How do you pick out the very best content for students? How do you place high-quality resources in their hands? A digital backpack can help you curate and distribute learning materials to students. You can make online learning run smoothly with a digital backpack, both inside and outside of a traditional classroom.
Regular readers of the blog might remember that I featured Hāpara last year. This powerful platform for K-12 online learning has many features to explore. In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at Hāpara Digital Backpack. And you’ll hear how to combine it with open educational resources (OER) — a game changer for teachers and students!
Hāpara Digital Backpack
If you haven’t heard of Hāpara before, they are a digital teaching and learning platform that provides a streamlined experience for Google Classroom. With Hāpara Digital Backpack, students can access assignments, email, announcements, and G Suite files on one simple, mobile-friendly page.
Instead of having their materials in many different places, Hāpara provides teachers and students with a more manageable way to organize their learning. Hāpara Digital Backpack is flexible enough for teachers to customize their students’ learning experiences. It helps support the equitable distribution of digital textbooks online. And it also gives students access to various digital learning content for their courses. With Hāpara, students can also get digital reading tools that address their reading level needs, too.
Since Hāpara Digital Backpack makes it easy to organize learning materials for students, you can combine the power of this tool with OER to create customized learning experiences for students.
Benefits of Open Educational Resources
What is OER? The term open educational resources (OER) isn’t brand new. But if you haven’t heard it before or seen it in action, a great place to learn more is the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen initiative. Open educational resources (OER) are free online resources educators have shared so anyone can use them.
Why do schools and teachers use OER resources? OER resources are free to use and can save teachers time. Instead of creating content from scratch, you can use OER resources “as is” or adapt and customize them for your group of students. OER resources are often supplemental and used alongside a curriculum a school or district has already adopted.
With OER resources, educators can give all students a deeper learning experience. It can help you address the needs of every student they support during the school year. When choosing OER resources to use, you might decide to share a virtual course, assessment, video, or even an audio file with your students.
Getting Started with a Digital Backpack
Hāpara Digital Backpack makes distributing OER across your school and district simple. Instead of having to search for content and figure out the best workflow for getting it in the hands of students, you can use this platform to create a seamless learning experience. Hāpara Digital Backpack distributes all of your digital educational resources to students. Students can easily access everything you share in one dashboard.
Want to see Hāpara Digital Backpack in action? This post shares the story of how a group of schools came together to deliver a more equitable learning experience with Digital Backpack. I love how equity was front and center in this initiative, “Having enhanced student curriculum and professional development resources widely available to educators helps level the playing field for young people living in urban centers, isolated rural areas and everywhere in between.”
Learn more about Hāpara Digital Backpack on their website. Or click here to read the story of how educators from Alberta, Canada, used this platform to connect their students with high-quality, open educational resources!
