Your top four Hāpara product updates of 2024

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School leaders and technology administrators are entrusted with setting up digital learning for success. At Hāpara, we’re here to lighten your load with tools designed to make digital classroom management seamless, user-friendly for educators and effective.

This year, we launched several updates to simplify your workflows, support educators and drive more learning engagement. We’ve received many positive comments from schools and classroom educators about these updates over the past year! Let’s take a look back at your favorite 2024 Hāpara product updates.

1. A more intuitive Hāpara Admin Console

When it’s back-to-school time, you’re tasked with getting many different apps and online software up and running in classrooms. It could take many hours to set up teacher and student accounts, assign permissions and configuring settings for all your programs.

We wanted to make the start of the school year as smooth and stress-free as possible for you. The updated Hāpara Admin Console, launched in March, does this by making your Hāpara setup up process fast and simple.

School technology administrators can now use the console’s intuitive interface and modern navigation to quickly create teacher and student accounts. The cleaner layout makes configuring user permissions and settings easy, too.

For example, Will is a technology administrator for his school district. At the end of the summer, he’s ready to set up Hāpara for schools across the district. 

In the Hāpara Admin Console, he quickly grants Google permission and then adds teacher and student domains. He then adds school principals to a leadership group so they can see what’s happening with learners throughout the school year.

Because his district uses ClassLink, he clicks the button in the Hāpara Admin Console to start syncing and creating accounts.

Afterward, he configures Hāpara settings to best support his district’s needs, such as the level of access teachers will have to student Google Drives, monitoring hours for Hāpara Highlights and enabling the Chat feature.

Check out our video tour that walks you through the new and improved Hāpara Admin Console.

2. Focused learning with the “close and block tab” feature

It’s the class period after lunch, and a high school biology class is creating presentations for an upcoming project. A few learners, though, have drifted over to a gaming site instead of focusing on the project. 

Thanks to the Hāpara Highlights “close and block tab” feature, their teacher quickly steers them away from this distraction, without disrupting the rest of the class. Because the learners have been distracted by this same website the past couple of days, she chooses the “block” option and enters “50 minutes”  to block it for the duration of the class period.

This feature, launched in April, allows educators to close and block tabs either for the entire class or for individual learners. She then sends the group of learners a quick message using the Highlights Announce feature to remind them to stay focused on their project.

This updated feature with the “block” enhancement makes it even easier for educators to keep learners focused and moving forward with their class activities.

3. Streamlined browser monitoring with the Class View tab

A fifth-grade class is in the middle of a science lesson. Half the learners are researching on their Chromebooks, while the other half are collaborating in groups at their tables. Their teacher is guiding group discussions at the tables, but needs to make sure students learning independently on their Chromebooks stay on task. 

The new Class View tab in Hāpara Highlights, released in October, simplifies this juggling act.

By combining Current Screens and Browser Tabs into a single view, the Class View tab streamlines browser monitoring. 

For example, the teacher can quickly see the learners’ current screens to ensure they’re related to the science lesson. Or she can toggle to Browser Tabs to skim the list of open tabs for any particular off-task websites. 

From there, she can identify anyone off-task and start a Chat conversation to ask if they need help. With the updated “Guide browsing” banner in Class View, she can also set up a Focus or Filter Session with just a couple of clicks, ensuring that learners only access relevant websites during their research time.

4. Saving teachers time with recurring sessions

In November, we introduced recurring “Guide browsing” sessions designed to make structured learning activities even easier for educators to manage.

A middle school math class uses Chromebooks every Wednesday for math practice. Their teacher focuses learners on specific websites during this time. The new recurring sessions feature allows the teacher to automate this process for the entire semester. With a few clicks, sessions are scheduled to repeat every Wednesday at the same time.

The educator sees on the weekly school updates that there will be a fire drill next Wednesday. She’s able to quickly click on the recurring Focus Session and edit it for next week so that it runs on Thursday instead.

Educators can edit or delete recurring sessions as needed, accommodating any changes in schedules or instruction.

Product enhancements guided by school and classroom needs

Every 2024 Hāpara product update we’ve released is designed with your needs in mind. Whether it’s simplifying onboarding or empowering educators to manage online behavior, we’re here to help you achieve your goals.

If you’d like a closer look at any of these updates, our Support Center is always available to guide you with in-depth resources and assistance.

Do you have feedback that could guide our future product development? We’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to your Hāpara Account Manager to share your thoughts. Your idea could help us make digital classroom management even better!