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Juggling schoolwork, extracurricular activities and a social life can feel like an uphill battle for learners. Staying organized amidst the whirlwind can be a major challenge. This constant scramble, complicated by distractions within the classroom or online learning environment can lead to stress, missed deadlines, and ultimately, hinder academic achievement.
How can educators empower students to take control of their learning journey while boosting classroom efficiency?
Strong organizational skills form the foundation of academic and future success for learners. Today, we’re going to explore research-based practices teachers can use to help their students build that critical foundation and hone in on how Hāpara can support the process.
Why organization is so important for students
The flipside of organization — clutter and disorganization — literally mess with the human brain. A study by Princeton psychology professor, Sabine Kastner, showed that clutter competes for the brain’s attention. “The more objects in the visual field, the harder a brain needs to work to filter them out,” wrote Michael Blanding, summarizing the research.
Educators see distraction play out with their learners. In her upper elementary classroom, educator Kristine Nannini noticed that disorganized students not only had trouble focusing on their own learning but often distracted classmates. She realized to best help individuals who struggle with organization, it was necessary to organize her entire classroom system. Now she starts out the school year with a structure that requires learners to stay organized. It includes a weekly mandatory desk cleanup, modeling precise organizing procedures and a planner to help learners visualize all the tasks they need to get done.
Benefits of organization for learners
Organization for students promotes a learning environment that supports better focus for everyone in the classroom. Learners get the message that they and their education are considered valuable and worth the effort it takes to be organized.
Common benefits of organizing the learning environment
- It’s easier to find materials and resources.
- Navigating the classroom is easy and logical.
- Time management improves.
- Less clutter means fewer distractions.
- Efficiency and productivity in schoolwork increase.
- Learning becomes more engaging and fun.
- Stress levels for learners and educators alike are reduced.
- It’s easier to focus and concentrate on studies and teaching.
The above benefits apply to physical classrooms and online learning environments. However, when students are 1:1 with devices, educators have discovered that distractions can be even more difficult to manage.
How Hāpara can help learners get organized
As evidenced with the classroom described in the above example, individual learners usually do their best when their work environment is well structured. Hāpara supports classroom management to simplify and streamline learning for students. Hāpara, paired with Google Workspace for Education, gives schools a way to better organize and focus learning.
Hāpara Highlights
Hāpara Highlights has several features to help manage distraction which often results in lost instructional time. With this Chrome browser monitoring software, individuals or groups of students who are more easily distracted can be given different levels of support to remain focused on their digital class activities. Highlights supports teachers as they work to boost classroom efficiency and provide positive reinforcement that encourages students to stick to their learning goals while preparing for more online responsibility.
Hāpara Teacher Dashboard
Another tool highly recommended by educators is Hāpara Teacher Dashboard. It helps with organization for students by giving educators ways to provide personalized support and feedback. It gives educators visibility into learners’ recent Google Workspace for Education files, making it easy to provide formative feedback.
“Teacher Dashboard empowers learners by fostering executive functioning skills like organization, focus and task initiation. Teacher Dashboard promotes digital literacy, providing learners with skills to navigate the digital world responsibly and effectively,” explains Heather Rentz, Hāpara Community Development Manager.
Hāpara Student Dashboard
When Hāpara asked learners to detail the qualities they’d like in their ideal online planner, their input helped shape the design of Hāpara Student Dashboard. They said less interference from notifications and an uncluttered screen could help them better manage distractions and keep up with all their tasks during the day and week.
Focus and distraction management
Anyone finds it hard to concentrate when they feel pulled in multiple directions. With busy schedules after school, many welcome the chance to focus on completing projects without games or unnecessary messages to tempt them. Hāpara’s classroom management and safety tools help students stay focused on learning tasks by minimizing distractions while promoting critical skills.
“Hāpara Highlights develops learners’ essential organization skills like focus, prioritization and time management,” says Rentz. She explains, “By gradually increasing browsing independence as learners demonstrate readiness, Highlights provides them with skills to become responsible and confident digital citizens.”
This Hāpara tool allows educators to employ a gradual release of responsibility model in their classroom to support students in developing the ability to focus when using the internet.
Highlights also allows educators to use groups to differentiate their approach. They can easily create student groups in Highlights and set up guided browsing sessions for specific groups. Or they can send a message or share links with certain groups who need encouragement, support or help with resources.
Some learners may get distracted by a certain website.Educators can prevent them from accessing it with the “Guide browsing” feature in Highlights until those learners begin to navigate online responsibly. This feature also allows educators to focus learners on a set of websites to set them up for success.
With Hāpara, educators can focus browsing for learners for a certain time period of time or preschedule guided browsing sessions that can be repeated. Without interrupting other classmates, educators can also pause screens to get the attention of individual learners and communicate one-on-one with the Chat feature.
Visibility and ownership
With Highlights and Teacher Dashboard, educators also get visibility into learners’ Google Drives, allowing them to find misplaced files and reorganize.
Students also get visibility into their learning with Hāpara. Being able to see their learning process laid out clearly supports students with organization. A clear, uncluttered view of learning is what makes Student Dashboard stand out among similar online student organization software.
High school learner Ashlyn says, “Hāpara Student Dashboard helps me stay organized because I can see all my assignments in one place. It’s easy to keep track of what’s due and plan my time better, so I don’t feel stressed or forget anything.”
Student Dashboard also gives learners personalization options, such as selecting the colors for their screen. This detail is another small way learners can experience ownership of their experience on their school device.
Differentiation and personalization
Educators can use Hāpara to tailor learning experiences for individual student needs. To provide differentiated support with Teacher Dashboard, teachers can share a Google file directly to learners’ screens from their own Google Drive or create a new file to push out to the entire class, a group or one learner.
Highlights allows teachers to differentiate instruction in several different ways. With its Share links feature teachers can easily push out a resource, such as an interesting website, to a group of students or an individual. They can also provide content for a group of learners who need a more basic reading level or an extended assignment for a group who needs increased challenges to stay engaged.
Each of these tools promotes a more inclusive and psychologically safe learning environment because students get a personalized experience. Educators can share videos, images and online articles to Google Docs, Forms and Drawings.
Streamlined learning
Hāpara’s seamless integration with Google Classroom means learners, as well as educators, are usually familiar with commonly used tools shared by both platforms. For educators, this simplifies managing assignments and learning materials. Students, including those who are just starting out with 1:1 device use, can focus more on the content than figuring out how to use the technology piece. There is less they need to figure out to manage learning across platforms.
Resources for implementing Hāpara’s student organization tools
Hāpara is a company run by educators who know firsthand the realities teachers deal with every day at schools and districts. That’s why we offer a wealth of resources to ensure a smooth integration and ongoing personalized support.
“Since the pandemic we’ve purchased so many edtech tools, too many to name. Our experience with Hāpara is unlike any other company we’ve worked with in terms of technical support and help to onboard us,” says Phillip Ledford, Instructional Technology Coordinator, Elizabethton High School.
Whether educators are new to Hāpara and edtech or just want a deeper dive into all that Hāpara offers, they have access to professional learning opportunities. These include our online micro-credential courses which educators can complete in an hour or less. Also, educators can tap into the Hāpara Community to connect with peers from around the world to learn from each other, ask questions and share tips and best practices on student organization.
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