Dear parents,

Our school takes your child’s online safety seriously. The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires that K-12 schools and libraries use internet filters and implement other measures to protect children from harmful online content as a condition for the receipt of certain federal funding, especially E-rate funds.

Our school has recently adopted the Hāpara Instructional Suite to assist with this requirement, along with other important learning tasks. We will begin using it in the Fall 2020. This is a great opportunity for your child/children because it will provide new ways to personalize learning to meet their individual needs, keep them safe during online lessons and provide them with ongoing feedback on their work to encourage continuous learning and growth.

What is Hāpara?

Hāpara is an Instructional Suite of tools that works with Google G Suite to add functionality in a classroom setting. Hāpara provides teachers with:

• Access to your student’s school documents and online activity through their school-issued accounts

• Visibility into web activity when students are logged in to their school account

• A place to engage in classroom work so students can have personalized learning experiences.

The following are Hāpara tools that your child’s/children’s teacher will use:

Teacher Dashboard

Teacher Dashboard is designed to give teachers quick access to student work in Google Drive, as well as efficiently share out assignments with learners. Since our teachers will now have quick, easy access to student’s work, they can provide more feedback and encouragement. We know that continuous feedback positively impacts student achievement.

Highlights

Highlights will give our teachers visibility into what students are doing online, the ability to create curated online lessons and share out useful links and resources. The goal of Highlights is to help our students build their digital citizenship skills, and help them to learn how to make positive decisions and stay safe while working and learning online.

We have made the decision as a school to follow Hāpara’s Ethical monitoring policy. This means that your child’s/children’s online activity will not be monitored outside of school hours. Monitoring will take place while students are at school or at home between the hours of 8:00 am and 3:30 pm. Students should always use their assigned Chromebooks for school work and never use them for personal activities.

Workspace

Workspace gives teachers the ability to easily create personalized lessons, projects and units of inquiry. Teachers will now be able to create and deliver learning tailored to meet individual student needs.

Student Dashboard

Student Dashboard is an app where students can find important announcements from their teachers about assignments, due dates and more. Student Dashboard is designed to help students grow and develop their executive functioning skills like planning ahead, organization and task initiation.

Student privacy

We have partnered with Hāpara because they are a company founded by educators and they always keep the interests of students at the center of everything they do. Student privacy and safety is of extreme importance to them. No student data is sold. You can learn more about the Hāpara privacy policy on their website.

Questions?

If you have questions or concerns about this educational tool, please feel free to contact: office@mrcserie.org

Sincerely,

You can learn more about Hāpara here:

http://www.hapara.com

https://hapara.com/ethical-monitoring-practice/

https://hapara.com/privacy-toolkit/