Hapara Teacher Dashboard- A bird's eye, real time view of student activity on the Chromebooks

Did you hear our district approved this software for teachers to go with the Chromebooks?!  I am very excited about it and can't wait to use it this year.

While I was piloting the Chromebooks, one thing I really wish I had control over was what the students were doing REALLY doing on the Chromebooks (my students were always on task...haha).  Of course I was walking around the room, trying to monitor each student to make sure they were doing what I had asked them to do.  And of course, there were students that were trying to get away with doing other things (listen to music, playing games, etc. Luckily I was able to figure out what to look at on each Chromebook, over their shoulder, to make sure they didn't have another tab or window open to something else.)  But this got really overwhelming and tedious.  I wished there was something available so I could "see" exactly what they were doing during my class.  Then on day the light came on, angels sang and my wish came true!  I was at a technology meeting for our district and another teacher (a teacher trained at Google in California, so cool!) showed us the Hapara Teacher Dashboard for the Chromebooks.  (I swear I heard birds singing outside ;)

Thoughts

I can not tell you how awesome this software really is!  Here are a couple of things that this software can do.

Teacher Dashboard 

One application of this dashboard is that teachers can share docs and websites to students directly and students can more easily share docs with teachers.  They just have to drop their doc into the folder for the correct class (already set up for them) and the teacher has access.  Much easier than having a huge list of shared items in your Google Drive "Shared With Me" folder. Watch this video for more information about the dashboard.

Remote Control 

Now this is the best thing EVER!!  You can push websites to each student in your classroom and it will be opened automatically onto each student's Chromebook. The best part, you can see what they are doing on their Chromebook during your class in real time!  You can close tabs and windows that the student has open when they shouldn't. Now I can make sure all of my students are on task. :) Watch this video for more info:

Seriously, cool or what?!  (Do you hear the birds singing too? :) 

Jen