Say goodbye to a blank app project starting point! New features to support faster, smoother and easier lesson starts, assessment and collaborative working are now live for all schools.
Here’s what you can now do
Save a great project starter app as a project template and share it out directly within Blippit to target year groups/classes or individuals for any subject or colleague to use.
Save time year on year with planning and preparation
save, store and re-cycle templates
make templates to support different abilities and share to targeted students with differing levels of scaffolding in place within the app template
All users can now download an app at any stage of development. This is useful for assessment purposes in that you can have different versions of the app saved to show how it has developed over time
Download an app from Planet Blippit (see how in this video) and upload it to your own account for re-mixing before you share it out to targeted class groups
Teams of students working collaboratively can plan and develop an app project together then download the basic app and share an exact copy to each member of the team to develop different versions based on that design. This is done with the new app template upload/ download feature available to all users.
As you can see every app made by a student or teacher user now has an extra link so that others can download and remix the app if they want to using their own Blippit App Maker account. No other tool can open a Blippit App to remix and develop it further. All apps are teacher approved and all apps carry an audit trail in their About section to show the origins of the app project.
Blippit is introducing a powerful new single-sign-on option for Microsoft Office 365 school users globally and what’s more it’s a free upgrade.
If your school already uses Office 365 to access various tools, such as email, then you’ll benefit from this in a few ways.
your school log in for Office 365 is all you need to use Blippit
faster and smoother starts to lessons so more time for app making, computational thinking & collaborating
one less username and password to remember
What is Blippit?
We’ve got a HQ in England and Australia which means people don’t always know what Blippit is when search engines or other schools send them our way so here’s the low-down on what we have got going on in our coding and computational thinking journey.
Drag and drop or do some mark up language then publish your apps to Planet Blippit with your teacher’s approval and individualised feedback.
Drag and drop block programming to stimulate those computational thinking brain cells and even see the Python code behind the scenes. Create projects personalised to scaffold learning concepts for your children and much more to promote collaboration.
The next step along the coding journey from Blippit Blocks with a focus on text based programming using Python. Start with a blank Turtle project or create projects yourself to scaffold learning concepts for your students to use.
Spotlight The simplest and safest web based video conferencing tool available designed to support learning where experts are brought ‘virtually’ in to class or where classes link up to share learning. School firewall friendly.
Try Blippit out with the Office 365 Integration
Here’s how to do it if you want to find out more and link your school’s Office 365 with your Blippit account. Just click the button.
When we added the feature of being able to upload animated gifs into Blippit App Maker Apps via the Image Widget we of course had to do some testing before releasing it to users. Just now we found a little surprise in one of the files we used to test with….
In the Blippit IO Knowledgebase we’ve tried to capture some of the more important and popular areas of Blippit IO’s tools. Here’s an example and if you want more just click the Question Mark symbol (top right) when you’re logged in to Blippit IO.
Last week we released a new layer of ‘look and feel’ choices for Blippit IO App Maker users to apply to their project apps. This is a free upgrade to all our existing and trial schools.
a huge range of icons to choose from
colours to apply to individual button icons
broad themes that follow design rules according to your personal preference of phone platform between iOS and Android
not just about looking pretty but also about putting the navigation in the correct place for the phone device
The iOS & Android Styles
These are brand new and include a huge collection of icons that you can now pick from to make the app look more professional. Once you have selected a style a extra ‘Advanced’ tab appears on every widget where you choose colours and icon.
There is now ‘icon only’ navigation on the footer area too which many people have been asking for.
The Default Style
This is the standard theme that has always been popular because of it’s speed and simplicity. So, we’ve left this in as well as the iOS and Android Styles.
When you just need a refresher on a topic that you’ve not visited for ages, like app publishing, there’s a simple and quick way to feel like a super-capable ninja.
There’s always Google, but, for more specific info on Blippit IO there’s a Knowledgebase accessible from within Blippit IO itself via the Help/Info icon.
Above is a screenshot of the popular topic of app publishing from the Knowledgebase. This entry is a series of screenshots that walk you through the process.
Other topics and tours feature videos to watch like the Admin Tour. So, don’t feel stuck whatever you do. Click the Help/Info icon in Blippit IO when you’re logged in and you’ll never be far away from the information you need.