Glogster are you listening...

Well glogster, are you listening. I'm not sure as there is no spot for a user forum/help on your website so I'm not sure you are willing to hear feedback. I can only hope I'm not writing this for myself alone...
In review and for those of you unfamiliar with it, glogster is a great way for students to demonstrate what they have learned in the form of a very easy to create poster. While it has many built in graphics, you may also upload your own or link to items that you want from other sites. You can record your own audio and video directly into glogster as well. All around a great idea. Once your posters are created you can embed them into a wiki or blog. Awesome! Now my students, and yours, can still keep all the wonderful things they create in one location behind a password protected site. That's our responsibility as teachers in keeping students identities and information safe. (Although in my case, it is student work not pictures of them or personal data so nothing really to hide or protect IMO.)

Glogster has also created a great section for educators. It is a bit more protected so students won't be seeing inappropriate general content as they are choosing what to add to their glogs. Glogs are also automatically set to private in this area. No advertising cluttering the screen or bombarding students. Thank you for that!

However, the folks at glogster for some reason decided that there was a reason to alter the embed code for these glogs in the education area. I can't for the life of me figure out why but it makes embedding in my course wiki by my students impossible and even if I were to do it for them, it incapacitates the glog. Let me explain...

The embedded image is so large that it gets cut off by the wiki window so that you can't see the entire glog. This is NOT the case with the regular glogster version, only the edu version.

Now, you can change the code in the edu version, assuming you are comfortable looking at code, which I am but not all children can find the correct place to make the change without accidentally deleting the wrong thing. I'm not really interested in doing all the embedding for ALL of my students.

For the sake of argument, let's say I do change each student glog so that is 50% of the original size and can be viewed in the wiki page. Doing so makes the text so small it can't be easily read. Unfortunately the fix for this, available ONLY in the NON-edu version is an automatic dropdown that allows you to view the full version.

They tell me it is for protection, but from what am I protecting myself and my students? Viewing their work? If the glog is set to private and only available by entering a password protected wiki where once found by the authenticated user, that user clicks on the "view full size" link, which takes you to the full size version (marked as private) what on earth are they protecting? PLEASE PLEASE GLOGSTER, reconsider putting the same embed options in the .edu version as you have in the regular version. This is a show stopper as far as user friendliness in the .edu community.

On another note, perhaps less important, why am I not able to create usernames for my students? You have a crazy assigning system. I realize you are trying to protect student identities but that is really my job as the teacher. My students have more than enough different IDs to remember for things. Give me the option of uploading my classlist or naming my students the way that I want to, OR using your naming convention. PBWorks figured out how to do that for eductators, why can't you?

So glogster, you really do have a great product but I fear that the developers have lost track of our reality in the classroom. Please don't force me back to using paper and limiting my student's audience again...