Showbie
Flexible desktop, mobile assignment tool works best with pro features
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Showbie
Pros: With tons of integrations with other iPad apps, a great one-stop place for giving and receiving feedback in the 1-to-1 classroom.
Cons: Teachers won't get as much bang for their buck without the paid version.
Bottom Line: A flexible way to collect student assignments and offer written and verbal feedback, especially with the premium features.
Since the free "Workflow Essentials" version of Showbie supports only 10 assignments at a time, teachers need to be strategic. Consider picking one unit to use with Showbie, or use it as the submission tool for final projects at the end of several units during the school year. If you're in a one-to-one iPad classroom, the paid version is likely your go-to; you can use it as a one-stop shop for students to submit assignments from almost any app on their devices (thanks to tons of integrations with other apps). Use the portfolio tool to help students develop a rich multimedia collection of their classwork, and use the discussion features to help parents stay up-to-date on student progress.
Showbie is an assignment submission and grading tool for desktop and mobile devices, tuned to flipped and one-to-one computing classrooms. With both its free and paid versions, teachers can create assignments and share them with students, and students can submit responses from a desktop or mobile device. Teachers can offer written feedback (by drawing or typing) and they can also record audio to give verbal feedback. Notably, Showbie lets students submit assignments from many iPad apps, including apps where students write, draw, develop presentations, and make movies. The paid version of the app has significantly more features, including a gradebook tool, a student portfolio, and additional features for fostering discussion among students and with parents.
If used strategically, Showbie can be a great way to support and organize classroom learning. There's a nice mix of built-in features for offering feedback: You can type or draw to offer written feedback, or you can record audio and pin it to a student's assignment. Showbie also stands out for its flexibility. It's useful that you can submit assignments from dozens of iPad apps (from Google Drive and Dropbox to Explain Everything), and it's nice for teachers and students alike that you can access Showbie well on a desktop or a mobile device. The built-in videos and help text also make it especially easy for students, teachers, and parents to understand the app's features and how to use them.
The only point of concern with Showbie is that its free version is so much less powerful than the pro version. The pro version includes more features for sharing feedback with students and parents, developing student portfolios, creating a gradebook, collaborating with colleagues, and hosting class discussions. Most significant, the free version doesn't have a powerful gradebook feature, and it only allows teachers to create up to 10 assignments, and those assignments are limited to 25MB each, which may drastically limit students' ability to submit assignments from all of those great apps on their devices. Plus, some teachers might balk at the idea of learning to use a tool that's limited to 10 assignments per year. If your school springs for the paid version of this app, it could be an excellent one-stop shop for collecting student assignments and helping students build a pretty remarkable multimedia portfolio of work created in a variety of iPad apps. However, without those paid features, Showbie might be a better fit for far more limited classroom use.
Learning Rating
This is an incredibly useful app to use with all classes in a Secondary School.
I found this app to be incredibly useful when I worked in a Secondary school where all pupils had an ipad. One of its main uses was to help the pupils organise their work. They could keep track of homework tasks and deadlines and then upload their work if necessary. It was also useful to keep a store of extra reading material and past exam papers which the pupils could access in their free time. We brought the paid version as the app was so popular with both teachers and pupils.