 Let's talk now about bringing badges to your school, to your organization. You're one of those people that can influence things and make change. Perhaps you make waves. Perhaps you annoy people. Perhaps you're so good that everybody just listens to what you say. Either way, we're going to talk about how to get those badges rolling with your group of people that you hang out with. For me, this is the process I like to go through. Find those early adopters. Find people that love new things and that are motivated or excited by new things. Also find people that you have a good relationship with, someone who trusts you. In schools, when it comes to technology, often it's these people. They're a little bit nerdy. They like that new exciting challenge. Maybe they're socially awkward. I don't know. But if you can find those early adopters, they will help you to create a domino effect where when you get them going, it'll be the next one and the next one. There's a curve that talks about new adoptions and there's always the early adopters in the beginning who are influencers and then everybody else starts to adopt it and then the late adopters come in. So get those early adopters rolling. It's a great way to test the system as well. There will be lots of mistakes in the beginning and they will be more likely to be patient with it. Start small. Starting one classroom. I started with the PE teachers. Actually, they just took off from there. I was like, whoa, slow down. But I didn't want to say that, but I was thinking that instead I had to catch up. But I started with one group of people to test the system. I found tons of mistakes, got it worked out, got a nice process set up and going so it would scale out to a larger group. So start small, start with a couple, get a process in place and scale it up. I talked a little bit about the process that Concordia uses to award badges in an earlier part of this presentation. So you can feel free to go back and watch it if you want. Or of course you can always go to badges.concordiashangi.org and check out our processes there. Locate a badge designer. Look around. Try and find one. I found one at my school. School. He likes doing it. There's a lot of work at him. So far he's happy. I hope that continues. There's always open badges.me, which we talked about earlier, if you don't have a badge designer. See if you can get one in place. It's more fun if it's somebody here within your organization that's local. Then it's time to get admin support. Now some people might think you'd want to get admin support right away. I don't agree. I think it's better to test out a system and see if it's feasible to get it up and running on a small basis and then go to the administration and say, hey, check this out. This is pretty neat. This is what I've been doing so far. I want to scale it. I want to get to a larger area. What do you think of this idea? Can you lend me support? It's important to get the admin going behind it. And generally what they will, this is about recognition. It's about recognizing people who are doing successful things. That's what admin is all about, right? They always want to recognize the people for their good behavior. Well, hopefully my admin does, but I'm pretty lucky maybe. Who knows? So talk to your administration and see what they think about the concept because you may need to get some support for them to get the technology behind it up and rolling. Sometimes those technology people can be a little resistant to new ideas because they're worried about things. They're afraid it's going to break something. And if you can get your principal to help you out, you'll be okay. Well, more likely. Then it's time to secure some tech resources. If you're going to do this on a wider scale, you might want to have some server space at your school. You could always use badge.us. That works as well if you want to keep it outside of your school's resources. But I use WordPress and we have location on our WordPress servers. All of our students here at Concordia have a WordPress website and everything gets kicked in through there. It makes the process a lot simpler. If you're not a WordPress person, maybe you might want to become one. Or again, back to badge.us. Time for marketing. So you've got this cool idea. You've got a few early adopters. You think you're done. You can either just hang out and get frustrated that nobody's listening to my idea or you can take action and start doing marketing. You have to sell your idea. You have to spread it in the words of Seth Godin, like a idea virus. The person who can spread ideas is the one who wins. And in order to spread that idea, you need to do marketing. If you're not comfortable with marketing, go get comfortable with it. Here's some ideas. Lobby people to join. You've got your early adopters going, right? Time then to spread from there. Start bugging people. Hey, have you seen this program? It's set up. It's going. It's rocking. I've got some ideas for you. Where do you say you adopted? Generally, people will say yes to the concept of badges, but getting them to actually do it to change the routines in the classroom can be a little bit more difficult. It requires some gentle nagging, maybe a gentle nudge or two. And if you have a relationship with these people, they'll probably say, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. And if you volunteer to come in and help them, then they're more likely to do it. You just have to get that habit in place for teachers. We're pretty habit-oriented people. And if we get a new process and are involved or coming to us, sometimes we can be a little bit resistant. But once it's in, it's in. I mean, who doesn't want to wear badges? That's fun, right? Make sure it's a grassroots effort. Try to get everybody from the bottom and pull them up through. You'll find badges, at least for me, more successful if you encourage people to do it rather than yell at them or force them to do it, right? Develop a process. And above is a link to what our process is. And I think I've talked about this before. So that it's easy and simple for people who want to create and award a badge to do it. So all they have to worry about is thinking of the badge, creating the badge, maybe describing what it looks like, who should they award it to, and how should they manage it in their classroom. They don't have to worry about all the other outside stuff. They just say, go. And it happens. If you can make it that simple for people, you're more likely to get adopters beyond the early adopters, who don't mind the hassles, right? I publicize adopters. And you've seen this slide before. But whenever possible, and I see some new ideas coming, I put it up on this page. I do send out a weekly news tech letter, or we actually all do here as tech coaches at Concordia. And we like to publicize people who are using badges. Then it becomes a movement. As soon as you can get two, three, four, five groups going, then the movement will start taking root. And then you can say, hey, look what everybody else is doing. It's working well for them. People have a lot of new ideas coming at them. They help them sort through what are the good ideas and the bad ideas. They'll turn to their neighbors and people they respect and say, what do you think of this? And if you can get a few of those people to say, this is awesome, then they're more likely to adopt it. We're going to talk about the future of badges next. Stay tuned.