Delaney Wharton’s Updates

Update 2 - Hooray for Hapara?

https://hapara.com/

Hapara is a fairly new educational technology. In some regards, it is wonderful because it allows teachers to send out materials to their students efficiently. Teachers can easily share Google docs with students so they can all have their own individual copy. You can also differentiate instruction if you would like to send different materials to different groups of students by either making groups or by sending items to individual students that they can then access through their Google Drive. 

It also has a feature called "Highlights" that allows you to see what a student is doing on their device, such as a chromebook. You can see what tabs they have open, and you can receive screenshots from what students are doing also. With that, you can limit the tabs/websites that students are allowed to go on. For the student that tries to access YouTube or games regularly to avoid doing tasks, that can be wonderful. But is it truly solving anything? 

In the grand scheme of things, Hapara truly uses old pedagogical ideas. While students may be interacting with one another over Google Docs, Hapara does not allow students to interact with one another. It just facilitates it. Instead of using paper hard copies, the teacher can send the worksheets or articles out to students electronically. Essentially, the tasks themselves are the same.

Hapara can help build individual student accountability because they know their teacher has the ability to watch them, but at the same time, students know they can be watched and if they do something questionable someone, such as an administrator, will find out. Therefore, they may not be willing to truly communicate their ideas because they know they are being monitored.