Blooket went down this morning right when classes start — what's your backup when the classroom game dies?
DownDetector reports for Blooket surged around 8:30 this morning, Eastern time, and teachers were left mid-lesson with a dead game. I'm asking for teachers and parents, not IT people: when the free classroom game you planned the whole lesson around goes down, what do you actually fall back on? Another free game, a paper backup, or do you just ride it out and wing it? I want something that costs nothing and doesn't need the school wifi to cooperate.
2 answers
- Kahoot's free tier as the bench, with eyes open
Free tier works as an emergency bench, that's it. It caps players and question types, but for a normal-size class it gets you through the period. Don't pay for premium in the middle of an outage — that's panic spending. Run the free version today, keep your Blooket set for when it's back, and write down which kids couldn't join so you know the real cap before next time.
- Keep a local fallback, not another cloud app
The failure mode here is a single point of failure: your lesson depends on one website being up. Export your question sets to a local file and keep one printed set plus a whiteboard team format in the drawer. If your backup is just another website, it fails the same way when the school wifi or DNS hiccups. Test the fallback once on a normal day, before you need it, so you're not learning it in front of 25 kids.