Saturday 22 June 2019

Hapara Toolkit with Kerry Boyde-Preece June 18th

My focus with Hapara earlier in the year had been on basic use of both the Dashboard and Highlights functions within Hapara. Since then I have used it to monitor student files and drives. I was able to track and monitor student learning and activity - which was especially helpful for conversations with target students about their learning and the amount of independent tasks they were managing to complete.
In this toolkit my plan was to extend that knowledge more. My focus during the session was on learning how to use different functions for grouping students, and assigning work. I learnt how to use  the "Guide browsing" function within Highlights to set up focus learning sessions for groups of students. I was able to plan a session for the class focused on Matariki. Kerry's tips for populating the tabs suggested that sites selected included the class site, Docs and Drive, so that students could then access learning tasks and create their own files to complete these. That leaves seven free tabs to populate with other relevant sites for students to browse.



The focus session can be set to a specific time of the day for a specific length. This is great as it means you can set the time for a specific learning block - in my case Literacy learning time. For that session the students can then only access the selected tabs. As some of my students discovered they cannot delete those tabs, and they can't access other sites either.
My planned focus session was so popular and successful with my class, that I immediately planned a follow up session for next week. Student voice comments about the focus session made during our end of day Captain's Log reflection were positive. Students liked that the sites guided their learning. One of my target students commented that it meant he could not get sidetracked. Other students agreed, and said that having all the sites chosen for them made it much easier to get on with the task. They felt that having seven sites to look at was a good number. One student said that she and her buddy found that two of the sites were most helpful, so they spent most of the time on them. Another target student liked the site that included some video clips, as he learnt lots of facts from them, without having to read much. Again, working with their learning buddy helped the students. I did have to swap two students, as one of my target student decided that he didn't want to work with a girl that day! He worked well with his buddy for the day, and they produced a great set of slides.

Target Student's Matariki Slides

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