Hapara – An Instructional Management Tool for Google Apps Content

Hapara was recently implemented in the high school, joining the Middle and Elementary schools who implemented it at the beginning of the school year. At SSIS Hapara will be used to help visually manage Google Drive content shared with your students. It will also help facilitate communication with your students.

Hapara, a cloud-based Google Apps content management tool, should make your Google Drive workflow between students and you more efficient. You will be able to quickly share documents to your whole class, individuals or groups within a class, or multiple classes. With the Hapara Dashboard, you will be able see to your entire class and each student’s Google Apps content on one screen. Students can easily share documents with you by simply creating or placing a document in the Hapara shared folder.

You will be able to email your entire classes or selected groups of students directly through Hapara, as well. Since Hapara is connected with Powerschool, it is frequently updated with the correct class list information. You don’t need to make any changes manually like you do in Gmail contact groups. Hapara doesn’t have the capacity to email parents, however, so you will still need to use Gmail contact groups or email individual parents directly through Gmail to communicate with parents.

If you have already created a system of individual folders with your students prior to our implementation, it should be easy for your students to move the content of those folders into the Hapara folder. That way you can monitor and access work directly in the Hapara dashboard, eliminating the need to click through folders in your Drive to get to student work.

If you have a shared class folder with your entire class where you have students submit their work, allowing other students to see and feedback on each other’s work, Hapara won’t be able to facilitate that process (yet) since Hapara doesn’t manage folders. You should maintain that system and set-up directly in your drive if you have that need.

It’s also important to know that Hapara does not manage your personal folders and documents and it does not manage shared folders and documents between teachers and admin. You will still need to go to Google Drive to access and manage those folders and documents.

We hope Hapara will make your teaching lives a bit easier and more efficient as you manage and work toward a more paperless classroom with your students. As you use the tool, please let me know of any issues that arise. At the same time, if you have worked out a process in Hapara that is worthy of sharing, let me know and we will highlight that here in the Matrix or elsewhere. When updates come, I’ll be sure to let you know what any new possibilities and features include.