About Hāpara classes Follow
In this article:
- Classes overview
- What happens when a class is created?
- What do I need to provision classes?
- Where do I go from here?
- What about students?
Classes overview
Once your school or district has been set up with Hāpara, the first step to get up and running is to create classes. Each class has one or more teachers, and once set up, can be populated with students and accessed via Hāpara.
There are three ways to create a class in Hāpara:
- Provision the class or classes in the Hāpara Admin Console (Admin only)
- Manually create the class in Hāpara Dashboard (Admin or Teacher)
- Sync classes from Google Classroom (Teacher)
To help you choose the best method(s) for creating classes, please read this article.
What happens when a class is created?
When a class is created in Hāpara via the Hāpara Admin Console, the following steps take place within your Google Apps domain:
- A Google Group is created for the class.
- Teachers are added to the Google Group as Owners.
- If enabled, a Class Root folder is created in Google Drive (owned by School Apps Owner)
- The Class Root folder is shared to teachers with read/write access.
Depending on your Hāpara Configuration, the following actions may also take place when a class is created:
- Subject Root folders may be created within the class root folder. These Subject Root folders inherit the Class Root folder sharing settings, and are therefore shared to teachers with read/write access. Subject Root folders eventually contain all Student Subject folders, which students use to receive, turn in, and store their work.
- A Google Calendar may be created. Teachers have write access to this calendar, and eventually students in the class will have read-only access.
If you do not create class folders when you set up Hāpara, the Google Drive Sharing view will be enabled by default. Teachers will see the All Docs view in their primary Dashboard tab. You can still disable this setting, however if it is disabled and teachers do not have class folders, the Dashboard tab will not show any student work.
Note: Manually created classes and classes created via Google Classroom sync function differently than classes created via the Hāpara Admin Console. It is important to understand the differences before choosing how to create classes.
What do I need to provision classes?
The minimum requirements to provision a class via the Hāpara Data Loader are:
- A unique Class name.
- A unique Class email address.
- The G-Suite email addresses of the class teacher(s).
In addition to those mandatory settings, Hāpara Administrators can enable a number of optional features for classes. These extra settings are listed below, including links to further documentation:
- Subject folders: Classes with a defined Subject Folders setting will have Google Drive folders created for each student. These folders live in the students' My Drive and their contents are visible within Hāpara Dashboard.
- Gmail visibility of student emails: When this setting is enabled, teachers have visibility into the Inbox, Sent, and Trash of each student in the class.
- Google Calendars: Administrators can choose to automatically create class calendars for some or all classes, which are shared with teachers (edit access) and students (view access).
Note: For more about setting up and formatting class data, please see the Hāpara Data Loader User Guide.
Where do I go from here?
Next, it’s time to select a load method. Then, follow the appropriate steps to load your data.
What about students?
To learn more about students in Hāpara, please read this article.