Badges for Learning

When I was a Brownie and a Girl Guide, I loved to earn badges. I loved to pore over the badge list and dream about which ones I would try to get. I was insanely jealous of the leader, Susan. She had hundreds of badges. She had so many badges that she ran out of space on her badge collecting sash, and had to start sewing them down her arms. Nobody had as many badges as that! I think I only earned about 8 badges in my Guiding career, but I was proud of each one. Each one was a little marvel. Little, tiny, colourful pictures that meant that I had done something that other people hadn't. I did it myself! I had no idea that I was 'learning' anything. I just thought they were pretty!

I've just discovered badges for learning. I'm sure others have known about this for a while, but the fact that I was oblivious leads me to believe that there are other teachers out there unaware of this tool.

Digital badges can be awarded to students (or colleagues) for achievements, for prizes, for marking success. You choose the badges available, you set the criteria, you award them as you see fit. OK...it's late and I'm tired, so here's a link to Mozilla for a really really good explanation.
http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html

In fact, this all started for me a few months ago, as I was browsing Pinterest (another badge-like enterprise), and I found a tool called "classbadges"
http://www.classbadges.com/

Classbadges is in beta right now. You have to request an account, wait a few days, and when they have a space for you, they will send you a password and instructions. Tonight I got mine, and signed up. The process is a little bit convoluted, but I hope it will get easier as they evolve. 

Once you sign in, you create a class and name it. You have to enter your students' information...names and email addresses. You can do this by copying a list straight from an excel sheet, or you can add each student manually. The site then produces a list of your students with their own individual passwords. They will need these to sign in and view their badges. Once you have a class created, you can then start to select the badges you want to use. Classbadges has a fairly extensive list of education-themed badges, and you can peruse their collection, or if you don't find what you need, you can send a request to their team of designers. I found some silly generic ones that will suit my purposes. A lot of the "language arts" badges are pictures of books, but I wanted something to mark completed tasks such as making your first blog post, or winning the class debate. 

So, you select the badges you like, set the criteria, or meaning of the  badge, and 'award' them to the students of your choice. The students then get an email notification that they have received a new badge. When they open the email, they are asked to sign in with that password that Classbadges generated, and which you remembered to give them! I sent myself a trial badge and got it on my phone immediately! Exciting!

I like this idea of "gamification of the classroom" for my students who are often young, distracted, unmotivated, jittery, and would probably rather be playing games anyway. I can see it used to mark certain stages of progress....first post to Twitter, First Penguin Reader finished, 3 Conversation Partners in one week, etc...

What I'm not crazy about right now is that the badges are all stored in Classbadges and I don't see a way to export them. I hope that in the near future, they will be transferrable to other places like blogs, websites, heck...even Facebook. It looks like Mozilla is working on that, so it will be interesting to see how far the idea will be carried. If anyone knows of similar sites, let me know. I can't wait to try it out!