Showbie: A teacher's guide
Explore the ultimate guide to using Showbie effectively in the classroom and enhance your teaching experience with this innovative educational tool.
What is Showbie?
Showbie is a classroom tool that allows teachers to administer assignments, deliver feedback and communicate with their students. The platform is designed to save teachers time and make the management of learning activities seamless. The application can be used at home and acts as a bridge to the classroom. It also provides an easy way for parents to keep up-to-date on what’s happening in school. The app has been developed by educators who understand how busy teachers are and want them to spend less time managing tasks and more time teaching.
With Showbie, they have created a simple yet powerful solution that will help you manage all aspects of student life from one place. During the pandemic teachers had to quickly adapt to the new range of digital classroom tools. Products like Showbie quickly became very important for primary classrooms. Giving feedback to students is an important part of classroom practice but without having children in the same room, teachers quickly had to pivot and start using remote feedback solutions. The platform allows educators to give rich feedback to their pupils when they need it most.
We know that timely feedback drives learning forward and keeps children motivated. Utilising a classroom management platform that reinforces a learning environment is very useful. Schools around the world are trying to future proof their operations by investing in digital classroom tools. If you are delivering remote learning then you will know that maintaining and engaged classroom community is a difficult task if you don't have the right tools for the job. Showbie allows educators to keep their finger on the pulse and monitor classroom activity remotely.
This seamless approach means that the classroom workflow is rarely interrupted. In modern classrooms, educational technology solutions at some point will feature in a child's learning journey. We will always have books and pens but the advantage of technology solutions in ever-changing learning environments cannot be understated. Keeping students engaged is a key classroom challenge that our new taxonomy is designed to achieve, you can use both to achieve your classroom goals.
Key features of Showbie
• Assignments – Students receive reminders about upcoming deadlines and assignments via push notification so they don't miss out on important information. Teachers can assign homework, quizzes, tests, projects, presentations, etc., directly through the app. They can even create custom forms and surveys using this feature.
• Feedback - Get instant feedback on assignments, exams, quizzes, reports, portfolios, etc. You can send comments, questions, suggestions, tips, corrections, etc. straight from within the app. This helps improve communication between students and teachers.
• Communication - Communicate instantly with other users via private messages, group chats, polls, notes, files, links, videos, images, audio clips
To use Showbie, you'll need access to a smartphone running iOS 8.0 or later or Android OS 2.3 or higher. To get started, download the free version of Showbie here. If you're looking for additional functionality, there are two paid versions available: Pro, which includes unlimited classes; and Business, where you can add multiple schools. For more details visit www.showbieapp.com.
How does Showbie work?
Once installed, showbie automatically connects to your Google account when you open the app. All data stored locally on your device is synced across devices once connected. When logged into the app, you can view grades, attendance records, class rosters, schedules, announcements, and much more.
You can easily share content such as photos, documents, PDFs, web pages, eBooks, music, video, and voice memos. You can also upload any file type including.docx,.pptx,.pdf,.
Before installing Showbie, ensure you have the following requirements met:
1) An email Account.
2) An Apple ID if you wish to sync your iPad/iPhone calendar events.
3) Your phone number registered under your email address.
4) Internet connection required to install the app.
5) Access to a computer to back up your data.
6) A working internet connection.
What do I need?
You will need either an iPad, iPhone 5S+, iPod Touch 6th Gen., Android 4.4 KitKat + Google Play Services installed on your device.
As a classroom teacher, remember that any learning management system is designed to do just that, management. You'll need effective classroom learning frameworks such as a universal thinking framework to design the actual learning experience.
What do teachers think of Showbie?
Having a paperless app that's easy to use and powerful to administer is always going to be a popular digital classroom tool for teachers. Fellow teachers would have been swamped with new solutions over the past year, some of these have come and gone but it looks like Showbie will last the test of time. No matter what age group you are a teacher of, the positive peer reviews have clearly given the education community a lot of confidence in this product. You don't need to use all of the premium features to get started, it's simple way in means that you don't have to spend a long time learning how to use it. A word of caution, don't lean on the technology too much, effective classroom practice cannot be solved with technology alone.