Last week, I talked about the constant battle of should it be blocked or is it a classroom management issue.  So this week, I would like to talk about one of the classroom management tools that is out there, and all of our teachers have access.  Hapara Dashboard and Highlights is a program that works via an extension installed on student Chromebooks, rosters are synced through Clever and our SIS and teachers have access to classrooms list of students.

The most commonly used part of Hapara is the Browser Tabs screen in which teachers can view all of the open tabs on a student Chromebook.  But Hapara is more than just a monitoring system.

How to Use Hapara Highlights

Let me explain how I would use Hapara amazing feature called “Focused Browsing” if I were fulltime in the classroom.  So a little context, most of our teachers are now teaching in a blended learning station rotation model. This would consist of the students being divided into four different groups, with each group having a different set of tasks and the groups rotate every 10-15 minutes.  Stations would include a teacher-led mini-lesson, collaborative station, a digital content station and a 5Cs station (emphasis on creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and connectedness).

So in the teacher-led mini-lesson, I feel that I can keep the 6-8 students on task due the small group working directly with me.  For this, I would worry about using Hapara to focus any of their browsings.

In the collaborative station, I would have students working together in a Google Doc, to answer questions, do lab work, etc.  For this, I am going to use focused browsing and I will focus them to docs.google.com.  That would then prevent my students from going anywhere else besides docs.google.com. I would make sure that I select only those students in that group for this focused browsing.

The third group would then be working on a digital content, ST Math, Learning A-Z, Moby Max, etc.  I would do the same thing as above but change the website to the digital content site. So for ST Math, I would put in web.stmath.com.

 

And let’s say for the last group they are working on digital citizenship and I want them to play Google’s new gamified curriculum called “Be Internet Awesome”. So for that, I would select those students in that group and focus them to beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com

So there you now have four different groups that are on task and doing what they should as they are now “focused” on what their tasks truly are. I highly recommend Hapara Highlights if it is used in a proper way as an instructional tool and not just a tool to “spy” into students’ devices.