Firefly for Teachers

Has so much potential but full of bugs, some of which have not be resolved for 6 years. Every updated is guaranteed to bring new bugs that take until the next release to fix. Updates are also very slow, so the wait is often long.

This was an immensely useful app for keeping a mark book and marking submitted work but now the app crashes whenever you try and insert a comment on pupil work. The response from Firefly is that fixing the bug it isn’t a priority. Given how much money our school spends on this system I would hope that it might become a priority in the future.

When marking pupils’ work, the app frequently crashes and you lose what you have done. When marking, the “Save and move onto next pupil” button is located at the bottom right of the screen - exactly where your hand rests as you write. Consequently, you often end up touching it by accident and moving on before you want to. Who on earth designed that? Probably the person that thought having one pen colour for marking was all you need. If a pupil submits work on blue paper or poorly lit, you blue pen will be invisible and you can’t change it. If a pupil submits a powerpoint file, Firefly converts it into a pdf before you can mark it. The problem is that the Firefly converter has a very limited colour palette and so it often converts the text and the background to the same colour. So, the app is only useful for marking on screen, which it does badly, and as a link to the website. Overall, rubbish.

Great when it works. Not working at the moment very often at all. After writing this review, I have now worked out a solution. I’ve switched off background refresh ( in settings on the iPad). This has stopped the app crashing, happy days - this is one of the better marking apps. Old iPad (6 years), ios14.4.2.

Virtually required in the world of remote learning, but when I try and mark students work I can mark one page, and then it shuts itself down. It’s tedious and annoying.

I would only try to use the app rather than the desktop version if I suddenly remembered someone I needed to add or mark but it’s pretty pointless trying to do that anyway as the app crashes every time I try to use it.

Not helpful for remote learning. When it isn’t crashing, it won’t let you copy tasks, copy pages, upload content quickly.

I hate this torture

Just crashes all the time and refuses to load work

Audio feedback really useful, editing capability poor but still better than desktop. Crashes frequently, the children’s work used to load immediately now takes ages and constantly need to reload before it can be opened. What did you change.