Hāpara Champion Educator - Highlights Reflection

 Kia ora koutou, 

I am completing the Hāpara Champion Educator course in order to be able to expand my proficiency with the Hāpara suite. I have been enjoying the course material and self-paced learning thus far. I have been working through the rubrics in sizeable learning 'chunks' as I am finding it all flows together nicely. 

The following work is my learning reflection around the Highlights tab on Hāpara. This is a section that underpins my day to day classroom management of my ākonga's Chromebooks, and I enjoyed delving deeper into this feature. 

The questions I will be answering are in bold and my reflection and comments will follow. 

1. Describe how you can use the awesome superpowers (aka visibility) that Highlights gives you to foster productive digital classrooms and build positive, respectful relationships with students. Include at least three examples/scenarios in your response. 

It is important that students learn to navigate Cyberspace in a safe, yet autonomous way. Preventing them the chance to learn from their successes (and mistakes!) does not foster good digital citizenship. Here are some examples that I do in my classroom when using Hapara with my learners. 

At the beginning of the year, or when I have a new group of learners for a course, I walk them through what Hapara looks like and can facilitate. I make sure students are aware that I will be pulling up Hapara to share with the class as an example. I then use the Chromecast to share this to the classroom TV. We walk through things such as the Highlights tab, where I show them how their visible tabs work. I will usually have a willing student google search something silly like a meme or something else ‘off task’ to show what the teacher can see when a new tab is opened, and the bold tab is the current tab. This shows them how they are being monitored and then it will not be a surprise if they are on a wrong tab during learning, and a follow up conversation happens. 

If a learner appears to be on the ‘wrong tab’ during learning, I will view the tab to see what the content is. Perhaps they think they are on task, the website is just a bit more obscure than what I would have recommended for research. I think it is important that teachers do their due diligence before calling out a student for being off task to create mutual respect. A student is more willing to admit they were off task if the teacher is sure that they are (ex. Cat videos!). I would then use the messaging feature to send a reminder, or question as to whether the student requires help with their task. This allows them the chance to self-manage or reflect on if the site they are using is helping or hindering their learning. This also gives students a bit of privacy as the message is direct to their device, opposed to calling out over the quiet workers in the room which could lead to the student feeling embarrassed or put on the spot. 

If a message directly to the student hasn’t changed their use of an incorrect site, I then take a screenshot or pull up the Snap and quietly call the child over to my table to explain what they are doing. I didn’t realise in this module that you can take a screenshot and save/email the Snap through Hapara which will simplify my practice of this for next time. The snap is documented and visible to help the child be accountable and take ownership of their learning, as well as a tangible piece of evidence to forward to their Dean if this is an ongoing behaviour. This helps to build a portfolio or provide support this child may need with managing themselves online, we can begin to see patterns to what they are gravitating towards online. If the site is completely unsafe or harmful, this Snap is also good evidence when contacting a parent/caregiver or school administration if it escalates that far. 

The Activity Viewer gives you a whole-class record of all the tabs currently and previously open during a Highlights session. It starts “recording” when you click on the Highlights tab and ends when you close Highlights or refresh your browser. The Activity Viewer can record class browsing for a period of time and gather evidence of browsing behavior. From here, you can see who has (or had) a tab open and take a Snap of that activity to review later. You can also close tabs in the Unique Activity section.

2) What are some ideas for using the data from Activity Viewer to establish and support a positive classroom environment and encourage students to be responsible digital citizens? Include at least three examples in your response. 

I was so pleased to learn about the features of the Activity Viewer and immediately have ideas as to how this will be helpful to my teaching and my students’ learning. 

I was not aware that Hapara started ‘recording’ only when on Highlights, and ends when the page or tab is refreshed. This will be helpful to my practice as the nudge to open up my Hapara tabs immediately when my students log in. I can be guilty for fussing around to help get them organised and log in part way through the session when I feel students may or may not be on task. Knowing that their data is only collated when I am logged in will help me to prepare earlier on in the lesson so that I am most accurately monitoring and keeping my students safe online for the entire 1 hour lesson. 

Gathering the evidence through the Class Activity tab will be immensely helpful. I find that I am providing links for viewing, researching etc. to scaffold independent learning, however, when I see the output from my students, I do not always see evidence of these sources being used. Being able to monitor on the Class Activity tab exactly who or who hasn’t viewed the provided links will be helpful when having one on one conversations about work that is not completed correctly, or missing information. I will have evidence to show that, the student hasn’t used the correct websites, and that also allows us to figure out if the student didn’t know how to find them on the instructions, the websites are too hard for them to use so they are trying to find other resources or if the instructions were completely missed altogether. This opens up a great starting point for learner focussed conversations.

Using the Unique Activity tab will have a similar benefit, I think specifically for the handful of students who are generally surfing online themselves. I can use this data to have learning conversations with those who perhaps use Google to help them answer all the questions, as opposed to reading the text, breaking it down and understanding it to answer comprehension questions. I have quite a few who are quick to finish their reading and writing work, simply because they are skimming over the resources and using Google to help them answer everything. Again, this is a great avenue to show them the data, perhaps give clear evidence of their digital footprint and give them a place to share why they are not, or not willing to, use the resources provided. Maybe I need to change and reflect on the lessons and tasks I am planning to make it more engaging for them through differentiation. 

3) Describe at least two scenarios where the Guide Browsing feature would be useful in supporting student learning. For one scenario, describe how and why Focused Browsing would be useful; for the other scenario, describe how and why Filtered Browsing would be the better option. Keep in mind that neither scenario should make students feel overly-controlled or policed. 

Filter Browsing is a feature that I use during our beginning and end of year testing. We require students to take a variety of assessments online and it is quick and tempting for students to look up answers when they are stuck. I saw this plenty of times before I was aware of this feature. We have a conversation prior to the tests where I explain how a Filter session works, I ensure that students are aware that in the testing, I am looking to see what they already know, so I can teach them what they don’t know. I do not expect them to get 100% and using Google to help them score higher is actually a hinderance to their learning. I make sure students are clear that the boundaries are being set so that 1) everyone has equal chance on the test, 2) the Filter session will come off when the allotted time to sit the test is complete and 3) when we are finished we will be off devices to do something quiet which doesn’t distract others and to give them a break from screen time after focussing for an hour. These parameters help them to understand the benefit a Filter session will have to their learning and not feel like they are being ‘policed’. 

A Focus Browsing session is helpful when I have resource(s) for students to view to help them with their work. I specifically use this when doing small group teaching. This allows me to push out a website to a selected group of students that I am working with. This enables clarity for other students who do not need to access specific sites based on their work, and simplifies my whole class instructions. I like to send out different links for different topics or abilities and the Focus Browsing filter is the best way to do this. This also provides agency for students if I provide them 2-3 links to explore, they can choose which is best for them but also scaffolds them with teacher selected resources based on their topic. I find that we can very quickly end up in the ‘black hole’ of the internet and not all my students can navigate the freedom of Google as well as others, so this helps me to steer them in the right direction, but allows them to feel like they are still in control of the sites they are choosing to use. 

4) Discuss how Scheduled Browsing could be used to help increase classroom productivity in ways that do not make student learning feel too stifled. Please include a minimum of three examples in your response. 

This is a feature I do not use very often on Hapara as I have found it a bit difficult to set up for a variety of my classes (my year levels are split on more than 1 Hapara class so I would need to do this 2-3 times to cover some of my classes for the same 1 hour). Some ways I can envision this in my practice are… 

Using Scheduled Browsing to have students access only their blogs for our ‘bell ringer’ activity which in English is the first 10 minutes of the class a written response to a question on the board. We are practicing forming an opinion, and I want students to do this with their own ideas, not the ideas found through research. Having them only access their blog for the first 10 minutes would reinforce them to focus on their opinions being valid and complete the task without any additional aids. 

Continue to use Scheduled Browsing when doing assessments at the start and end of the year. This has been beneficial to have students focussed for the 1 hour session and released at the end for their next class. I would make sure to reinforce the ‘why’ of this and perhaps aim to have the end of year assessments more self-managed, where they do not need to be scheduled to a focus session in order to do their test without accessing Google. Perhaps we could work up to only Schedule Browsing those students who cannot manage themselves over the course of the year, who need this extra support and allow students with great self managing skills to have the freedom of this during test time. 

We work in collaborative spaces and I find that the end of the day packing up can get hectic with many classes, teachers and students sending out instructions. I would like to try sending a Focused Browse tab for the last 15 minutes of class, a timer which counts back from 10 minutes, so students can have this quietly pop up on their screen to indicate to them we have 10 more minutes to work. This frees me up from having to be at the Dashboard and sending a message each session to pack up. Once the 10 minute timer finished, the students would know they have 5 minutes to quietly transition to tidy up. This gives the children ownership to keep that timer tab open, reference it and work to finish up their task in those 10 minutes. This would also be helpful for me to carry on the group teaching I am doing and not worry about watching the clock. This would be a great routine to build, and I imagine especially helpful when there is a substitute teacher in as the students will know what is expected and it will have been scheduled ahead of time. 

Do you have any additional thoughts about Highlights? Please share! 

Now that I have a better understanding of these features I am excited to try them out in my classroom!