At its core, Showbie allows teachers to easily distribute assignments to students who can then submit work for feedback and grading. However, several teachers are using Showbie in ways that add even more value to the paperless classroom.
I recently got the chance to chat with Roxy (known online as RoxygirlTeacher) who blogs about her middle school math technology use. Roxy creates weekly Showbie Assignments for tasks such as note-taking, practice problems, and performance tasks. “The advantage of doing this through Showbie is that the learning is self paced for the students while also visible to me. I can see which assignment the students are on and how they are progressing.”
In addition to this, Roxy asks her students to “leave a final comment after they finish an Assignment,” as they submit their work into their Showbie folder. This action requires that students reflect on their own learning and practice articulating their thoughts in a Showbie text comment.
This process is important as it ensures that students are actively engaged in communicating with their teacher, while also developing skills of metacognition. According to Jon Hattie there are crucial steps towards making student learning visible for a more successful learning experience.
When I first started teaching, I did final comments on paper exit slips. I have also seen other teachers ask students to keep learning journals. While these traditional methods work, they have some limitations and somewhat challenging to manage. For example, students may reflect on an assignment days after completing it, while dealing with hundreds of tiny paper slips can be a nightmare for a teacher to collect, give feedback on, and then distribute again. While students can take more ownership over learning journals, they are physically detached from the actual assignment, making it hard for students, teachers, and parents to revisit specific comments at a later date.
Using Showbie for student feedback and reflections improves on these methods as it allows comments to be made in real time, and ensures that everything is easy to keep track of and organized alongside the appropriate assignment.
Roxy believes that using Showbie in this way allows her to better communicate with her students about their learning, while also helping her monitor their progress on her weekly Assignments – all within the one app.
For more Showbie teacher stories, please check out our blog here. Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great week in the classroom – Justin
