Hapara: helpful or heinous?
The struggle began when the chromebooks came in to effect. How were the teachers going to monitor what the students were doing? That is when Hapara came into play.
October 30, 2020
With the new school Chromebooks that were given out to all of the students starting last year, new guidelines were put in place on how to monitor what the students were doing during the class period. Most teachers relied on a site called Hapara. This site allowed the teachers to monitor each student’s screen, see what tabs each student had open, and close anything out that they wanted to. Before this became common knowledge to the students, many tabs were being closed out on a continuous basis.
When speaking with the students, it was a unanimous vote of hating Hapara. It did not do anything to help the students besides attempt to keep each one more on task. When speaking with junior Paige Dreckman, she explains how she feels when a teacher has used Hapara for her class over the course of the last two years.
“My least favorite part is that you always feel like you are being watched,” she said, “even if you are on task, you still feel like you are constantly doing something wrong since you know they are watching you.” Many other students agreed with this statement.
While the students all will probably spend their entire high school career absolutely despising Hapara, most teachers have a different viewpoint of it. When speaking with English teacher, Mr. Van Leeuwe, he explains many different positive aspects of using Hapara.
“I think Hapara has positively impacted our school and my classes. Hapara is great to help shoot out links to students faster than Google Classroom or at the right moment when we need them, especially when we only need the link once and not again. It’s also been very helpful to help keep students focused and on task because I can watch what they are doing on their screens. Guided browsing has also been very helpful to make sure students are only on websites they need for my assignments and limit their distractions.”
While he says that the students may be opposed to Hapara, he believes that they are starting to understand the true need for Hapara and how it is impacting their learning. He hopes the school continues the investment in Hapara in the near future so it can continue to provide positive results for the student’s education.