Tech Ice Breaker
Breaking the ice of technology literacy for teachers and students.
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This work by Chris Prout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Enrage, Oops I mean Engrade Customer Support
Our school has been using Engrade since the beginning of the second quarter. Prior to switching over (I had been using Thinkwave Educator, fantastic customer support there!) I set up an account and emailed them a few basic questions. To date none have been read. Why? Does customer support exist with Engrade? It certainly seems like it should. After all there is a prominent button that says “Email Engrade Support”. I understand that I am not paying for this service, but I would have expected that at least the emails I have sent would be read.
Here’s an example of outstanding tech support. We bought a Smart Board 8 years ago (well past warranty) I started having difficulties with it a couple of weeks ago and emailed their tech support email. Within two hours I had a response. Two hours for a product that in tech terms is an antique.
Thinkwave Educator is similar in that any issues I have had with both their free accounts (currently) and with their paid products I have always received prompt and accurate customer support.
Is Engrade going to provide support for their product?
December 18th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I think Engrade is a big pain. I’ve had the same experience…plus no contact phone numbers or email apart from a link on their website that doesn’t always work. I’m a parent and I find it unreliable. The past two days I get a “catch all” message when I try to log in to my account. It says something like “Oops! Your account has been idle for..” blah blah. The thing is–EVERY person in our school that has tried to log in gets the same message. It’s an alternative to saying “YES, our crappy website is down AGAIN and we can’t support all the users. Oh, and GEE. It’s the end of the semester. Hope that’s not an inconvenience to all of you.”
December 18th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Fortunately for my school and teachers Engrade’s days are numbered. We will be switching over to CENTRE SIS for all of our school information systems. It will be a lot of work as I maintain my Thinkwave Gradebook and Engrade site, but will be worth it. Thanks for visiting the site and commenting!
Chris
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I was really excited about Engrade, as it seemed to be a GREAT TOOL! However, I’m having the same issues as you guys and being that this is only my 2nd week in it…I can happily readjust to another site. Please inform me of something helpful that’s free! Otherwise, it’s back to spreadsheet in Excel for me. Thanks!
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Thanks for visiting the site and commenting. I really like Thinkwave Educator. Check it out at http://www.thinkwave.com/
Thank you,
Chris
January 19th, 2009 at 1:04 am
I could never get on Engrade so I went back to Thinkwave. Yes, I paid for the Thinkwave disk 5 years ago, but it works and Engrade doesn’t.