Anyone using Glubble?

I was thinking of creating a presentation on FireFox add-ons every educator should be using. ScribeFire, ScreenGrab are ones I love. But, when I began mining the FireFox extension options, I found Glubble. It's aimed at families with young children. It's free. But, it was just dragging a lot of my time with its extensive options. I'm still playing with it at home with my own two young ones - my verdict is still undecided. It certainly has many Early Childhood link opportunities.

But, is anyone using this in their classroom (where the students have restricted access and the teacher doesn't have to worry about them messing around with your settings and vital documents)?

Any tips or even negative experiences shared using it are most appreciated.

Thank you in advance,
Mike

Tags: EarlyChildhood, Glubble, Parenting

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Permalink Reply by Mike Romard on November 9, 2008 at 10:34pm

I'm thinking of ditching this program at home (after grabbing a few of its many good websites it has collated)

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Permalink Reply by Bartel Scheers on November 10, 2008 at 6:04am

Hi Mike,

Now you made me very interested in why you're thinking of ditching Glubble at home ;-)

Especially cause I think (of course ;-) that Glubble has great features to be used by educators.

Bartel Scheers
Glubble Team

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Permalink Reply by Mike Romard on November 27, 2008 at 9:11pm

HaHa - yes, it has good features, but can be greater. In the end, my wife's regular complaints about it lead me to uninstall it.

Things I suggest to be even better:
(1) Attach an age range to sites, so when I say the child (or class) is 3 years old - I only see those sites. My son loves Fireman Sam, but the website is not age appropriate for him and he gets frustrated there. So for each 'family' of links you have - attack age ranges to them.
(2) I was sure as you found new sites, they were bringing back site 'families' (ie adventure quests) that I thought I'd disabled (it felt like they were re-enabled)
(3) New folks begin with a very basic setup - just links - no gotchas or picture galleries
(4) the link to view (child's collection) was very small and too hard to manipulate for my son; so I'd have to do it for him. Instead, I'd have BIG icons come in with the child's image to be pressed to go to their collection
(5) Any chance to have mouseover commands for options on the homepage?
(6) Maybe have an opportunity for your users to rate (age range, interest) sites?

P.S. I love your welcome to Glubble video - it drew me in. I also noticed you have a ning with 100s of folks participating. The collection of websites you've found prove you have put a lot of time into this. I'm in the business of finding good websites and I was impressed with your findings. it was equally exciting for me. I was reflecting that you have the kid's being your little Net detectives as they find and approve new sites - are you able to take advantage of this and as one child discovers a great site, that information gets filtered back to you so you include it in new installments?

P.S.S. I had more ideas, but I made the error of hitting back and lost my message - so I'm sending this one now before I lose this one. Keep up the good work Bartel - in my opinion you are on to something, just keep making it more user friendly (for 3 year olds) :)