 Good day, K to 12 online educators. My name is Vanessa. I'm your friendly learning lead at Peer to Peer University. And today we're going to talk about PDPU's badge platform, which is radically learner-centered and how you might use it in your classroom. And as I said, I'm with Peer to Peer University. Peer to Peer University is an open online educational community where we do some experiments in 21st century learning. And as I said, all of the courses are free, all the content is free, and it's built by our community. Our community has built 550 courses, hosting 67,000 learners since 2009. And since we're committed to the values of openness, peer learning, and community, we have a very different take on measurement and assessment. We, as peer learners, we see assessment and learning as part of one loop. So as peers, we constantly give feedback to each other and learn from that kind of feedback. So as we created our assessment platform, we held onto those values dear and our badges enable feedback and conversations. So this presentation will walk you through our platform and also a use case of how the Youth Voices Summer Program used badges for learners to assess each other. What are badges at Peer to Peer Work? Okay, first, learners create their own badges. So anyone can create a badge and learners decide what is important and what are the skills that should be recognized in a learning project. After they create these badges, learners can award them to each other. They can give each other feedback, building an excellent community around their learning and learning how to give each other critique and feedback in the process. So how do you get started? How do you create a badge? All right, we're going to pop on over to creating a badge over here. All right, so I am going to create a badge for making a mix tape. I'm going to find an image. Let's use this guy. What are we going to call this nifty badge? We're going to call it make me a mix tape. And in the badge description, I like to think about this as sort of the badge subtitle. If the badge is for a certain kind of course or an event or a certain type of project and this mix tape is for making a playlist on the web and gifting it to someone else. The criteria that we're going to use to receive this badge, so how can someone prove that they have met the requirements for this badge? We can say using a program like Spotify or Audacity put together a playlist that tells a story, share, take a picture of your playlist and send it to someone else. All right, and now I'm ready to preview my masterpiece. And from here, we can either edit it, delete it, save and return later or publish this sucker. And I am ready to publish this sucker. There we are. So now my badge exists. And since I created it, I am automatically the expert and other people can apply for this badge and I can give them feedback. All right, so what's next? Now that we've created a badge, how do we review a badge? We're going to go over to from badges.pdpu.org. You can click review a project. And so you can see that here's the, how do you click review a project? You get down here and a friend of mine, someone I know, Dirk, he applied for the PDPU badges contribution and he submitted this project. He worked on the early version of badges.pdpu.org. And in the badge application process, we ask people to not only submit evidence for what they've done to meet the criteria for a badge, but they also need to walk through some of the steps taken, which is a kind of self-assessment and gives a person who's reviewing the badge a bit of context for what the person has tried, where we might give them feedback or additional ideas or resources. And Dirk has fulfilled the criteria to receive this badge. He shared an experience, reported an issue, and suggested improvements. And I know this because I worked with him. So when I give Dirk feedback, the feedback process at PDPU, we do it in three stages. We do kudos, which are green questions, which are yellow and red, which are concerns. And the reason that we do that is because we want to prime learners to give better feedback. On the web, it's very, very easy to plus one something or like something, but that doesn't really help someone improve their project. So we ask people to step out what's excellent, what they have additional concerns about, and what isn't going so well on the project. So for Dirk, Dirk was supportive throughout the contribution process. I still don't really understand how forking and emerging works on Github concerns. Wish I had further opportunities to challenge myself on this project. Okay, so now if the project has met all the criteria for the badge, then we can award it. But if the expert feels like not all the criteria for the badge have been met yet and they want to ask someone to revise and resubmit, you don't check the box and you click submit feedback. And here is a case study for using badges in the classroom. Youth Voices. Youth Voices was a summer program at Lehman College this past summer facilitated by Paul Ellison and the National Writing Project. And it was 15 middle school students who applied to work on their writing skills over the summer using a connected learning approach. And when I went to go visit this classroom, Paul worked with the students to identify which skills were important for them to learn over the course of the summer. And so the students created these badges and they awarded them to each other. And in their reflection process, they took great pride and responsibility in both managing the badge and managing the projects and also recognizing each other's skills. They found it very empowering. So I recommend that you take a look at the Google Plus community for some of the quotes and their experiences. Some of the key benefits of working with PDPU's badge platform is that it builds a community of learning in your classroom. The learners themselves decide what expertise matters and what are the criteria for recognizing it in each other. The way that we have made space for peer feedback and peer assessment, it enables that self-assessment, that reflection in asking students what they've done to accomplish that project, and peer assessment with the kind of feedback mechanism that we've created. And last but not least, our badges are OBI compliant. So learners can build a portfolio for the web. They can push their badges to the backpack from their dashboard. So just to reiterate, three steps to using badges in your classroom, it's very, very easy. If you ask students to identify the skills that are important, ask them to make badges that reflect those skills and ask students to give feedback to each other and you'll be using badges and peer assessment in your classroom in no time. As I said, my name is Vanessa Generelli and I am here to help if you have any questions about using badges in your learning community or in your classroom, please, please, please reach out and I would be happy to hear from you and help you. Thank you very much.