How to pause students' screens Follow

In this article:

• Pause screens overview
• How to pause students’ screens for your entire class
• How to pause individual students' screens
• The student experience when screens are paused

Pause screens overview

Pause screens is an optional Highlights feature that your Hāpara administrator may choose to turn on for your school or district. 

If pause screens has been enabled for your account, you will see it as a toggle switch in the Highlights toolbar. 

When you turn on pause screens, students’ browsers are temporarily locked so they cannot browse the internet. This is a helpful feature if you need to get the entire class’ attention for some direct instruction, or to facilitate a change in activities. 

How to pause and unpause students’ screens for the entire class

Pausing your class' screens is as simple as switching the pause screens toggle in the Highlights toolbar to on. 

When you turn on Pause Screens, a warning message with a 5-second timer will appear letting you know that learners' screens are about to be paused. 

Turning on pause screens will prevent all students in your class from navigating the internet for a set period of time. Your school or district’s Hāpara administrator can set the maximum length that screens can be paused for 5, 10 or 15 minutes. 

Once Pause Screens is turned on, Hapara Highlights shows that all screens of learners who are online have been paused and muted

If you would like to unpause all students’ screens before the time is up, you just need to switch the pause screens toggle to off. 

You can release individual students from pause screens by hovering over their student tile and clicking Release this student.

How to pause individual students' screens

If you would like to pause the screen of just one student, you can do so directly from the student's tile in Highlights by clicking on the three dot more menu and then clicking Pause screen.

This will prevent just that student from navigating the internet for a set period of time. Your school or district’s Hāpara administrator can set the maximum length that screens can be paused for 5, 10 or 15 minutes. 

Once Pause Screens is turned on, Hapara Highlights shows that the screen of that learner has been paused and muted.

You can release the student from their paused screen by hovering over the student tile and clicking Release this student.

If you have paused the screens of multiple students and would like to release them all at once, you can switch the Pause screens toggle to off. 

The student experience when screens are paused

When you pause screens for students, whatever they were looking at in the browser will be replaced by the following screen:

While screens are paused, students will not be able to navigate to close the page or navigate to other websites. 

Pause screens will also mute any websites that stream audio or video like YouTube, Wistia or Vimeo (any website that shows it is playing audio in the Chrome browser tab )

Pause screens will not mute audio from video calling websites like Meet or Hangouts. If you are teaching remotely and pause students’ screens, they will still be able to hear instructions you provide!

When you unpause students' screens, any tabs they previously had open will re-open.