I love choice. Some people complain about too much choice—it’s known as the Paradox of Choice—but not me.

I also love Edmodo. And with 17.4 million users (as of this second), it’s clear that so do many of you.

Back in August we released instaGrok Classroom on Edmodo. It includes the same features as Classroom on instaGrok.com, including a teacher dashboard, more control over content, premium support, no advertising, and so on. It’s proven very popular, and for that we thank you.

However, it’s also created the aforementioned rift in the time-space continuum. instaGrok.com users could take advantage of the core research features for free, or they could subscribe to the Classroom edition if they wanted the additional functionality. However, Edmodo users had to pay before they even had a chance to try instaGrok. Understandably, many people weren’t willing to do so.

So we’re announcing a free version of instaGrok on Edmodo. It includes all the research functionality you’ll find on instaGrok.com. Users can:

• Click on concept nodes to focus their research
• Adjust their level of expertise
• View key facts, links, images, and videos
• Customize the Grok to show what they think is important
• Test their knowledge with quizzes
• Write a report in the journal

So now there are two versions of instaGrok on Edmodo:

instaGrok on Emdodo

instaGrok Classroom on Emdodo

See? I told you that choice is good.

Sunday was not a fun day here at instaGrok World Headquarters. As many of you noted, we had an unplanned outage. We owe you, our users, an explanation and an apology.

What Happened

At around 6:30am PT we received an alert that instaGrok was down. At first we thought it was just a hiccup and things would be back to normal soon, but that wasn’t the case. Our servers had a number of disk errors, and we worked with our hosting company for much of the day to diagnose and repair the issue. instaGrok was back online at 8:15pm PT.

How We’re Responding

• We are sorry. As many of you made clear to us, instaGrok is critical to your research, and this wasn’t acceptable.
• If you have a subscription to instaGrok Classroom, we’re extending it by one month.
• We’re coordinating with our hosting provider to avoid a repeat experience. We can’t promise that it’ll never happen again, but we’re working very hard to prevent it.
• If you ever encounter issues with instaGrok’s performance, please check our Twitter feed. That’s where you’ll get the most up-to-date information.

Thank you.

As you know, instaGrok allows you to customize and share concept maps, so you can share what you are learning about with your friends or classmates.

Now you can personalize even more with the addition of notes – little bits of text you can add to different parts of the graph, just like Post-It notes! Notes help you remember important ideas, and share what you find interesting about your topic.

To add a note, select the relevant concept, type in the text into the yellow “(add note)” box, and hit Enter. The note is added to your graph (and journal). To edit a note, click on it (showing the editing box), edit the note, and hit Enter. To delete a note, select it for editing, delete the entire text, and hit Enter.

So, what will you do with notes?

We’re happy to announce that InstaGrok now runs on Internet Explorer 9 and above. If you know someone who uses IE and has been dying to try InstaGrok, please let them know!

Why didn’t it run before?

InstaGrok’s user interface is primarily written in a language called JavaScript. Virtually every interactive website uses it to some degree; InstaGrok employs it extensively. To the right is a picture of the concept maps on our site. See them? They’re drawn entirely with JavaScript.

While the JavaScript we use is advanced, it’s also pretty standards-compliant. InstaGrok runs beautifully on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It even works on phones and tablets.

But until now, it didn’t run on IE. That’s because Internet Explorer’s support for JavaScript is incomplete. However, thanks to the efforts of the open source community behind the Arbor.js plugin, we’re happy to announce that InstaGrok now works marvellously on Internet Explorer 9.

But I’m running IE8! Or 7. Or 6…

Engineering around the limitations of old versions of Internet Explorer would involve a tremendous amount of work just to replicate features that already work in standards-compliant browsers. We’re a small team doing some pretty cutting-edge stuff—our algorithms are patented—so we have to carefully choose how we spend our time. We’ve decided to build a more compelling experience for the vast majority of users who choose other browsers. (And we’re not alone in making this call.)

We hope you understand, and we urge you to upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant, and safer browser:

Download Links
Internet Explorer	Firefox	Chrome	Safari

InstaGrok is a great tool for everyone interested in learning. That said, students and teachers have been among our earliest and most vocal fans. The ability to visually research a topic—and focus on what’s important—has proven invaluable in classrooms worldwide. Now we’re making it even better.

What Hasn’t Changed

Many educators are already familiar with how InstaGrok trumps traditional search engines:

• Students using InstaGrok explore a graphical map that shows how concepts connect. They can quickly refine their research and zero in on important ideas.
• InstaGrok provides key facts, links, images, and videos. These are culled from relevant educational websites. Users can click through to verify the original sources.

That core experience is—and always will be—100% free.

Introducing InstaGrok Classroom

Today we’re announcing a premium educational version of InstaGrok. For the past few months we’ve been beta testing it with hundreds of teachers. Let’s highlight some of the benefits:

1. Teacher dashboard
   Now you’ll have insight into your students’ research and note-taking activity: you can see what they’re searching, how much time they’re spending, and what they’re writing in their journal. Up to 200 students can link their accounts to each teacher ID.
   
2. No advertising
   Teacher and student accounts don’t have ads. Period.
3. Safe content
   instaGrok for students automatically removes any site that contains profanity or sexual content from the search results. In addition, you as a teacher can explicitly remove controversial sites (e.g. biased or questionable sources) from being seen by students. You can read more about how to do that here.
4. Premium support
   Cutting in line might get your students a detention, but we think you’ll make an exception for this. While we’ve always prided ourselves on being responsive, now we’re moving questions from classroom accounts to the head of the queue.
5. New features based on your feedback
   Help us make this product even better. Have a suggestion? Please don’t be shy.

How to sign up:

• Simply create an account with “Teacher” role.
• More details can be found in this post.

Think we’re missing some critical feature for the premium educational version? Tell us how we can win you over.