6 Tips for Going Back to School with Showbie

As teachers and students return from the long break, I thought I would share some workflow ideas to help kickstart the new academic year:

1. Get to know your new students

Get a class of new students to add their ’selfie’ to their account profile. If you’re anything like me, it takes a few weeks to get to know student names and having the work in Showbie tagged with the student’s profile pic helps enormously!

2. Set up groups for staff, students and parents

Showbie Groups allow for any combination of staff, students and parents and they have enormous potential for the learning space.

Staff groups are an easy way to share resources and ideas. You can do this for the whole staff (virtual staff room) or by subject and year teams. Student groups can be created by subject, topic, project or activity. For example, a book review group means students can post about the book they are currently reading along with a short video review (without spoiling the plot!) for others to view and comment on. This is a great way to encourage reading.

Parent groups can be set up for after school clubs and you can leave notes about the club schedule to keep parents in the loop. This makes it so that these notes make it home instead of remaining in the bottom of the school bag.

3. Add teaching assistants, technicians, tutors etc as a co-teachers

Adding teaching assistants etc… to your classroom in Showbie allows them to comment on work the same way you do, so that any additional work they do can take place and be documented in Showbie. Interventions such as 1:1 reading sessions can be seen by all teachers sharing a class, saving on meeting times and allowing supportive comments to be added by different members of the team when a student is making progress. We all like positive reinforcement!

4. Save work in Showbie

Get your students used to logging into Showbie regularly to back up their work, and remind them that uploading images and videos to Showbie means several things:

• All files uploaded into Showbie are safely backed up.
• The large video files filling up your students’ iPads can now be saved in Showbie and then deleted from their iPad, freeing up valuable storage space for the apps you need them to have in your lessons!
• Students can access their files from home on any device via the Showbie app or in a web browser.
• Students in a shared device environment can pick up any device, log into Showbie and find their work in the cloud. Showbie is the answer to shared devices.
• Students with their own devices are learning to back up their work and manage their files, as well as freeing up space on their device.

5. Use Showbie’s annotation tools to create multimedia projects

Use Showbie’s annotation tools on your images and PDFs to transform them into multi-media experiences. Today’s students live in a world of HD video, high quality audio, and media. Showbie allows users to add annotations, pinned notes, pinned audio notes and further text to your uploaded images and PDFs. This means that students have an interactive experience with a range of media. This also allows you to scaffold the experience to an extent. Some students may struggle with particular terms or long passages of text. You can supply audio notes that explain text and diagrams — and it’s very easy to do!

6. Integrate with thousands of other apps

Use a free app such as Padlet for brainstorming sessions. Showbie allows you to add dynamic links to your comments. To access a Padlet wall you’ve created, imply tap on the dynamic link.

If you are not sure how to access all of these features, they are explained in detail in a series of video tutorials in two new applications, Tutorials for Showbie and Workflows and Lessons Ideas for Showbie.

Tutorials for Showbie features 20 video tutorials on setting up Showbie, creating classes, assignments, adding students, adding content and much more! Essentially, this app covers all of the operational aspects of Showbie, including new features such as Groups, Quick Marking, Grade Books and Parent accounts.

Workflows and Lessons Ideas for Showbie contains a further 15 video tutorials on ideas such as those posted above. A preview can be seen here on YouTube with one of the workflow video tutorials:

Get Both of Joe’s apps for a special price from September 6-10!

Get Tutorials for Showbie and Workflows and Lessons Ideas for Showbie right now in the App Store at a special back to school rate of just £1.49. Schools can also purchase both on VPP for just £1.49 ($1.98USD)!

Valid only from September 6-10. Both apps contain supporting PDFs and links to further resources.