Welcome to Hāpara Highlights Follow
In this article:
- Introduction to Highlights
- Getting started with Highlights
- Key features of Highlights
- Student privacy limitations
- Troubleshooting with Highlights
Introduction to Highlights
Hāpara Highlights gives you visibility into what students are doing in the Google Chrome browser so you can provide necessary learning supports.
Highlights has everything you need to support learners online and help them become responsible digital citizens, whether you are:
- Opening and closing tabs to keep learners focused
- Creating guided browsing sessions
- Sending instant announcements with formative feedback to learners
- Recording a snapshot of browsing progress
Highlights has three ways to view student browsing:
- Browser Tabs is the default view when you select Highlights.
This view helps you see everything a student has going on in their browser.
It shows individual Student Tiles for each student in your class. Each Student Tile shows a list of the tabs the student has open on their device.
The bolded item is the tab they are actively looking at.
- Current Screens also displays individual Student Tiles for each student in your class. But this view shows screenshots of what students are actively looking at.
- Activity Viewer shows a near-real-time summary of the browsing activity for your class as a whole.
Getting started with Highlights
Before you can use Highlights, your school Hāpara administrator has to deploy the new Highlights extension to the students in your school.
Once the Highlights extension is installed, follow these steps to access Highlights:
1. Log into Hāpara using your school-issued Google account.
2. Select the class you want to view.
3. The Browser Tabs view will open by default.
If students are online, and you are within school hours, you will be able to see their browsing activity right away.
Key features of Highlights
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Highlights updates automatically to show you students’ browsing in near-real time. How quickly Highlights updates will depend on your network bandwidth and how Highlights has been set up by your network administrator. |
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Set up timed sessions to focus students on specific websites, or filter out select websites. |
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Remotely open up to 10 tabs at a time on students' devices. |
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Send an instant announcement to a student, group or the class that pops up in their browser. |
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See a summary of the browsing activity across your class. |
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Record student browsing activity (information and screenshots) at any point in time to explore at a later stage or share with students. |
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Close tabs remotely from your screen and provide a reason to help with digital citizenship skills. |
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Create and edit groups of students to provide differentiated learning experiences. You can also filter Highlights to only view specific group activities. |
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Pause all student browsing activity temporarily. |
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Access students' Google Drives to help them find a file or to check their progress. |
Student privacy limitations
Your school or district may put limitations in place to prevent you from viewing students’ browsing when they are not in school. These limitations can be based on school hours (days and time) and/or location (whether or not students are connected to the school network).
If you open Highlights outside of your designated school hours, you will see this message:
If network limitations have been put in place, and a student is not connected to the designated network(s), you will see this message in the Student Tile:
If you believe you are seeing either of these messages in error, reach out to your Hāpara administrator to check the student privacy settings for your school or district.
Troubleshooting Highlights
Student connection issues
Occasionally, Student Tiles in Highlights may not display student browsing activity correctly. Highlights provides various alerts to let you know when there is a problem connecting to students’ devices.
Possible issues include:
- The student appears offline
- The student is logged into several devices
- There are several students logged into one device
Highlights is slow to update
If you find that Highlights is very slow, it may be due to your school network. In this case, contact your system administrator, who will be able to adjust Highlights bandwidth parameters.
Getting help from Hāpara Support
If you are experiencing an issue connecting to a student’s device, first click the refresh button at the top right side of your screen.
This will help to reestablish the connection between Highlights and student devices.
If you continue to experience an issue, you can click the Need help? bar at the bottom of a Student Tile.
After trying the suggestions, if you still need help, you can send details to Hāpara.
Click on the Report a problem button in the window.
Please add as much information as you can to the description box.
Then click Report issue to send the form to the Hāpara Support team. We will investigate the issue and follow up with you.