FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Chicago, Illinois, March 2, 2021–After an extensive review process of the Hāpara Champion certification program and the Hāpara Instructional Suite product, ISTE recently announced that it is awarding both the teacher bad∂ging program and the product with the ISTE Seal of Alignment. With this recognition, Hāpara joins a select and prestigious group of edtech companies that meet and exceed the rigorous ISTE Standards for Educators.
The ISTE Seal of Alignment is the gold standard of the edtech industry and represents years of tireless work by the Hāpara team and the educators they work with on a daily basis. “ISTE’s Seal of Alignment gives us guidance to intentionally and meaningfully provide high quality, standard-aligned learning experiences that support student agency and engagement in our instructional suite, professional learning programs and community. It sparks rich conversations and opens our eyes to new ways to serve learners and educators,” remarked Robin Poncia, VP of Marketing and Professional Learning.
The ISTE Seal of Alignment Review Findings Report issued in February of 2021, found that,
“The Hāpara Instructional Management Suite is a robust, well-designed system that lets teachers develop and deliver high-quality online instruction, both for in-school and at-home learning. In addition to providing an easy-to-use platform for designing consistent, media-rich instructional units, it also gives teachers tools to make monitoring student progress, providing personal formative feedback, and grading submissions clean and efficient. The Highlights feature, for in school applications, offers genuine tools for helping students stay on-task and out of trouble.
The Hāpara Champion Certification Courses are well designed and effective in introducing teachers to Hāpara and helping them become capable users. For those participants who want to master the capabilities of Hāpara and capitalize on its potential benefit to their students, the certification program will be a tremendous help.”
Hāpara has worked hard over the last five years to build the Hāpara Champion certification program into our premiere professional learning offering. The Hāpara Champion certification program consists of three, self-paced online courses led by expert facilitators to help teachers learn how to effectively use Hāpara, and then train other teachers too. Every participant is also required to participate in the Hāpara Community.
- Educator – A functional introduction to the Hāpara Instructional Suite
- Scholar – A focus on pedagogy within the Hāpara Suite with emphasis on the ISTE
- Standards
- Trainer – Equips educators to train other educators to use the Hāpara
“The ISTE Standards for Educators have always been the backbone of the Hāpara Champion program, and we are thrilled to have officially earned the ISTE Seal of Alignment against the ISTE Standards for Educators. Thank you to our over 1300 Hapara Champions for molding the Champion program into the robust learning opportunity that it is today,” Lindy Hockenbary, Hāpara Professional Learning Manager.
About ISTE
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) is the premier nonprofit membership organization serving educators and education leaders. ISTE is committed to empowering connected learners in a connected world and serves more than 100,000 education stakeholders throughout the world. As the creator and steward of the definitive education technology standards, our mission is to empower learners to nourish in a connected world by cultivating a passionate professional learning community, linking educators and partners, leveraging knowledge and expertise, advocating for strategic policies, and continually improving learning and teaching.
About Hāpara
Hāpara began in New Zealand in the Manaiakalani school cluster in 2011 and now has offices in Auckland and Chicago, Illinois. Our team is dedicated to building great products for schools.
After adopting Google Apps for Education in 2010, Manaiakalani educators realized they needed a more effective way of managing learner work in this new digital environment. They collaborated to design a dream tool that would streamline teacher workflow and deepen personalized learning and student engagement. They emphasized a straightforward design that would empower teachers of all technical abilities to track learner progress, provide ongoing feedback, disseminate files, and facilitate collaboration and differentiation through flexible groupings. From this, Hāpara’s original Teacher Dashboard was born.
Today, Hāpara has a range of products that were all built to support educators as they create authentic, personalized learning experiences.
Notes to Editors:
The Hāpara Suite currently includes:
- Teacher Dashboard (teacher facing) – Teachers can easily view and access all student work from Google Workspace for Education in one central hub (even if it wasn’t shared with them), organize learners into differentiated groups and quickly share out documents and resources.
- Highlights – (teacher facing) Teachers can view learner browsing activity, guide learners to or from specific sites, and help learners become better digital citizens by providing personalized, private feedback.
- Workspace – (student and teacher facing) A space where teachers can build digital assignments and projects that can easily be differentiated for groups or individuals. It gives learners an easy, intuitive interface to manage their assignments, customize their submissions and participate in learning and teaching.
- Student Dashboard – (student facing) A one-stop hub for learners to organize themselves for learning. Student Dashboard provides access to all of their Google Classroom assignments and announcements, Drive files, Gmail from teachers and even gives them reminders when something is due (or late!)–all in one place.
- Analytics – (administrator facing) Gives school leaders insight into how technology is being used in the classroom so they can use data to guide school improvement plans, measure return on investment and instruction, target professional development and inform further technology purchases.
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