this.
A better first day for new teachers
If you are onboarding a colleague this fall, their first sign-in looks different now. Instead of a credits pop-up, new teachers get a short welcome that asks what they are trying to do — progress monitoring, spending less time on 1:1 assessments, tracking intervention students — and whether they have passages to bring or want to generate them. The last screen sends them straight to the right place: the passage importer, the generator, or the dashboard.
It also keeps students out of teacher accounts. Students join sessions with a class code and never need an account, so anyone who self-identifies as a student is sent to the join page instead.
Smaller improvements
- Light and dark mode is now a single switch in the sidebar footer, and the assessment report's bright surfaces were toned down in dark mode.
- Dashboard passage strip gets pagers, and scrollbars only appear while you are scrolling.
- Imported passages get cover art immediately instead of a blank placeholder, and generated covers use a newer image model.
- Empty states across the app share one calmer panel that matches your theme.
- Sidebar hints dismiss on tap.
- Product updates inside the app now scroll, so the digest works on smaller screens.
Used up your credits on beginning-of-year benchmarks?
September is when the most reading happens in a short window, and a beginning-of-year benchmark across a full class can eat through a month of credits fast.
If that happened to you, email support@readingfluency.app and we will extend your credits for the month. We ask one thing in return: tell us one thing you like about ReadingFluency.app and one thing we should improve. Two sentences is plenty. Those answers are how the roadmap gets written.
Join the Educator Advisor program
Almost everything in this update started as a message from a teacher. We want to make that a habit rather than a happy accident.
We are starting an Educator Advisor program for teachers, reading specialists, interventionists, and literacy leaders who use ReadingFluency.app with real students. Advisors agree to meet with us four times over the school year — short video calls, scheduled around your calendar — to look at what we are building, tell us what is wrong with it, and point us at the problems that actually matter in your classroom.
In exchange, advisors get free usage of ReadingFluency.app through bonus credits, which never expire. You will also see features before they ship and have a direct say in what ships next.
If you are interested, email support@readingfluency.app with Educator Advisor in the subject line and a sentence about your role and how you use the app.
Free PD for your team
If you have three or more colleagues who want to learn ReadingFluency.app together, we still offer free virtual PD sessions. In 45 minutes we walk your group through passage import, rosters, AI auto-scoring, group sessions, and Reports.
Where to go next
- New to the app, or onboarding a teammate? Start with Get Started with ReadingFluency.app.
- Have a benchmark packet as a PDF? Import it, then share the collection with your grade team.
- Setting up a new class? Import your roster and archive last year's students in one pass.
Thank you for another year of trusting us with your students' reading. We are just getting warmed up.
See what this could look like in your classroom.
If you want to spend less time on assessment logistics and more time helping students read, these pages show a few practical ways ReadingFluency.app can help.
PDF and photo import, collection sharing, and the unified New Passage page all feed the same passage library you reuse across benchmark windows.
Roster import, bulk archiving, and instant reports make it faster to set up a new year and keep assessment history clean.
Editable assessment endings and more reliable AI scoring keep the numbers behind Reports trustworthy.
Ready to try it with a real student passage?
You can start a reading fluency assessment in about 30 seconds, then keep the passage, score, and follow-up notes together in one place.
Start in 30s