I’ve been using Headsprout and RazKids for almost ten years in my classroom. In the past year it has gotten very buggy. It freezes while loading, crashes, or in Headsprout it started returning students to the screen where they need to select Headsprout or the book room after every single activity. It’s great when it works but lately it doesn’t, not on the app or browser (safari or chrome) on iOS, not on PCs in Chrome. Updates haven’t fixed anything and it seems to be getting worse. Students understandably get so upset when it freezes and they lose their progress and it wastes my time to try and troubleshoot and find workarounds. FIX THE SOFTWARE. We use other apps and software without issue and school subscriptions are reevaluated yearly. There’s no need to spend money if it doesn’t work. UPDATE: Instead of fixing Headsprout or incorporating it into their counterintuitive and obsolete the day it was released Foundations A-Z program, they shut it down. Headsprout was the best thing they ever put out and the reason is that they bought it from another company. I’m done with it. Reading Eggs is a pretty good replacement, but I will miss using Headsprout since it was a good supplementary program with a different and complimentary teaching order that really taught students to read.
