Hapara

This is a great resource to monitor student's Chromebook use, control what sites they're on, and it's also an easy way to push out websites to a whole class.

Below are some of the basics you will need in order to utilize Hapara effectively in your classroom.

*I feel that it is also important to mention that this site is set to school hours and only monitors their useage when they are on school WiFi.

My Classes:

When Hapara is first loaded, it will take you to this page. This is where you will find all of your classes. Our classes and class lists are usually pulled through JMC, but there were some issues with that this year, so I pulled mine from Classroom and it was very simple.

On this page, you have a few different options.

First, this is where you will select the class that you want to monitor or work with.

Second, you can click the star to remove that specific class from "My Classes". This will not delete the class, it just won't show up on this page anymore - it can still be found under "All Classes".

Third, you can give your classes a nickname. This allows you to use something a little easier than the number combinations JMC uses. You would change the name by clicking on the 3 dots and selecting "View class info". You can also change the color and design of your classes too. That doesn't change anything other than how the classes look on your screen.

Viewing a Class:

After you click on a class, your screen will look like this:

(I have covered my students' names, so yours will look slightly different)

This is where you will be able to see what tabs your students have open, however, I prefer to use the "Highlights" option, which is marked with a purple arrow.

Highlights Options:

Above are all of the options available under the "Highlights" option. My personal favorite is "Browser Tabs". This allows you to see 5 of the tabs that the students have open, and the one they are currently on will be bold. The browser tab also makes it very simple to close them out of tabs they aren't supposed to be on - Unblocked Games for example 🙄. If you want to see what the site is that they're on, you can just click on the tab and it will take you right to it.

The "Current Screen" option is also helpful. This one is nice since you can easily take a screenshot if you want to document the screen they're on. All you have to do is click their screen and it will take and save a screenshot of their current screen.

While on the Highlights option you will also see three dots on the top right section by their names. This gives you a variety of options to choose from.

When you click the dots, you will see the options that are to the left of this text.

View screenshot - this will pull up the screenshot that I had mentioned before. From my understanding, if you didn't take a screenshot, it will take one once you select that option.

Send message - this sends a message to the student and it will appear on their screen, similar to a notification.

Share links, start focus session, and start filter session will be some that I will talk about below but this is a way to use those options on individual students.

Pause screen - exactly what it sounds like, it pauses their screen.

Email - opens a new Gmail tab with their email address already filled in.

Edit groups and Student notes are not options that I use...

Sharing Links and Guiding Browsing

These options are my favorite.

When you're on the Highlights screen, you will see "Send message" "Share links" and "Guide browsing" as blue buttons on the top right hand side of the screen. Sharing links and guiding browsing are my most used features.

Sharing Links

Once you click "Share links" the above screen will pop up. In order to share the link you want, you will just copy and paste the URL you want to use. Once you have pasted it, you will need to click "Enter" on the screen. You can send out up to 10 links at one time. You can also filter who you want to send it to. If you want the link to go to your whole class, you would not change any settings and leave "The Class" selected. However, if you only wanted a few students to receive the link, you would want to select "Student(s)" and then you would click on the students you want to receive the link. When everything looks right, you'll click "Share links" and the links will be immediately pushed out to the student's Chromebooks.

Guiding Browsing

When you select this option, a screen will pop up giving you two options. It is important to know the difference between the two.

A focus session will only allow students to go to or be on the links that you send them.

Example: students are working on a research project and you only want them on one specific resource page and their paper - you would put them in a focus session and only allow those two links.

A filter session will not allow them to go to the site that you don't want them to be on.

Example: a student is on YouTube when they are not supposed to be, so you would start a filter session with YouTube so they can go on anyting but that link.

Focus Session

This is similar to how you share links with students. I have found that if you want to add a students Doc or Slide to a focus session, you must use their specific URL for it. So, you would need to click on their tab and copy and paste that link. One difference here would be that you can set a focus session for a set amount of time. I would recommend not going over your class time since they will remain in a focus session even after closing and opening their Chromebooks.

Filter Session

Another very similar option. The big difference is that you can only filter out 5 links, whereas focus groups and sharing links allows you to use 10.

Templates

This is a feature I have not used, but it seems that it could save time. If there is a link that you use repetitively, you may want to look into setting up a template for that link. For example, I have students take vocabulary quizzes on Fridays, so it would be beneficial for me to set up a template for those quizzes.

There are a lot of other features that Hapara has! These are just the options that I think are most used and most beneficial to start with. There are quick start guides as well as video tutorials on Hapara as well, and I would definitely recommend using those if you want to learn about more features!