What teachers can and cannot see in Hāpara Highlights Follow

This article helps teachers, administrators and families understand what Hāpara Highlights can show teachers, what it cannot show, and how student visibility works.

Who this is for

Teachers | Admins | Families

Hāpara Highlights is a browser extension that helps teachers monitor and guide student browsing during class. Because it works entirely within the browser — and only within your school account — it has clear, hard limits on what it can access.

This article explains exactly what teachers can and cannot see, and how to keep your personal browsing completely separate from your school account.

How do I know when I'm being monitored?

You should never have to wonder. Highlights gives you two clear signals:

The extension icon. The Hāpara icon sits in the top-right corner of your Chrome or Edge browser. When it's coloured, your teacher may be able to see your school account activity. When it's grey, monitoring is off.

Screenshot notifications. If your teacher saves a screenshot of your screen (called a "Snap") to give you feedback, you'll see an on-screen notification right away.

Monitoring also only runs during the hours your school district has configured — typically something like Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Outside those hours, the extension goes grey and deactivates automatically.

What teachers CAN see

When you're logged into your school account during school hours, teachers can see:

• Open browser tabs — the URLs and page titles of tabs open in your school account's browser window
• Your current screen — a live preview of the specific tab you're actively viewing
• School cloud storage — files in your school-issued Google Drive or OneDrive, which teachers can view, search, and comment on to track assignment progress
• Browsing history for the class session — a log of websites visited during that specific class period

What teachers CANNOT see

Because Highlights is a browser extension — not a device monitoring tool — there's a lot it simply cannot access:

• Your camera or microphone — Highlights has no technical ability to access your device's hardware
• Anything outside the browser — desktop apps, local files, your desktop background, games, Spotify, Discord, and anything else running outside Chrome or Edge is completely invisible
• Your personal accounts — personal email, private browsing history, and social media are blocked from view, as long as you keep your personal and school browser profiles separate (more on this below)
• Off-hours activity — teachers cannot see what you're doing in the evenings, on weekends, during school holidays, or at any time outside your district's designated monitoring hours

Using a personal device at home

If you log into your school account on a personal computer, tablet, or laptop, the same school-hours rules apply — Highlights won't monitor outside those times. That said, the most reliable way to keep your personal browsing completely private is to use separate browser profiles.

How to set up a dedicated School profile

Using a separate browser profile means the Hāpara extension only ever lives in one isolated window, with no connection to your personal browsing.

1. Open Chrome or Edge and click your profile picture in the top-right corner.
2. Select Add (Chrome) or Other Profiles (Edge) and create a new profile named something like "School."
3. Log into your school account only within this profile. The Hāpara extension will install and run only in this window.
4. When you're done with schoolwork, close the School profile window entirely. Once it's closed, Highlights is completely inactive.

Your personal profile — where you do everything else — remains entirely separate and invisible to Highlights at all times.

Quick reference

For questions about how your specific school has configured Highlights — including exact monitoring hours — contact your teacher or school administrator.