As part of our One-to-One Chromebook learning initiative, the District employs a product named Hapara for classroom management.
Some of the capabilities that Hapara allows our teachers to do include:
Hapara automatically makes a shared folder for every class that a student is enrolled in. Teachers can place materials in their folder and any material that students place in theirs is in return automatically shared with the teacher.
Hapara has a "focused browsing" mode that teachers can use during tests to prevent students from opening browser tabs. Also, coming in the summer of 2019, teachers can momentarily block a Chromebook's screen to focus student attention.
Hapara has a feature named "Highlights" which lets teachers see all the browser tabs a student has open. Teachers can close tabs if a student is not engaged in the class activity.
To alleviate privacy concerns with these features, the District has put in place the following restrictions on these features:
The Highlights feature may only be used by classroom teachers and only used during school hours (8am through 4pm on schooldays).
A teacher cannot automatically see any other content that is not saved in the appropriate class folder (unless the student or teacher shares the document directly).
Also, Hapara cannot and does not offer any kind of camera monitoring. The District does not have any method of viewing camera contents at any time, nor do we have any intentions now or in the future of using software with such capabilities.