Product Review of Showbie

Showbie involves assigning, collecting, and reviewing learners’ work in the classroom. This platform makes it easy to share assignments, instructions, and resources with your learners. All submitted assignments are kept in a private and convenient server. It also reviews annotations; voice notes and text notes can be added directly to learners’ work.
Website: https://www.showbie.com/
What Users Love About the App
“Showbie is an excellent tool to make sure that students know when to complete their assignments during the designated time limit. It allows them to stay punctual with their assignments and remain focused with the current subject at hand.”
“Showbie gives out notifications at different times of the day to remind you of an upcoming assignment due date, these can be customized to the student’s liking. I can send out assignments and let Showbie do all of the announcing for me.”
“It is a very easy to use platform, our students start using it at the age of 5. Teachers can post links, exercises, PDFs, etc in folders and add submit dates. Assignments can be closed until a certain day. Students can upload all their work, which the teacher can they copy to the shared folder.”
“Showbie has revolutionized the way I collect and assess work, in particular oral assessments (I am a modern language teacher). Showbie’s seamless integration of an enormous variety of file types (including recordable or upload-able audio files!) make conversation assessment a breeze!”
“Showbie allows me to share video easily! I am a keen advocate of the flipped classroom model and needed a platform that would allow me to share videos and organise them into subfolders matching my lesson titles. The deadlines I could set and the option of when to make a folder visible to my students meant I could plan ahead and make my flipped videos well in advance.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“A great addition would be the ability to attach certain images or documents to the assignment created. It would make things much smoother as I do not have to create or find links for the resources needed to complete the work assigned.’
“I’m not paying for it personally but if I had to I would need to budget for it since it’s best features are not free (however the free version is still great!). There are a few minor technical functions that are not yet available on Showbie (ie., copy multiple assignments into other classes).’
“Students can reach me via Showbie whenever they need support. I have had to set firm boundaries in class so they know they will not get an immediate response and should plan their work in advance so they aren’t messaging me via Showbie the night before their work is due!”
“I’d like to have more control on the administrator’s side of things to ensure students had their notification enabled and that teachers had certain settings on by default.’
“I wish there was a running grade book or a way to upload stuff and it not be called an assignment. Sometimes I upload notes but students look for documents in the all assignments tab and get lost”