The education landscape has essentially changed overnight due to COVID-19, and so has what we’ve been working on here at Showbie. Just as teachers have been working hard to move their lessons online, we’ve been working hard to quickly deliver some Distance Learning features for our users to help them through these unknown times.
Thursday, July 23, 2020
We’ve got another new iOS feature! You can now create blank documents! You’ll now have the option to add a blank document anywhere in Showbie! You’ll be able to choose the orientation, style, and number of pages before adding! Available on iOS only—update your app to get access to this feature!
In addition to this feature, we’ve also added an improvement to our Student Approval Feature (see our previous release below). You can now able to Approve All pending user requests for your classroom. Clicking this will grant access to all users on the Pending Requests section.
Monday, June 15, 2020
We’ve got a double release for you today! We are not launching one, but TWO new distance learning features for you. The first, is the highly anticipated Video Chat feature(will be made available early next week). You will now be able to start a video chat from right within Showbie with your classes, groups, or students. This feature is in beta and only available on an opt-in basis to schools and districts with Pro subscriptions. If you want to try it out, talk to the Showbie administrator at your school. We’re hoping test out and gather feedback about this feature before we do a larger rollout. To learn more about the Video Chat beta, check out these articles.
In addition to the video chat feature, we have also released an increased security feature to all classes and groups on Showbie—the Student Approval Feature. You can now set your class or group to By Approval mode, which will require all students to be approved before accessing class content.
Key aspects of this feature include:
You are now able to set your classes and groups so you approve new members to join. You can also set the classes and groups to be open to join without needing approval.
You will receive a notification when a member joins your class or group and is waiting to be approved.
When you first set up a class, it will be open to join for one week, and then switch to approve to join automatically.
If you set a class/group to be open to join, after 1 week it will automatically change to join by approval. You can always set it to be open again if you need.
We hope you enjoy these latest features! We’re not stopping here, we are continuing to learn and build features for your classrooms(whatever they may look like in the near future)!
Thursday, May 21, 2020
We’re coming at you with another feature release — an Improved Video Uploader on iOS! We know there are a lot more video uploads occurring in order to get lessons and personal messages out to your classes. We wanted to improve this process for you. You and your students are now able to trim your videos and choose the quality before uploading. Smaller videos sizes means faster upload times for getting videos onto Showbie, and faster download times for viewing! We’ve done our best to have the app suggest a video quality that will give you optimal speeds and video quality.
Available on iOS only. Update your app in the app store and upload a video anywhere in Showbie!
We are also very excited to announce that video chat will be coming soon to Showbie though a partnership with Whereby. To read more about this upcoming release, check out this post!
Thursday, April 30, 2020
We’ve got our next distance learning feature released—Pinned Posts in Class Discussion! Teachers now have the ability to pin any post in the Class Discussion so that it remains on top for everyone in the class to see! Important announcements, instructions, or FAQs will no longer be buried under student comments and questions in the class discussion! We know its not the same as standing in front of the classroom and telling them this important information, but we hope this helps! This feature is available on web and iOS (be sure to update your iPad app though!).
To learn more about pinning posts to class discussion, you can check out this article.
In addition to this new feature, we have also released an improvement to the way that you watch videos in the Web App. You can now watch videos on the Web App from within the Showbie browser. No need to download the file in order to watch the video. Please note that only certain file types, on certain browsers support this feature on the Web App.
Thursday, April 9, 2020
We’re very excited to announce our first Distance Learning feature launch — Clear Class Discussion! No more deleting comments one-by-one or having students get distracted with old conversations. We hope this helps you have many more fruitful discussions with your students. If you want to check out how this feature works, you can find out more from this article.
Check back here for many more new distance learning features coming in the near future! Good wishes from everyone here at Showbie and we hope you and your students are staying safe!
