1. General Information

Hapara is a tool used to monitor student activity on their Chromebooks and gives the ability to staff to see what tabs they have open at any given time, as well as the ability to close them or even restrict them to certain sites for just one class period. 

Hapara has an excellent support site that has guides for tons of different situations teachers can reference, you can find it here. Unfortunately, most teachers will not have time to go through the detailed guides, so a quick reference of the common tasks they might ask about will be presented below.

Hapara is set up to pull class info from both PowerSchool and Google Classroom. When a teacher logs in at teacherdashboard.com, they should see their class sections in the "My Classes" area.

2. Navigating and Adding Classes and Students

From the start page, staff should be able to see classes that they are the main teacher of. To switch and view all classes in the district, they should click on the "All Classes" option in the top left (circled in green), and then filter by which school using the dropdown in the top right (circled in teal). 

Staff can also add a custom class if they have a special circumstance that isn't reflected in PowerSchool such as an aide taking a few students out of a class, either by creating it inside of Hapara or having it in Google Classroom and syncing from there. 

Using the "Add or sync class" blue button in the top right of the main page, the staff can choose which building to add the class to, then either manually create the new class (left option), or sync classes from Google classroom (right option).

Once the class is created it should automatically direct them to the class info in order to be able to add students.

In order to add students to an existing class, you can select the class by clicking on its name to open it. Once opened, navigate to the "Class Info" section in the top left bar navigation bar. 

This will bring you to a page where you can add another teacher (for co-teachers, aides, etc) in order for it to show up as their class on the front page as well. In addition, you can add new "learners" a.k.a students by adding them by their email (ID#@d118.org)

Note that this does not apply to Google Classroom synchronized classes. There will be no options to add teachers or students, they will have to be added inside of the Google Classroom, then the "Sync Class" button should be used to transfer the changes into Hapara 

3. Viewing Student Activity

To see and manage students' activity on their Chromebooks, select the class you would like to view by clicking on the class name to open it up. Once in the class is open, navigate to the "Highlights" option in the upper navigation bar 

Once the Highlights area is open, there are a few different tools to monitor students.

The most common and useful tool is "Brower Tabs", which as its name implies will list the current tabs that the students have open on their Chromebooks. The current tab the student is viewing will be listed in bold text while the others in the browser will just appear in normal font. To increase the amount of tabs that will show up for each student, you can use the dropdown in the top right (shown below) to select something besides the 5 default.

There is an X icon next to each tab. If you would like to close the tab on the student because it is inappropriate, it can be clicked to forcibly close the tab on the student device.

If you are not sure what a tab actually holds, or are worried the student is playing a game that might not show up in the Browser Tabs section, another useful tool is the "Current Screens" option under Highlights as well. This will show a screenshot of the entire screen the students currently has up, whether it is in the browser or not. 

To have a closer look at a student screen, click on the relevant student panel. An enlarged image of the student screen will be shown.

You can download the image by clicking the ‘Save’ button if you want to have it for documentation.

To protect students' privacy while they are using webcams, Current Screens cannot display a screenshot of students' screens when they are on meet.google.com or hangouts.google.com. When students are on either of these sites, you will see a message indicating they are on a Meet instead of a screenshot. This message only displays while students have Meet or Hangouts in their active tab. If they move to another tab or website, the screenshot will update.

Finally, you can use the "Activity Viewer" section to see real-time stats of all the students at the same time in a format that makes it easy to see if just one or two students are on sites they should not be on.

The Activity Viewer has 3 sections:

• Class Activity lists all sites that students currently have open in their browsers
• Collaboration lists all URLs and documents that two or more students have open at the same time.
• Unique Activity lists all URLs and documents that exactly one student has open - highlighting students who are "exploring" or working by themselves.
  

4. Using Focused Browsing to Restrict Tabs

The final major feature of Hapara is the ability to start what is called a "Focused Browsing" session. These sessions can force students to only have a certain list of tabs open. A full detailed walkthrough can be found here. 

To start the focused session, click on the "Guide browsing" button in the top right from the "Highlights" area of a class.

This will bring a pop-up asking whether you want to start a "Focus" session or a "Filter" session. A Focus session will only allow specific, allow-listed links to be accessed by the students. A Filter session basically adds an additional block-list to the student's browsing, for instance you could block access to youtube for a class period if you know the students will not need it. 

Usually the Focus session is the better solution for keeping students on task. Clicking on the focus session option will bring up another dialogue box with a bunch of options.

At the top you have to enter the URLs of each site that should be allowed. Keep in mind that any inbetween sites like login pages will also need to be allowed. Usually the "The whole site(s)" option under the link section will handle this, but sometimes there are other sites it redirects to. 

You then should select the duration (it should be the remaining time in the period, make sure to not run over into other classes or it can disrupt them), and a few other options.

You can also schedule the session to start at a specific time. For instance, you can set up the session during a planning period and have it take effect during the time the students will be in the classroom. Finally, you can save the session as a template in the lower left corner, which will allow you to quickly start it again without changing any options, or even set it up as a scheduled session every day.