Our district utilizes several tools in the Hāpara Instructional Suite to help teachers monitor, manage, and teach to student Chromebooks.

• Highlights

  • Monitor, filter, and redirect Chromebooks in realtime

• Dashboard

  • Monitor Student Google Drives and create/share documents

• Workspace

  • Build differentiated units of instruction or use the built-in database to search through thousands of community-built lessons and units.

Note: The video mentions a recently created "Filter" program that we do not currently have as part of our suite.

Everytime you log in to Hāpara, you'll land on the Manage Classes page. Here you'll find any classes that have been auto-rostered to you as well as any classes that you created.

If you get an error message when logging in, please put in a help desk ticket.

Note: I recommend using the Google Sync option of connecting your classes to Hāpara as a backup even if they auto-rostered. More on that in the next video.

Syncing your Google Classroom classes to Hāpara offers several benefits, including:

• Custom groups (ex. caseloads, intervention groups, etc.)

• Ability to add or remove students on your own

• A backup in case the PowerSchool sync sneezes and your classes disappear!

Once you select your class, I've set Highlights to be your landing page because it is probably the function of Hāpara that you'll be using most often. With it, you can:

• Monitor & manage Chromebook screens & tabs

• Send one-way messages to students

• Pause student screens

• Create temporary filters

• Direct student Chromebooks to a website of your choice

Student tiles provide an efficient overview of what each individual Chromebook is doing and allows the teacher to manage individual devices or the entire class at once.

Grouping students within Hāpara allows the teacher to direct messages, filters, and websites to precreated groups. This is useful for:

1. • Group projects

   • Accommodations

   • Differentiation

The Browser Tabs tab shows all currently open tabs and gives the teacher several options to interact with students and redirect them when necessary.

The Current Screens tab offers all the same functionality of the Browser Tabs tab, except that it shows real-time screenshots of each student's screen.

Note: The Current Screens page doesn't always "keep up" with students jumping between tabs as quickly as the Browser Tabs page does.

One of the most helpful features of Highlights is the ability to "Share Links" with students, which causes a website of your choice to automagically open on each student device in a new tab.

If you've ever written a website link on the board and walked around while students tried to agonizingly enter it, you'll appreciate how helpful and efficient this feature is!

Sending a one-way message to an individual student, a group, or the whole class is a fast and easy way to give instructions or a gentle redirection.

Pausing student screens allows the teacher to disable all Chromebook functionality for up to 15 minutes. This is useful for:

• Redirecting a student or class

• Mid-lesson check for understanding

• Group or partner discussions

The Activity Viewer allows the teacher to see a log of all websites that were accessed by students while Hāpara was monitoring.

Keep in mind: If the Hāpara browser tab is closed or if you navigate to another class, the Activity Viewer log gets reset. If you would like to see the log of more than one classroom at a time, you'll need to use multiple browser tabs.

Think of Snaps as a beefed-up screenshot! Not only does it capture a screenshot, but also:

• Student name

• Website link

• Date/time

• When the website was opened & closed

This can then be saved or emailed to be used as helpful documentation for desirable or undesirable behavior!

Focus Sessions are useful when you need to "focus" your class on a few (up to 10) specific websites.

While a Focus Session is active, students will not be able to:

• Navigate to any other websites

• Close any of their current tabs

• Get around it by restarting their Chromebook (they've tried)

Note: The pop-up window was updated this summer and no longer looks like the one in the video, but it still has all the same options.

Filter Sessions allow your students to access any district-approved website except the ones that you choose to filter (up to 10).

Be careful not to block any website that is too broad!

Example: Filtering google.com in order to prevent access to a Google game site will also filter all Google apps (Docs, Slides, etc.)

The Schedule tab allows the teacher to view any upcoming scheduled Guided Browsing sessions or Share Links. It can also be used to create new scheduled sessions or duplicate previously used sessions to use them as templates!

The recently added Freeze Tabs feature of Hāpara helps to solve the problem of keeping students on a program (like HMH or iReady) that requires CoyoNet to sign in. Just follow these steps:

1. Have students log in to their Chromebooks and navigate to Coyonet.

2. Students will use the app in Coyonet to access and sign in to the program.

3. Once everyone is signed in to the program, the teacher will then use Hāpara to freeze all current tabs.

4. Students can be individually released as they finish.

Although the entire Hāpara website is referred to as the Teacher Dashboard, the Dashboard is a specific set of tools within that (which includes Dashboard & Sharing). With it you can:

• Create and share documents & templates with individual students, groups, or the whole class

• Access files and folders contained in students' Google Drives

• View at-a-glance information about files like:

  • Who created the document

  • When it was last accessed

Note: The video shows a Gmail tab, but our students don't use Gmail, so you won't have that tab on your dashboard.

Although the entire Hāpara website is referred to as the Teacher Dashboard, the Dashboard is a specific set of tools within that (which includes Dashboard & Sharing). With it you can:

• Create and share documents & templates with individual students, groups, or the whole class

• Access files and folders contained in students' Google Drives

• View at-a-glance information about files like:

  • Who created the document

  • When it was last accessed

Student Tiles allow you to quickly view and access the most recently modified documents in each student's Google Drive.

The Search tool built into the Dashboard allows a teacher to quickly search through the contents of their Students' Google Drives. Searches can be done by document title or words contained within the document!

Smart Share offers many of the same document creating & sharing features that are found when creating Google Classroom assignments. The difference is that students don't have to click on anything. As soon as the document is created, it will show up in each student's Google Drive!

The Hāpara Workspace is a creative platform that can be used to develop multi-part differentiated lessons and units with features like:

• New assignments unlocked upon assignment submission

• Differentiation based on teacher-created groups

• Embedded videos, documents, quizzes, and rubrics

While the Workspace feature of Hāpara is the most academically useful tool in their suite, it also has the highest entry point to learning. For those interested, I would definitely recommend not hesitating to dive in though. I've only ever received positive feedback from teachers who decided to take the plunge!