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To all our educators and school leaders in the Southern Hemisphere — welcome back! Hipi the Sheepicorn and Team Hāpara are here to help you create an engaging learning environment for all of your students. To support this, we’re sharing five back-to-school tips that are easy to implement this year with Hāpara classroom management tools.
1. Build classroom relationships with communication tools
Our first back-to-school tip is an important one. Building positive classroom relationships is an essential strategy for helping learners achieve.
Education expert Jorge Valenzuela wrote about strategies for building positive classroom relationships. He explained, “Research supports intentionally using positive words and affirmations to increase the motivation of students to confront challenging tasks. Other positive effects of affirmations include students’ enhanced mindsets about their intelligence, emotions and feelings, and problem-solving ability.”
Hāpara Highlights makes it easy for classroom educators to share positive affirmations with learners.
Announce feature
The Announce feature allows teachers to send a short message with optional fun emojis to an individual learner, a group of learners or the class. For example, an educator could say to the class, “I’m impressed by how much progress you’ve made today on the maths project! 🤩” Or an educator could send an announcement to an individual learner by typing, “Grace, your paragraph writing is improving. 🎉”
Two-way Chat feature
Schools will soon have the option in the Hāpara Admin Console to enable the Chat feature for teachers. This two-way online message feature allows an educator to start a conversation with a learner in their class. If the teacher has the Chat feature toggled to “on” in Hāpara Highlights, learners in the class can also start a conversation with the teacher.
Not only can an educator send a positive affirmation, the learner can ask follow-up questions and get one-on-one support without having to interrupt the class. This creates a respectful environment, especially for quiet learners who are reluctant to ask for help otherwise.
2. Help learners stay away from social media distractions
New Zealand implemented a school phone ban in April 2024 to help with distractions. In Australia, social media will soon be banned altogether for children under 16. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says, “This law is focused on the addictive design and features, and dark patterns that emerge on social media platforms.”
She continues, “I believe we should approach online safety the same way we have water safety. And what I mean by that is: Decades ago, there were tragic backyard drownings in swimming pools. So Australia made a decisive decision that all pools would be fenced, and that would be backed by enforcement. But we don’t try and fence the ocean because that’s futile. What we do is we teach our children to swim at the youngest age, just like we need to teach them digital literacy. We teach them to swim between the flags. We have lifeguards. We have shark nets where we know there are predators and we teach them about rip [tides].”
In Hāpara Highlights, there are several features that allow teachers to provide a digital fence to keep learners engaged, focused and safe. They can also create personalized browsing experiences for their learners.
Guide browsing
Classroom educators can guide learners’ browsing to help them focus on specific websites or stay away from certain websites. While web filters block categories of websites, there may be websites outside of those categories that distract learners. In that case, an educator can create a Focus Session to keep learners on task with a group of websites. Or they can create a Filter Sessions to block websites and prevent learners from visiting them.
This is a great chance to have conversations with learners about what they find distracting and what type of “digital fence” they need to stay focused. Hāpara Highlights allows teachers to personalize browsing for individual learners’ needs or group needs as well. Over time, an educator can follow the gradual release of responsibility and open up browsing when learners are ready.
Close and block a tab
In the moment during class, an educator may see that a learner has visited a distracting website. It’s easy for learners of all ages to get off track at times, and that’s why it’s helpful for educators to have a digital classroom management tool like Hāpara Highlights.
Many educators recommend sending a learner a message with the Announce button as a reminder to get back on track. If the learner gets distracted again, the next time the teacher can click the X to close the learner’s tab in Highlights.
If that website continues to distract a learner, the teacher can take the next step by clicking the X and then choosing to block the website for a period of time. Every learner’s executive functioning needs are different, but the variety of features in Highlights gives educators the ability to support all of those needs in their classroom.
3. Make it easier to guide browsing
We recently released a new feature that many schools have been waiting for! When creating a “Guide browsing” Focus Session or Filter Session, educators can now select “Repeat this session.” They can select the days of the week and end date for the recurring session. This new feature makes it easier to focus students on their learning, while saving educators time.
Learn more about recurring sessions in our Support Center.
4. Explore new lessons to share with learners
The Discover tab in Hāpara Workspace features hundreds of Workspaces that educators and schools have shared, including lessons specific to Australian and New Zealand curriculum. We’ve gathered up some of Hipi the Sheepicorn’s favorites. Check them out and make a copy of any of the resources or Workspaces for your school team or classroom.
Back to School
This Workspace is a back-to-school template with fun activities for the beginning of the year.
Maths Mindset
This Workspace has engaging, maths-centered activities, designed to offer practice in solving problems and grow learners’ math skills.
Workspace Template
This template was created so you can easily start creating your own Workspaces.
Anzac and Australia Unit
This Workspace about Anzac commemorates those throughout history who have fought for Australia.
The Gold Era: Australia
After completing this Workspace, learners will understand that the 19th century, and the influx of new settlers into Australia, was a time of incredible change.
Māori Language Week: Language and Maths
This Workspace was designed to teach basic Māori and can be used during Māori Language Week or any time of the year.
Science: (Geography) Describe aspects of a contemporary New Zealand geographic issue
Learners will use this Workspace to help them with their research about a contemporary geographic issue in New Zealand.
New Zealand – Conflicts Over Time
In this Workspace, students will learn about New Zealand’s history with war and conflict.
New Zealand Social Action for Equality
In this Workspace, students will learn and write about social actions taken in reference to women in New Zealand seeking equality.
5. Streamline teaching workflows with Class View
In case you missed it, Hāpara Highlights now features the Class View tab! This tab combines Current Screens and Browser Tabs. Teachers can toggle between the two views, streamlining visibility into student browsing activity.
Class View also includes an updated “Guide browsing” banner at the top of the screen, making it even easier to start a Focus Session or Filter Session.
Learn more about Class View in our Support Center.
Hipi and the Hāpara team wish you a Hipi-rific school year! What tips will you be taking into your school or classroom?
Discover a better way to manage the digital classroom
We’ve created an essential guide for school leaders to help manage digital learning environments.
