Hāpara has been awarded the 2022 Excellence in Equity Award for outstanding impact during the COVID-19 crisis by The American Consortium for Equity in Education. Hāpara was also a finalist in the Differentiation and Personalized Learning category.
The Excellence in Equity Awards program recognizes the companies, nonprofits, leaders and educators whose work contributes to the critical goal of ensuring access and equity for every learner.
“This competitive awards program honoring schools, educators, and industry received more than 160 total nominations from across the U.S., plus a number of submissions from abroad. The awards were created to acknowledge, spotlight, and celebrate high-impact work across K-12 education, as well as expand and enhance the discussion around educational equity. After the judges’ review, the winning nominees were selected based on outstanding achievement in supporting equitable opportunity and outcomes for all educators and learners,” The American Consortium for Equity in Education.
“When the world began to shut down in 2020, we knew we had to prioritize access to high quality digital learning opportunities for every student. We did that through offering free access to our products, free professional development for remote teaching and we tapped everyone in our community to share their tips and resources and essentially created a worldwide collaborative effort. We are privileged and humbled to be included among world class educators in the Excellence in Equity Awards this year,” Wayne Poncia, CEO Hāpara.
When schools began closing in 2020 due to the pandemic Hāpara partnered with educators to ensure they were still able to deliver learning to their students at home. Like many edtech companies Hāpara provided free subscriptions to their instructional suite, but went much further to help schools create a network to share standards-aligned curriculum content and resources regardless of geography through the use of Hāpara Workspace and Student Dashboard Digital Backpack. One of the most successful initiatives was the Sharing is Caring program in Alberta, Canada. 544 Alberta curriculum units, 35 Alberta-based course resources and 745 digital learning resources that replace the reliance on textbooks and print were curated and created by local educators and the Hāpara team. It allowed schools to ensure that every single student received not only academic support but also social emotional support during one of the most trying times in education in recent history. Teachers were able to connect with learners, provide guided practice, formative feedback and differentiated instruction all through the Hāpara Instructional Suite. The initiative continues today and has allowed many students to access classes not typically offered in their home schools due to lower enrollment, reduce the commute for students in remote areas that typically require two hour bus rides and to finish high school in alternative settings because the tools facilitate highly individualized learning paths. It has evolved into the Alberta Collaboration for Learning where school divisions continue to pool their resources to standards-aligned, vetted curriculum. More students across Alberta are able to access the same content and resources who wouldn’t have been able to just a few years ago.
“In 2020 alone our team created 80 professional development resources for teachers to take advantage of to enhance remote learning,” Lindsay Dixon Garcia, Hāpara Head of Content
Hāpara was founded and continues to be operated by K-12 educators who believe that equity should be at the center of every learning experience. The tools that Hāpara designs don’t simply digitize content. The Hāpara Instructional Suite gives educators the opportunity to easily differentiate instruction, promote digital citizenship, provide formative feedback and practice social emotional learning strategies. These student-centered tools empower learners to carve out paths that best meet their individual needs and truly be seen by their teachers, providing them with a greater sense of belonging. It promotes engagement on a level that gives students a voice in their learning. Functionally Hāpara provides students with access to everything they need for learning all in one place, essentially putting them in control of their education.
Hāpara is an edtech company committed to providing instructional tools that enhance teaching and learning and provide students with the opportunity to receive a high quality, personalized education independent of location. Our tools help teachers see student efforts across Google Workspace applications, support collaborative assignments, encourage real-time engagement and highlight student browsing while empowering students to take control of their digital learning experience in a responsible and secure way.
The Hāpara instructional management system provides teachers with maximum leverage of Google Apps for Education.
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