What’s the best way to use Hāpara? Follow

In this article, we'll share some of the things you should be thinking about as you use Hāpara, including the top three things to consider that will transform your teaching.

Let’s look at three ways Hāpara can transform your teaching. The top three things new Hāpara users can do are: 

1. Use Teacher Dashboard to provide formative feedback to students 
2. Use Highlights to guide student browsing 
3. Create great digital learning opportunities in Workspace 

Provide formative feedback

The goal of formative feedback is to provide students with a learning opportunity, not simply error correction. It emphasizes learning over compliance and truly encourages students to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them.

Here are some tips for how to provide formative feedback with Teacher Dashboard: 

• Feedback should be timely 
• Give feedback often
• Feedback should address student advancement toward the overall goal 
• Give feedback individually and use positive speech 
• Feedback should be non-evaluative and specific
• Provide opportunities for students to revise their work

Providing students with formative feedback is a highly individualized process. There is no amount of automation that can eliminate the teacher at this point. However, giving regular feedback to all of your students can be difficult. Teacher Dashboard brings all of your students’ work into one screen, so it’s easy to see where they are, access their work and give quality feedback quickly. 

Guide browsing to build digital citizenship

The internet changed the way we learn forever. It brought new opportunities for students to see real-world examples without ever leaving the classroom. There are so many options when it comes to creating lessons in which students are working online, so setting limits and clearly defining parameters as students build their digital skills and sense of responsibility is very important. Highlights is a great tool for practicing gradual release, because it helps you clearly define student responsibilities online in a measurable way. 

There are so many options when it comes to creating lessons that feature online learning, so being organized is very important. 

Here are some best practices for using the internet to foster meaningful learning experiences for your students: 

• Create a lesson plan in which students work online
• Choose the websites that you want students to focus on, or select some websites that they need to stay away from
• Give students a checklist of what they need to do while working online 
• Set clear rules. No funny business online! 
• Keep students on track, monitor progress and time and give frequent feedback

Hāpara Highlights allows you to easily implement these best practices by using the focus or filter browsing features.

Create great learning opportunities

When it comes to designing projects or units of instruction, Workspace can be a great tool to build those out in a cohesive way. Workspace allows you to create challenging and motivating assignments with all of the best practices in mind.

Here are ways you can use the various features of Workspace to create organized, engaging digital lessons: 

• Make sure objectives are clear to students by adding cards to the Goals column.
• Add a variety of digital resources to the Resources column to make assignments interesting and challenging.
• Create assignments that reflect objectives by adding cards to the Evidence column. 
• Use sections to provide additional structure to your Workspace.
• Schedule start dates and end dates for assignments to help with pacing.
• Make the performance criteria clear to students by adding cards in the Rubric column.

Even implementing one of these powerful teaching practices can have a huge impact on your students’ learning! Just wait until you find out what else you can do with Hāpara.