Microsoft continues to bolster its Office 365 platform with educational tools and services and announced today, the company’s productivity suite lands support from Hapara. Hapara is a New Zealand-born cloud-based instructional management system used by K-12 based educational institutions that have typically leveraged Google Apps for Education.
However, the new management system will find a home alongside Microsoft’s Office 365 tools such as OneNote Classroom Notebooks, Skype in the Classroom, OneDrive and Office Web Apps.
Other benefits of the Office 365 and Hapara partnership include:
- View a quick summary of learner activity across Microsoft applications, organized by class and by student
- Easily distribute resources and track progress
- Support differentiation, individualization, and collaboration on assignments and projects
- Single sign-on with Office 365 Education accounts
Hapara management tools include the Hapara Dashboard, which offers teachers and students a quick summary of learner progress across services. The Hapara Workspace is another tool that helps streamline organizational lessons or assignments and student’s work into one continually updated area. Faculty also gain high-level monitoring utilizing Hapara Highlights, to help monitor student browsing activities during class sessions. Lastly, faculty are empowered with Hapara’s Professional Learning suite of training and organizational tools and certification programs.
As mentioned before, schools and faculty have been using Hapara’s management software to tie into Google Apps for Education for some time now. It seemed incumbent of Microsoft to gain a similar footing with the company to help promote its continually expanding productivity platform.
