So…I go to grade the glogs my kids have made while they are taking a quiz. But what do I discover but that a firewall has been put up that is denying me access to my student glogs. When did this happen? Um, sometime between Tuesday afternoon and this morning!!! It may just be me…but how do you just decide to put up a firewall randomly in the middle of the school year?! Did anyone THINK about the possible implications and havoc that would wreck on two classes at one intermediate school who were using Glogster this week? No. Of course not. This is just one more example of a district limiting access to a site that is educationally sound without asking ANYONE if it would affect them or their classes. If this happened last week when all 180 of my kids were working on the glogs in class…I would have flipped out. As it was, I flipped out, sent off a bunch of emails to everyone I could think of…I dropped the names of my Director of 7-12 Instruction and Assistant Superintendent because I wrote and won a grant to specifically use this website. To say that I was upset is an understatement. I almost blew a gasket.

I vented at lunch and waited for the emails to start pouring in. I didn’t know if I would be supported or not, but I was NOT going to go down without a fight. And do you know what? When I checked my email after lunch, I received confirmation that the firewall would be lifted. I went to my Glogster dashboard…and yes, all of my student glogs were available for me to see. Now, you’d think I would be more grateful that this issue was rectified so quickly, but one just has to wonder why I had to go through this in the first place. I mean, seriously…does anyone THINK around here? Blindly banning an entire site that has a specific PAID license for educators is ignorant. I thought I was going to lose the money that my principal gave to me to use with my kids and more importantly, I thought I was going to lose my grant money for next year.

Argh. Technology is stressful enough without having to deal with people who have NO clue of what is going on in the classrooms.