Why Glogster.edu Irritates Me

When I found out that Glogster had come out with a kid-friendly edu version, I jumped all over it, and so did our entire school district! We were VERY excited about the privacy and restrictions put in place, and students really got into creating glogs to showcase their learning. However, we ran into a few snags when we found out that their privacy claims are not all they're cracked up to be. So as a forewarning to others, I'm sharing what we've learned.

• It IS possible to friend people outside of your classroom network. There are a number of ways to do this, but it's easier to show than tell, so here's a screen capture. Note that I am logging in to the edu site as a student. The one friend this student currently has is the teacher who created the account (me).

I'm still not sure why it is so easy for students to get to that page full of glogs in the first place -- I thought all glog content on the edu version was private, but I never got that lame warning telling me I was leaving the edu site, so where am I?

Not only that, but I was unimpressed with the response I got from Glogster when I expressed my worries:

"Dear teacher,

students cannot add any friends, not on EDU nor on Glogster.
When they try to go to Glogster main site they are alerted about possible non school-safe elements. If they still decide to go to Glogster main page, for example to chat room, and regular Glogster user adds them as a friend they can accept it.
You can advice your students not to go to Glogster main site or you can arrange Glosgter main site to be blocked."

Typos aside, it bothers me that the people at Glogster believe that their alert when leaving Glogster actually informs students that they might encounter "possible non school-safe elements." When I click on that big pink Beta button that sends me back to the main site, yes, the green warning pops up, but it doesn't say anything about "non school-safe elements"! The image quality stinks, but the warning below says

"Hey, do you know that you are leaving the EDU zone and returning to Glogster.com? If you return to Glogster.com then you will be automatically signed out of the EDU zone. If you want to use the full version of Glogster then you will have to register a new account. Do you really want to return to Glogster.com?"

That doesn't sound like much of a warning to me! In addition, it is not possible to block glogster.com without also blocking glogster.com/edu. We tried. I'm of the opinion that the people at Glogster should know that, too, and not send me a bunch of garbage answers! So those are my issues. Awaiting Glogster reply. If nothing else, they DO get back to you...