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Hapara Workspace - a first look

Workspace is a new feature of Teacher Dashboard that has been released into public beta in the last few days.

I've just loaded most of our classes and students into Teacher Dashboard for the coming academic year and have spent a little time seeing what it can do. It essentially bring in the assignment setting of Google Classroom into Teacher Dashboard and the ability to build courses which you can use year after year. Demo video below:

If you have access to it, there is a feedback bar on each page to put in suggestions.
A few observations so far:
  • I've noticed that from the students point of view it creates a folder called 'Workspace' and in that a folder for each Workspace the student becomes a member of. Now as Teacher Dashboard creates a subject folder for each subject, then I'd like the Workspace folders to appear in the associated subject folders. Would make the integration with Teacher Dashboard a bit more seamless. However, I can imagine how this might be technically tricky to do.  
  • It would be good if deadlines were put into the class calendar.
  • There does not seem to be any group email notifications of deadlines at the moment - might be coming?
It does make differentiating assignments very easy through the use of sub groups. I think this is one of the key advantages over Classroom. 

Very promising as a beta and I'll be interested to see how it develops over the coming months.


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