Quick Start Guide to Hapara Highlights – Highlights Quick Tips and Best Practices

Hāpara Highlights is a tool that allows teachers to create online lessons that are meaningful, purposeful and engaging, while guiding students so they get the most out of their time spent online. Highlights also minimizes the logistical headaches that sometimes happen during online lessons, making the process smoother and easier for you.

Monitor Pogress on Assignments

When you first open up Highlights, you’ll start on the Browser Tabs page. It shows you the website tabs students have open during an online lesson, giving you visibility into their progress. By seeing this information in near-real time, you can send formative feedback to students or start digital citizenship conversations.

You can also use Browser Tabs to close out a tab a student is looking at that might be distracting. Before closing out a tab, make sure you click on the website title to view it yourself, then have a conversation with the student. The student may be stuck and need some help, so it’s best to check in with them first.

Curate Digital Learning Sessions

The Guide Browsing feature in Highlights allows you to schedule online lessons. It also eliminates logistical issues that can come up when technology is involved.

For example, when you click Guide Browsing, you can select Set up a Focus Session or Set up a Filter Session.

A focus session opens up specific sites for students, while a filter session restricts certain websites.  

You can create these sessions ahead of time, making for easy substitute teacher planning. Or you can use them in real time when responding to student needs in the moment.

Positively Reinforce Digital Citizenship

Message and Snaps are great communication and formative feedback tools for teachers.

By clicking the blue Message button at the top of your screen, you can choose to send an instant message to a student, group or the class. The message will then pop up on students’ screens, and they can read your formative feedback right away. You can even include an emoji!

Snaps are screenshots with helpful information, capturing student progress at that moment.

You can take Snaps from any of the windows in the Activity Viewer by clicking the Camera icon.

You can also take Snaps in the Current Screens tab by clicking on the image showing what the student is viewing. At the bottom, you’ll see the Take a Snap button.

You can use Snaps to “catch students being good” and reinforce positive behavior. You can also use them to check in with students or help students reflect on their progress.

Quick Start Guide to Hapara Workspace

Hāpara Workspace allows teachers to quickly find, build, modify and share digital lessons and projects. They can also create student groups to serve different academic levels. Then with just a few clicks, teachers can personalize and differentiate a Workspace for a group or individual student to support the unique needs throughout their class.

Workspace brings everything teachers need for instruction into one education management system. Hāpara also plays well with other apps and education software, so teachers can easily embed them into Workspaces. With personalized Workspaces for instruction and edtech apps in one place, teachers can streamline workflows for success.

Teachers also don’t have to start from scratch with online lesson planning. With Workspace, you’ll find high-quality content other districts and schools have already created. You’ll also find lessons and projects aligned to multiple regional curriculums standards. It’s simple to make a copy of any Workspace and modify it to fit students’ needs.