 Hi, lately I've been really excited about the possibility of using badges inside my courses through the Blackboard Achievements tool. Today, I'm going to show you a little bit about how badges work in Blackboard courses and show you how you can get up and running to create some of your own. So if you look on your screen here, I'm just looking at a blank shell of one of my courses and I'm ready to go ahead and create some badges. Now I've already done a little bit of the work so I want to show you some things already. First off, in order to have students excited and utilize the Achievements tool, you probably want to create a course link inside your nav bar. So that's a pretty easy process of just going here, creating a tool link, and then give it a name and select achievements as a type and make it available to your users. Now I've already done this and I've called it badges, so let's just click on that and see what that looks like. So here are the badges that already are available in my course. You'll notice that they're gray because my instructor account hasn't earned any of the badges, but the students will be able to see them just like this, see some of the information about them, so hopefully they can be motivated to try to earn these badges or earn these achievements inside of that. But let's go ahead and look at the process of doing this yourself. The first thing is if you haven't enabled the Achievements tool in Blackboard, you need to go down to where it says customization and click on tool availability. This is the list of all the possible tools that you have inside Blackboard. Here somewhere, hopefully very close to the top, you'll see the Achievements tool and you just want to make sure that the link here is clicked as available and if it's doing this thing where it shows both of them, make sure the second one is also available in content area. Once you've got that set up, go ahead and click submit and you're ready to start making some badges. So now we're going to go down to where it says course tools and here at the top, the first thing or at least one of the first things that you should see is the Achievements tool. Go ahead and click on that. This is the area that you come to create new achievements or create new badges in your Blackboard course. So let's go ahead and create an achievement. Now there's three types of achievements that you can see in here. There's the custom ones that have a lot of options and availabilities to set up. There's the course completion that you might want to use if you're having a badge for the completion of the class that you're instructing in. Or the one that I use most often, which is the milestone. And we're going to go ahead and create a milestone badge today. So one of the badges that I like to do in my courses is a Quizmaster badge. I've kind of varied a little bit in the way that I use quizzes in my course in that I let students take the quizzes multiple times with their highest score counting as they're great for that quiz. Now what I've noticed in a normal class where I don't use badges, students will take it three, maybe four times at the most. And when they get into the B range, they stop. But the utility of having multiple attempts on quizzes is that students spend more time looking at the material to hopefully try to get that perfect score in the quiz. So badges are a great way that we can motivate students to go ahead and do that. There enters the Quizmaster badge. The Quizmaster badge is a badge that students can earn when they get perfect scores on a certain number of quizzes. So I'm going to go ahead and create that badge today and talk a little bit about how that works. So first thing I want to do is go ahead and give it a name. So we're going to call it the Quizmaster. And then the second thing that I want to do is go ahead and stick it in a location. Now, if you have like a quizzes section set up on Blackboard, great. If not, you can pretty much put it wherever you like. So I'll just stick it on my start page for right now. At this point, you want to go ahead and give it a description. Now I'm going to be real quick here, but when you write these up, think about the idea that students may be taking these quizzes with them outside of the course. The more that you can speak to the skills or the specific characteristics that they students had to earn that badge, the more useful and the more currency the badge will have when you get outside the course. But we're just going to do a simple one today. So we're going to say student scores work for right now, visible to students before using, and it is a milestone. Now we want to go ahead and click Define Triggers. The Define Triggers is where you're going to set the rules of what has to take place for a student to earn a quiz. Now, if you want to do something with your badge, like have a badge that students can perhaps earn in a face-to-face class, or if they demonstrate specific behavior, what you can do is you can just create a hidden gradebook column and have it set to not be shown to users. And anytime you put any amount in that, you can have that trigger, trigger the badge to go ahead and be awarded. Students don't necessarily see it, but that allows you to manually trigger it. That said, with a badge like this, I can actually have it triggered automatically based on the scores that students get on a certain thing. So I'm going to go ahead and cruise on down here. And I'm just going to skip over most of this basic stuff. We're just going to leave it all the same. And I'm going to move down to a grade triggering. So I'm looking here for a certain set of columns of grade. So I've got these cool tests offered inside of here. And I'm going to go ahead and base the Quizmaster for this example off of their grades on these cool tests. Or at least we'll do like the first three of them for that. So inside of this, now we want to select the condition. And I want to say that the score or the percent is greater than or equal to 100%. And I'll then go ahead and add that. And now I've got that rule in here. And now I'm going to go ahead and create a second rule. I'm going to go ahead and call this one Rule 2. And I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for that one, greater or equal to 100%. And this time I'm going to select Quiz 2. If I wanted to keep doing this for all of them, I could. And it would only be earned after they had perfect scores on all of their quizzes. But I think that you get the idea that it would have to be triggered by both of these things. At that point, we're going to go ahead and select the reward. Yes, I'm sure that I've got all the desired criteria. And we're going to go ahead and give a batch. Now, Blackboard's got a couple really generic ones. But one of the things that I think that allows you to make the whole batch process a little bit more special is for you to go and create or at least find some badges on your own. A couple of resources that I want to point you at. First off, there's this really great free tool called the Online Badge Maker. It's at www.onlinebadgemaker.com. And what you can do is go in here and it gives you a badge making studio where you can start with a button layout and create a button layout that you like. You can change the background color to be what you would like it to be. You can add images that you upload. You can add text that you want to put in. And you can even add a variety of basic shapes to go ahead and be inserted into this. You can drag them, create them, and then ultimately when you're done, export the badge, save it to your computer so that you can upload it in the Blackboard. Really great to make some custom badges for your class. Another great resource that I found is MoodleBadges.com. Now, while designed for Moodle, it works great in pretty much any LMS that has support for badges. And the cool thing about MoodleBadges.com is they've created and licensed under a Creative Commons license a variety of different badges that you can use inside your courses. And I particularly like their Badges for University section that has a bunch of generic badges that work great inside classes. So you can try one of these or make it your own in something like Microsoft Paint or whatever based on your artistic skills inside that. But nonetheless kind of cool to have your own unique thing. For the badge that I'm making right now, I've already downloaded a suitable badge off the Moodle's Badges website. So I'm gonna go ahead and attach that right here. I've got my little Quizmaster badge. And I'm gonna go ahead and upload the badge. And you can see now that I've got this badge ready to go. I'm gonna go ahead and turn to publish the Mozilla on so students could theoretically export this badge out of my Blackboard course and take it with them. And I'm gonna save and exit. This point you can see now that the Quizmaster badge is set up and rewarded. And based on the little example that we did today, if students got perfect scores on their first two tests in the class, they would earn that badge. And obviously all of that is customizable based on what you wanna do. Well, in an overview in a nutshell, that was how to use badges and the achievements tool in Blackboard. There's a lot of more information on my site. So feel free to check that out. And thanks to listening to this video.