Open Badges for Teachers
The Mozilla Open Badge Project is in development to encourage life long learning, through the form of digital badges. Digital badges are visual representations of a real life skills or achievements. They can be used in both formal and informal learning environments. Anyone who uses foursquare or klout, is familiar with digital badges. What Open Badges does is gives you the platform to build a digital badge program in your own class room, youth-group, unconference, etc.
The nice thing about Badges is that you, as the administrator, get to set the criteria in which to earn a particular badge and award them to your students accordingly. The student then can organize their earned badges in their Open Badge Backpack.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/46490072[/vimeo]
WordPress plug-ins:
- WPBadger ― lets you “bake” badges from within the WP Admin panel
- WPBadgeDisplay ― lets you display your badges on your WordPress site as a widget
But what if I don’t have a WordPress site? Now worries; ForAllBadges.com let’s you bake badges and add students from within its cloud software.
If you need any help with implementing an Open Badges program, the Open Badges Community is more than happy to help.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, August 15) is a holy day of obligation. We will be celebrating The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Here is a custom badge that I created for my CCD students who attend Mass tomorrow.
Feel free to share how you are using badges in the comment section below.
14 Aug 2012 Catholic Tech Tips
Here are some great ways that I can see Badges being used:
• At The Catholic New Media Celebration: There could be a badge for each presentation (ie. Podcasting 101 Badge, The New Evangelization Badge, The SQPN Badge, etc)
• RCIA/CCD Classes: You could have a badge for each topic covered, and if the student/catechumen participates that week, then they get the corresponding badge.
The options are endless. How are you using Badges?