Firefly for Teachers 4+

This app has been great during lock down. The ability to mark work on the iPad and leave quality oral feedback has been well received by my students.

The frustration comes, as many others have said and it has also happened to everybody in my department, is that the app crashes during marking. It happens about once a week. After the crash you can no longer load pupils work. The only solution is to delete the app and reinstall it. Then you’ve got to log back on and it takes about 5 minutes to reload all the work and messages.

It seems to be getting more frequent. Happy if I can go for a day without it crashing.

I absolutely love Firefly as a teaching tool and with social distancing, it has meant that the students can still easily access work. That being said, I would never willingly use this app (and am stuck doing so because of social distancing). When marking pupils work, Firefly will often shut down without saving a copy of the pdf I was annotating. The tasks bar does not let me select my classes—it has included extra classes that I was made a co-teacher for a singular task, that I have since removed myself from. Otherwise, I have no link to these classes. They are not displayed on the website, but the app insists that I have ownership of these classes and therefore refuses to open my actual classes’ tasks. Despite the apparent update, the app does not allow me to attach a file (pdf or jpeg) from my iPad as feedback to pupils (which I can do in the web version). The app also does not let me modify tasks and instead directs me to the web version. Our IT have been in contact with Firefly regarding these issues and the response is to uninstall and reinstall the program, which takes a fair bit of time. Uninstalling and reinstalling does make it function well for a little, but we’re 6 school weeks into lock down and I’ve had to uninstall and reinstall more times than that.

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.