Webinar: What's New at Harpara?

 Webinar: What's New at Harpara? (August Update)

Digital Backpack - A new offering and can add on to what we are already using. Gives chn access to digital resources on any device at any time. This means that it is responsive to the type of screen that it is being read on. This builds on Student Workspace. There is something like 350 resources already uploaded to the library however they are updating all the time. The library is full of original texts. Schools that sign up for this can add their own texts and will be helped to scan and upload and ensure they have the right copyright levels to share. 

How diverse are the texts being loaded? Resources for Kindergarten to Grade 12. Most resources are in the public domain. Harpara believe there is a wide variety but they do lead towards the classics. More NZ based texts are coming the more customers turn up in NZ. 

This is available now. It has been trialled in Canada.

New Hapara Admin Settings - Designed to make using Harpara more efficient for teachers. 

If you are a big Highlights user, you can now jump straight to Highlights. In the admin console under the optional settings - landing modules, you can now choose Dashboard or Highlights. This is not a personal setting it would be made for all teachers in the school.

Additional Updates - The search function can be used to search folders or drives for specific workbooks/docs. This has been around for about 5 years now but is a little well known secret.

New Onboarding Experience: Bright Purple Question Mark at the bottom of every page. New is the quick start guide. The Learning Hub is where anyone can go to to get tips and tricks or refresher idea. Wherever you are in Harpara there will be relevant pages for you to look at. Therefore each page on Harpara has relevant ideas for each page rather than just on the home page.

Another update is that now when you are in “current screens” it used to be that you would have to close the tab that you saw on current screens then you would have to go back to the browser tabs, but we’ve added a simple little edition to the student tiles that allows you to now close the tab directly from current screens.

There is a "reason for shutting tab" option that can be turned on in Harpara Admin. You can have up to 4 reasons for closing the tab and can personalise the wording to suit the learners. This would be a valuable tool to get schools to do so that students understand why their tabs are closed. Becoming positive digital citizens.

If you see Harpara folders in your drive, please do not delete them.

If there are any questions or suggestions we can get in touch with them. They are known for listening and responding to feedback.

Google Level 2 Certification

What to do in Lockdown? 

 Take on some study and have a go at the Google Educator Level 2 exam. 

Through the Google Teaching Centre, I have looked at the different apps and google tools that are included in the exam. On reflection, I need to do some further study on google sheets (I really only know the basics), Google Earth (haven't really used this) and Google Scholar.

So study time it is ....

Google Sheets

What is a Pivot Table and how does it work? 
A Pivot Table is one of the basic data analysis tools in Google Sheets. Pivot Tables can quickly answer many important business questions. One of the reasons we build Pivot Tables is to pass information. We would like to support our story with data that is easy to understand, easy to see.  Although Pivot Tables are only tables and thus missing real visuals, they can still be considered as a mean of Visual Storytelling. 

A Pivot Table is used to summarise, sort, reorganise, group, count, total or average data stored in a table. It allows us to transform columns into rows and rows into columns. It allows grouping by any field (column), and using advanced calculations on them..

To insert a pivot table you need to highlight the data you want to include from the sheet and click data. From this tab you will see pivot table.

Conditional Formatting

Google Sheets offers a lot of advanced capabilities that help extract meaning from a pile of data. One of them, simple and at the same time powerful, is conditional formatting. It helps turn bland rows and columns of black text on white backgrounds into a coloured and visually appealing dataset. This saves time, and also makes the data more readable and meaningful.

There are a lot of sites that explain how to use it but I found this one helpful.

Google Earth

Ten Ways to use Google Earth in the Classroom

From the above I learnt about Lit Trips/Tours. Google Lit Trips is dedicated to helping teachers use Google Earth tours in literature lessons. In a literature trip students explore the places that are significant in a story and or the places that are significant in an author’s life. There is even a Lit Trip on there from Dorothy.

Google Earth uses KMZ files.

Google Scholar

Advanced Searches - can limit results to researchers or include specific publications ("all the words" "with exact phrase")

Once an article/citation is found you can save it to your own personal library using 'save' link below the result.

Scholar autonatically generates citation formats. Can copy in MA, APA or Chicago Formats.

To copy citation of a text, click on the quotation mark under the text.

Not all articles are publicly viewable.

Google Explore

Citations - APA, Chicago and MLA can be done directly from the tool.

Google Search

Free to use or share and edit is 'not' a usage rights option.

So with the study done, some mock questions tried, I registered and took the exam.

Good news is that it was a pass.

Using Biteable

Biteable is a great create tool. You can make standout videos in a snap with the Biteable video maker. It's easy to use and navigate around. You can use their templates or create your own by uploading images. Add animations, footage, sound and effects and you have a winning combination. Best of all the lite version is free. The lite version has the Biteable watermark through the video but that doesn't detract from the quality of the video or the content. It's also easy to share on blogs by exporting and then downloading to your computer.

Below is an example of one I made with some of the students in Room 3 at St Bernadettes this morning in our cybersmart session. They loved the many backgrounds and animations they could choose from.