Students will roll into finals week lacking one of our most used study websites, Blooket.
With an alarming average of 30,000 websites hacked daily, the popular and beloved Blooket, pronounced “blue-kit,” has now joined the ranks of those affected, forcing students and faculty to adapt quickly to these less-than-ideal circumstances.
“It’s rather annoying as some teachers only have their study guides on Blooket so it’s really inconvenient,” sophomore Ella Michael said.
“Around mid-April, Blooket was hacked twice during a middle school class, and the second instance displayed racist and hateful language,” said Anne Ogg MEP Technology Facilitator for Millard Public Schools. “It froze a teacher’s screen, the game was shut down and the site was blocked to keep everyone safe.” “Blookets’ system automatically suspends accounts involved in this type of activity and they are working on a long term solution to prevent further incidents. They (Blooket) don’t have that right now because students anywhere are using that website and then a special third-party code to hack into accounts. Until they can implement a reliable solution, we cannot open it up because that then becomes an issue for our students and teachers,” Ogg said.
Over the past weeks, many staff members have been switching over and using other study materials such as Quizizz, Gymkit, Kahoot, and Quizlet.
In hopes that the Blooket will be returning, some teachers have not switched anything over and have allowed students to use their personal devices to study pre-made Blookets and some teachers have chosen to ditch the online study tools altogether.
Being unable to use Blooket for studying is not the only concern students have. Many students are worried that years of accumulating Blooks will be lost.
“It’s very annoying for the people who have put in years of effort to collect the stats they have just to lose it all,” sophomore Halle Hinton said.
Fortunately for the students who have devoted time to collecting Blooks as far as we can tell, the accounts remain active on non-school-issued devices and Blooks are in no danger of being lost.
As of now, Blooket is not anticipated to return before the end of the current school year. Ogg said the company refunded any Millard teacher’s paid subscription who had a paid accounts.
It’s up to Blooklet, based in Middletown, Del., to develop stronger security measures and long-term solutions to prevent this sort of incident from happening again before Millard will be able to unblock it from school devices.
