Heading back to school with Hapara

There’s a lot going on at the beginning of a new school year, and we want to make sure that you and your staff get off on the right foot! To do this, we’ve put together a few announcements, reminders and suggestions that will ensure you are up and running before students walk through the school doors.

Wrapping up from last school year

At this point, the Hapara Support team has processed and archived all of your student data from last year, cleaned up your Dashboard and removed last year’s classes. We have just a few post-archiving reminders:

• Previously synced Google Classroom classes are archived by Hapara.
• After archiving, teachers arriving back to school will not have access to Hapara Dashboard and Highlights until your new data is loaded. If your teachers are using Hapara Workspace, they can always access their Workspaces by going straight into https://workspace.teacherdashboard.com.
  
• If you are using Google Cloud Directory Sync, make sure the GCDS exclusions have been updated (Year Suffix). And if you’re using a firewall, check that the following Hapara URLs have been whitelisted.

If you have any questions about archiving, please contact the Hapara Support Team.

A quick data loading checklist

We’ve put together a quick checklist to make sure loading your data for the new school year goes smoothly.  

Note: If you’ve made any changes to your student domain(s), please contact the Hapara Implementation team. We’ll need to create a new instance. If you’ve changed to a new teacher domain, you will only need to add the new teacher domain to “Alternative Logins” in the Hapara Admin Console.

• Make sure the Hapara Marketplace app has been re-granted.
• Check that your Super Admin Access Grant for Hapara is still still valid by going to https://td-admin.appspot.com/((domain))?page=apps and granting access.
• If your school/district is planning to use SIS integration (Clever or PowerSchool) or cURL scripting, please make sure your new school year schedules are up to date before syncing the data into Hapara. It’s a good practice to run a test extraction to check what will be loaded into Hapara before you click “Sync Classes Now”.

Feel free to contact implementation@hapara.com for help or more info if needed.

New features and functions in Hapara

Check out what’s new! We’ve made a few changes that will make managing and teaching with Hapara easier for everyone.

• Introducing Student Dashboard: All of the digital tools that learners have to navigate on a daily basis can lead to confusion and overwhelm. To solve this problem and increase student agency, Hapara has created Student Dashboard: a one-stop shop for managing school work in a digital world. It’s a hub for Hapara, G Suite and Google Classroom in one, convenient location. Check it out here.
• Shared Groups: Previously, Groups could only be set as specific to each tab – so Groups needed to be recreated in each section of Hapara. Now, teachers can choose to set Groups at the class level, or to have individual Groups per Subject folder (Sub-tab) for each class:. Groups are also now shared between all teachers of a class — when one teacher sets up Groups, any co-teachers will have access to them as well. 
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• New ClassLink integration: If you are currently using ClassLink Roster Server, you will be able to use it to sync your data to Hapara for the new school year. Once the sync has been established, your data will be loaded into Hapara daily. Instructions can be found here.
• Pause screen: We have a new feature coming to Highlights that will allow teachers to pause learners’ screens for a moment to get their attention. It’s similar to an “eyes on me, 1-2-3” strategy, but now we’ve brought it into the digital realm as well.

Want to stay up to date all year long? We also recommend adding community@hapara.com to your approved address list for teachers in your domain. We regularly send updates and resources to teachers and admins, and this is the best way to make sure everyone is in the know on all things Hapara!