 Welcome. Welcome to the second webinar in our June summer webinar series. I'm Carl Blythe, I'm the Director of the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. That's a mouthful. We just usually say, Coral. And I'm Rachel Gilg, Projects Manager of Coral. Thanks for joining us again today for the second session and final session, I should say, of our webinar series on digital badges. This week's topic is creating and issuing digital badges. So just a few quick reminders. We want to encourage you to make this session as interactive as possible and we really mean that. So on the left side of your screen, you can ask questions throughout the session using the chat window and it's of course labeled questions. Natalie Steinfeld-Childre is back again this week to help us monitor. Natalie, say hello. Hi everybody. Okay, there she is. She's going to be helping us monitor and respond to your questions as they come in. Rachel and I are focused on our slides and on the information, but Natalie's going to make sure that we stop and take your questions as they come in. So let's make this interactive. We'll also be monitoring Twitter. So if you're tweeting today, please use the hashtag, hashtag Coral or hashtag C-O-E-R-L-L. If you get kicked out of the meeting room for some reason, please go ahead and log in under the same name just so we can keep track of who's here. Some of you who are joining us today have already indicated that you'd like to receive CPE credits for participating in today's session. If you haven't yet submitted the request for the credit, then please follow the link in the info section that appears on the left-hand part of your screen and fill out that survey. You can also send us a note at info at coral.utexas.edu and we'll make sure that you get a certificate for attending. If you missed last week's session or if you don't see all of today's session for whatever reason, we do record all of our webinars and we post the videos and slides on our website and on our YouTube channel afterwards. And finally just a quick reminder about the changes in our event schedule this month. This will be the final session in our Digital Badges webinar series. But on June 27th, we'll be offering a three-hour webinar dedicated to design and delivery of basic online language courses. And we've got some great speakers for this event including the technology expert from CARLA, our sister LRC at the University of Minnesota. We're really excited about that so we hope that you join us. If you want more information and of course the registration form, all that's available on the coral website. So Rachel? Okay, let's go ahead and get started. I first want to start just by reviewing a little bit of what we covered last week. Last week we did an introduction of Digital Badges and for those of you that attended, you remember that we learned that Digital Badges are visual representations of a skill or achievement much like the merit badges that most people are familiar with. And the fact that they are distributed over the internet of course gives them much greater visibility and are a powerful new tool we think for learning. So what do we mean by an open badge? Well, Mozilla has created a technical infrastructure for sharing badges and related information about badges and who earned them over a variety of platforms. So their infrastructure actually lets you display a badge across many different websites or communities that you might be a part of online. These badges actually verify your skills with links to evidence showing that what you did to earn the badge and they have that assertion of the issuing organization. So you see all of the background information about what the badge required and what the person did to earn it. And just a reminder, this is what's included in a badge. If you kind of pull away just that image, it's not just a static image. It includes information about, as I just mentioned, the criteria who issued the badge, if there's a link to some sort of evidence that shows the actual what was produced in order to earn the badge, when it was issued, if it's tied to any standards and any other description. So this is really a format that is meant to be portable and shareable online. And again, just a reminder, the sort of badge ecosystem that Mozilla is trying to create is represented by this infographic. We also have it linked in the file share section below if you want a larger copy of it. Basically, so on the left side, you have the learner in the center, and then on the left side, you have all of these places where they may be going for learning opportunities. I mean, in our case, we like to think we're interested in badges for professional development, so we like to think about the educator maybe going to these different places for professional development opportunities, not only universities, but maybe a language resource center or professional organization. They can earn these badges, these digital signifiers of their achievements, and they can collect them in a badge backpack, which I'll see again in just a moment. And then within that backpack, they can organize the badges and then decide where to display them online in the various communities that they're a part of. So that's just kind of the overview from last week. We do have that session recorded. If you missed it, you can find it on the homepage of our website. And what we asked you to do at the end of that session was to take a stab at creating your own badge concept, something that would be relevant in your context, whether it's K-12 or higher ed, or whether you're talking about a classroom or training teachers and using the badge in that context. So we're really glad to see we got several really great ideas. We're going to share some of those with you later on in the presentation. But I do also want to say that it's not too late. If you want to go ahead and do this assignment now, we will continue to accept them. And then we can, if you turn it in, then we actually will issue you a badge. So you'll get to learn about how that whole process works and you'll get to set up your own backpack and get started with that. So I encourage you, if you didn't do the assignment, go ahead and do it just so you can see how all that works. For those of you that did do the assignment and did earn a badge, I just want to kind of show what happened when you went to claim your badge, or hopefully what happened. You'll have to let me know if you experience any problem. But basically, you should have received an email, and now if you did not receive an email and you did the assignment, then check your spam filter because it's possible it ended up there. But the email would include a link to a page on our website where you could go and claim your badge. Now this is just a little system that we built. It's kind of a, you know, it's a locally hosted system. I'm going to be showing you some other types of badge issuing systems later on. But this is just something very simple that we built just for the purpose to issue badges for our various events. So when you get to our website, you'll see a link that says click here to claim your badge. And that's the key. That's what links our system to the Mozilla system where you have your badge backpack. So once you click that link, you get a little pop-up, and this is actually coming from Mozilla, saying, okay, you're going to send this badge to your backpack. Let's log you in. So once you log into their system, now it's important that the email that you have associated with your badge backpack is the same email that you were, that badge was issued to, because that is the unique identifier for the earner of the badge, is their email address. So it says, okay, go ahead and log in. And then it prompts you, do you really want to accept this badge? I mean, if you don't really want, if this is protecting you from people who might just award you a badge for whatever reason, maybe you don't want that badge, or you don't want it showing up in your backpack. So you do have the ability to decline if you want to or accept. And all of the information about the badge is displayed right there. So you can decide whether or not you want to go ahead and claim it and move it to your backpack. Okay, so then once it's in your backpack, it'll show up here. I did show some screenshots of the backpack last week. But you'll see, you know, you have all your badges here. You can organize them in different ways. There's a little collections link at the top that will let you put badges in different categories for maybe showing to different audiences. Can I just make a comment about that? So, again, you can get badges from all kinds of different topics and disciplines. So the idea is really to curate your backpack. So if you want to have a professional development backpack for language teachers, then that would be like a folder. She said a category. You could have a group of badges that have to do with your hobby. Let's say you're into gardening or landscape design, something like that. So that way you can really curate your backpack and send out the badges to the audience that you're targeting. You don't want to be sending out your landscaping badges to, let's say, a job that you're trying to apply for in language teaching. And again, when you click on any of those badges, you're going to see the metadata that comes up alongside the background information. So if you did assignment and you earned the badge, you should see exactly this in your website, in your backpack, the information about this badge you just earned. And if there are any questions about this, or if you had any problems or thoughts on this whole process. Yeah, there is. There is one question from S. Johnson about designing the actual badge image, and there is a website for that. Yeah, we're going to get to that. We're actually almost there. That's a good segue. But a couple of people have already written in, and I noticed Natalie is responding to them. So remember, some people had trouble downloading, I guess, the file to actually do the badge. I linked this. Yeah, so everybody, it's linked again in the questions window there. She put the link there so you should be able to download that. We're still accepting it so you can do it. You'll have a clear idea of what we're asking you to do. Okay. All right. Well, I promised last week that we'd really get into some of the nuts and bolts of how to really issue a badge. And first of all, let's just talk about what I mean when I say issue a badge. Basically, that means just having the badge and associating it with the learner in this way. There's basically three simple steps here, and we're going to talk about each one of these. But first, you just have to have a badge image. And this has to be in the PNG format, PING format. It can't be a JPEG. It can't be a GIF. So those types of file formats don't have that technical ability to hold the metadata in the fashion that the Mozilla standard requires. So it has to be a PNG. That's the requirement. Then the badge, that image and the associated metadata are posted somewhere online. And this isn't necessarily something that you have to do yourself to figure out how to post this and in what format. There's a lot of platforms that will do this for you that I'm going to be showing you later on. And then that final step is to associate that badge image with the metadata built in to the actual learner. So you issue the badge to the learner by associating it with their email address, basically. So it's usually like you have a badge and you type in the email addresses of the people you want to award it to. And it kind of can be as simple as that. Of course, you could have systems that will automatically issue a badge when some level or some accomplishment is met. But it can be really simple, as simple as just typing somebody's email into a system, and then you've awarded them a badge. And Mozilla takes care of the rest, basically. Okay, so first of all, let's talk about creating badge images. Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, but I'm not an artist. I'm not a designer. How am I going to come up with something that looks good and professional and that people are going to want to have to display? Yeah, I see a couple of people who have questions about that, exactly. Well, luckily, because of something called Creative Commons Licenses, which if you need to know more about, we have some – our webinar series last summer really covered places to go get images that aren't – that are free of the copyright restrictions. There's a really great site called The Noun Project. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this, but it's basically a site where you can go in and you can type in any noun – any noun you can think of. I typed in here. I typed in language. And you get all kinds of icons that – it's a whole community of designers who have contributed these designs to this website. And they're not all free, but a large number of them are openly licensed. And there's – it's just a wealth of really great images. And you can take them. You could maybe add color to them or fix them up in some way. And you've got a really great sort of basis for a badge design. So this is just to show when I clicked in on this one. And it's really hard to see. But at the bottom where I have this purple arrow pointing, it says it's a public domain. So that basically means if it's an image in the public domain, anybody can use it for anything. You don't have to do any attribution like you would with Creative Commons. So again, that's an icon that's supposed to signify the notion of translation, right? That's – right. Okay. Are there other than let's say I – that's not my language. You have to look through for – so that might be one of your criteria. And I like this, but maybe you could then take that and play with it to make it work for your language. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It could be a good – So some of them you can – my point is some of them you can use as is others. You might want to tweak a little bit. Right. Yeah, let me stop you for just a second. I see Mike Barker has asked a question. He says he gets – it appears that the coral – he gets a warning when he tries to claim his badge. Right. Yeah. And so that's the issue with the email. I basically was awarding badges just based on whatever email you use to send me your assignment. So perhaps that isn't the email that you have associated with your Mozilla account or if you're using Gmail or some – it depends on what you use to set up your backpack. So if that happens, just send us another quick email to let us know which address you would like me to issue the badge to. And then I'll issue another badge. You'll get a separate email to that address and then it should work. And I see that Ann is already anticipating the next slide. So she's already saying, talking about open badges. Another great site for design badges. Okay. Yes. The open badge designer. Yeah. I was thrilled to see that a couple of you are already familiar with this site and using it. This is a really great tool. It lets you – it's free for one. You can go in. You can build your badge image. It really is just for the badge images. You can't use this tool to issue a badge. You'll have to use a different platform for that. But for just creating the badge image, this is the best tool out there. So once you go to the homepage, you say, you know, I want to start building a badge. And then you'll see you have all these palettes here. Like this is something on the right that I just put together in like two minutes. You can choose all of these different design elements and it puts it all together for you. You can play with colors and shapes. I mean, there's just an infinite number of variations that you could create. And it really was developed specifically for people creating open badges. So it's the perfect tool for designing your badge. You can then just download your badge. I think in this free version you cannot save a badge, but you can go ahead and just download the image and then you can start using it in your badge issuing system. So that – I would highly recommend that tool. And it'd be a great tool to have, you know, your students use too. You know, have engaged students in designing badges. And, you know, it's a very simple tool. Okay, so we covered the first bullet. Now the second two, really that's the meat of the badge issuing. And again, you know, these are things that are going to be done for you. You don't really know – I mean, you don't need to know, you know, how exactly to format the badge metadata and put it online. You just need to find the right tool that can do it for you. Or you need to find, you know, a programmer. And it really is pretty simple programming to kind of build your own badge issuer. But there's a variety of tools out there now, so you don't really need to build your own. So here's a sampling of some what we call hosted badge issuing platforms. So these are platforms where you generally have to go and sign up for an account with them. And they provide the tools to help you create the badges and then issue the badges to your two learners. So the learners generally also have to have an account on this site. And the kind of the two first ones that I found out about were Creadly and Achievery. They've been around for quite a while. And those, you know – Quite a while, meaning two years. I mean, quite a while in your badge context is just not very long. Right. And some of the – for all badges, I'm not really sure how long that's been around, but that's another option. Open Badge Factory is very new. And both, I would say, Open Badge Factory and Badge Kit are really aimed more at the organizational level. Those wouldn't be so much for, you know, individual teachers who just want to get started with badges. If you're just a teacher and, you know, you want to try out badges with a group, I would try one of the first three options. The last two options, you know, Open Badge Factory is definitely going to – is a for-profit. And, you know, they're having a free pilot now, and it looks interesting. If you are doing this at an organizational level, you might be interested in it. And the Mozilla Badge Kit, which is eventually going to be open. And that's going to be really awesome when that comes out, because it really is going to be an all-in-one package for creating and issuing and managing, displaying badges. So would that also be for the individual teacher out there? No, I think that would be more of an organizational thing than Mozilla Badge Kit, although it's not really clear at this point. If you are really interested, they are accepting, I think, some institutions into their private beta, but they're not accepting – they're not opening it up to everybody right now. So just to go through a couple of these. So, Creadly, again, it's a site where you have to have an account on that site, but I know that this is an option that a lot of people who are experimenting with badges, they're using this option. And this is non-profit? I'm not exactly sure. Well, I mean, do you pay Creadly? No, it's free, but I'm not exactly sure. It might be a freemium, but it's free to create an account. One of the cool things that Creadly offers is that some people have taken advantage of is a WordPress integration. So if you have your own website and you want to display Creadly badges or have that integration, they have a really nice plug-in that our sister center, Lark in San Diego, actually has been using this for their Lark badge central. They've been issuing badges for the professional development they do. So that's kind of one nice thing about Creadly if you're looking for a hosted option, but then you also want to tie it in with your own website. I thought it was interesting that the for all badges, which is another badge issuing community type of site, they actually have moved their badges into another site called for all rubrics, which I thought that was kind of interesting that they're tying all of their badges to this rubric creation service. So that's just kind of a different spin on things. It looks like Natalie just Natalie's laptop just went offline. Okay. Well, Natalie might be off the chat for a few minutes while she reboots her laptop. But we're still here and that's okay. Okay, so open badge factory again. As I said, I don't know what's going to happen with this site. They are in a free pilot phase. So if you want to try it out, it seems kind of interesting, but I don't really know a lot about it. And I see Mike asking about a Moodle plug-in. And yes, I'm going to be talking about the LMS plug-ins too in just a minute, because a lot of LMSs do offer integration. Again, badge kit, you would have to contact them if you're interested. I know they're just really looking for kind of large organizations at this point to be a part of that trial. Recently, Pearson announced that they have a badge issuing platform, which is interesting. It sort of remains to be seen. I haven't heard a lot about this from sort of the badge channels, but I did see that they announced it and these are open badge compliant. So it's good they're compliant with the Mozilla infrastructure. So they might become a player. And it's interesting to me just that slide there you see at the bottom it says, this again is coming from Pearson, you're more than just bullet points on a resume. So the frame there of course is professional development and professionals who are promoting themselves and their achievements. So I'm thinking in terms of your portfolio. Okay. So in addition to all of these hosted options, there are a number of tools that will plug into an LMS or CMS, such as Moodle or Blackboard or Canvas or others. These really are more, if you think about these badges are really self-hosted, because whoever is hosting your LMS, that's where the badges are going to live, rather than having them hosted at one of these third party websites where you have to have a separate account and everything. So it's really nice because they will integrate, you know, you don't have to have your students sign up for another account on another host, but you will have all that student information and you'll be able to issue badges from within the system. So this is a screenshot from a Moodle installation where you can see, it says, you know, my badges and you have the badges at the top. This is, you know, an individual's profile and it's showing their badges. And so you have the badges that they earned from this Moodle installation at the top and then at the bottom it says my badges from other websites. And so that just shows how since they're using an open, the open badge Mozilla standard, you can actually display your other badges that are living in your backpack. So that's an example of a plugin that's not only letting you issue badges to people, but also lets people display the badges, not only badges that they've earned there, but badges that they've earned in other places. So that's pretty cool. Canvas has offered some badge plugins through this EDU App Center, which is a place to get applications that plug into various learning management systems. Some of these actually may work with systems other than Canvas. This is that LTI, I don't know, some of you are familiar with. It's a new standard for creating plugins that will work across a variety of learning management systems. So some of the apps that are appearing on this site may also work on your LMS. And I know also Blackboard, I don't have a slide for it, but I know that Blackboard Learn does also, they've been interested in badges and they have a badge plugin as well. So this is just kind of a chart and you can get this from our website. The website, open badges.coral.utexes.edu, this spreadsheet is linked. And you can kind of see that there's still a lot, there's a lot of options out there and maybe this kind of gives you a sense of what all the different criteria are. So not all of the badge systems or badge plugins that you see out there are necessarily going to be open badges, for instance. I know that Edmodo is one tool that is issuing badges, but they're not actually open, so they don't integrate with the Mozilla standard. So there's still a lot of, the best ones are rising to the top, but there's still a lot of options out there and this just kind of gives you a sense of all of these different options. But hopefully you'll be able to find one that really works for your specific needs. Okay, well I think we're going to switch gears now. If anybody has any questions about any of the tools. Before we get into applying into foreign language, Mike Barker has a question about his backpack. Do I need to be using the Firefox browser to see my backpack? No, you should and it should work across browsers. It isn't, just because it is a Mozilla tool, but it's not tied to the Mozilla Firefox browser. So it should work across all browsers. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about then applying badges to your foreign language education. Will you click for me then, Rachel? So we have taken, actually as we said at the beginning, we received some of your really interesting ideas for badges, and I just want to walk through a couple of them. These are really nice concrete examples of the different parts of a badge. So the first one is from Marcella, and she is thinking of giving a badge to beginning Spanish students, and she calls this a voice thread for a voice thread project. And the idea is to create a presentation about a Spanish speaking country using voice thread, which is a really nice way to present slides and animation and to talk over that. So she says that she wants at least 10 slides for the presentation, and you should include things like geographic location, culture, climate, animals, food, all that kind of information that typically goes with that kind of report. The evidence then would be the presentation that meets the criteria as specified. So the different kinds of bullet points. And she also says she wants it to reach a level of excellence in terms of presentational and interpersonal rubrics. So she's using kinds of standards. The value would be to show the ability to communicate written and orally in the target language. And I believe she said that she's used the badge template from Open Badges here. So this is an example of what we were just talking about. She created this badge using openbadges.me. My feedback is that when I looked at this, the first time voice thread project, it presupposes that they understand how to use voice thread in a way I think it's more about a culture presentation or a presentation. So I didn't know that it was as completely as transparent as... I mean, I think the name could be a little bit more transparent, but I really like this idea. So let's take a look at the next one. Ann Marie Baker sent in an example from Michigan State University. And they're calling this the motivated learner badge. And they started something at MSU at Michigan State University. It's a learner training module. So training foreign language learners and the principles of language learning to raise their awareness about what it takes to be a good language learner. And they actually have three different online modules. You can go see them at learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu. Actually, if you could type that in. Natalie, if you could put that in, can you type that? Learning languages, all one word. Learning languages.celta.msu.edu. Hopefully we'll get that so people can take a look at that website. But the idea then would be to make at least one post in one of the common areas on the modules and then the modules in with the summative quiz. So the evidence would be that the criteria met would be, of course, the post itself on the site and also the successful completion of the quiz. And she has a cutoff point of 80% accuracy. And so the value, of course, why would somebody want to collect this badge while students can show teachers or future employers or grad schools that they're serious about language learning? Okay, so another example, I thought that was a really cool example based on modules that they've developed at Michigan State. So the next one comes from Tina Dong here in Austin, Austin Independent School District. And Tina is the World Languages Coordinator for AISD. And the name of this badge is Leading Over the Expectations in Loat. So it's actually a play on words. Loat can stand for languages other than English in the context of Austin Independent School District. But it's also to reward those teachers who are going above and beyond in teaching languages. That's the idea of leading over the expectations. And so it's a badge for world language teachers who teach at Austin, Austin Independent School District. And the idea is you have to fulfill 100 points required on the teacher recognition form per school year. So you're trying to accumulate 100 points during the school year. And the points are listed in four different areas. Leadership, ongoing learning, teacher professionalism, and experience. And in addition to the points, you have to submit a 200 word paragraph highlighting memorable teaching moments of the year. She also appended with this file. She also gave us then the checklist because the four categories, for example, leadership, ongoing learning, teacher professionalism, and experience, that by the way spell Loat, L-O-T-E, are all broken down into rubrics, so checkpoints and you're of course getting points for each. So for leadership, it breaks down into honors, awards, community outreach, leadership, such as being a department chair, or sponsoring a club, a club sponsor. Ongoing learning, you can get points for graduate study or other professional study. You can participate in professional development activities such as the TEL framework, International Travel Study Abroad. Teacher professionalism, you get points for membership in professional organizations, attending conferences, holding offices in organizations and so forth. And finally, experience has a lot to do with bringing the community into the classroom. So best speakers, organizing, field trips, all those kinds of things. So it's something that has actually been established. It appears by Austin Independent School District. And the value then, why would somebody want to collect this badge? Well, obviously you're documenting what you were doing as a language teacher in I think a very clear and systematic way. And to give a bit of incentive here, these badges then will be entered into a grand prize drawing for expenses covered to a conference of choice, not to exceed $1,000. So that's pretty good. And then we have a final badge from Cui. I've got a bunch of the names. Chen Jotos, Mandarin Chinese, Pierre Tutor, and the badge design, what a pal. The idea here is to give a badge for volunteer tutoring of other students. So this is a service badge. And what you need to do to earn the badge will to spend at least 12 hours during the school year tutoring or offering to, it's part of a tutoring service to students who are learning Chinese. And the evidence then would be a tracking sheet. And the students who are being tutored will need to sign off on the tracking sheet. So why would you want to collect this badge? What's the value? It's a community service. You want to document your service. It could be part of a college application or even if you're going to apply to be a paid tutor later on. So those were a nice kind of sampling of I think really different kinds of badges, service learning, professional development, even something tied to a course. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about let's see the badge system design. And I like the graphic that Rachel was chosen for this because it's a web and everything is connected to everything in badges when you start to think of systems. So then the two bullet points here decide the size and purpose of the badging initiative because it can be overwhelming if your badge is actually connected to everything just like in a curriculum. There's so many parts to a curriculum to start by thinking about your curriculum and map it out. I think my advice would be to start small obviously and you don't have to badger by every element of the curriculum. So let's just take a look at a couple of concepts behind badges. And this Rachel and I were on a panel discussion about badges at the Calico Conference at Ohio University in May and Miriam Hauck from the Open University told us about the Open University's efforts to create badges for their MOOCs and she gave us this really great PDF to think about it. Think about different kinds of types of badges and the first one here then is what they're calling a waypoint badge and the main idea is that when you think of learning it's usually the metaphor that they use in this article is an arc. So there's a beginning point and an end point and then these are various stages. So you can give badges at various stages of your learning arc or trajectory. This could be something as simple as and again this implies then some kind of a calendar. It's a longitudinal right. So most of us have a syllabus with well-defined points along the way. So a test, an activity, those kinds of things are easy to badger by. Okay, the next type is something that they're calling a cumulative accomplishment and the idea here is some kind of activity that you need to do several times. So you set some kind of a threshold and once the threshold is reached a person can get a badge. What's nice about this is it's not tied then to the calendar so if they want to they can complete the threshold at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year or whatever. And then finally the third type of badge is to reward people from deviating from the learning arc or from deviating from the group. And this of course can be more to get people to really follow their own paths or to create their own paths. So it's to have people become more independent learners. In other words they're supposed to do optional activities that are not essential to the course. They're related to the course but they're not the focus of the course. So learners kind of set up these breadcrumbs in order to stretch their abilities. Okay, so those are very different types of badges to help you think about what you could badger by. Okay, and sort of another approach of thinking about design principles for badges comes out of this really interesting research project a few years ago there were several grants offered for creators of digital badge systems and these were sponsored by I think the MacArthur Foundation and some Haystack group and so there were several large badging projects that were launched and then as an add-on to those grants they also gave out research grants. So this was to do research on those badge systems. So now the results of that research is starting to come out and this project from Indiana University School of Education is called the Badge System Design Principles Documentation Project and what they did is they went through and looked at all of these badge systems that had been developed and launched and tried out and they tried to identify what were the principles that these systems were using to recognize learning, assess learning, motivate learning, and study learning. So recognizing learning one way of thinking about badges is thinking of them as micro-credentials so that's kind of what is meant by recognition or that's a part of it. Assessment, obviously there has to be some form of assessment to substantiate the claim of learning to provide the evidence of the learning. There usually is some element of motivation that the big reason why people want to try out badges is because of that promise of being able to offer more motivation to learners especially in a community context and having sort of shared goals and being engaged in a community. And then finally for studying learning, badges offer just another opportunity to look at does this improve learning or what kinds of things can we understand about learning through using badges. So I'm actually going to talk through because I think it's very useful that the actual principles are identified because these are concrete things that the badge systems were doing and you don't have to look at... to think that you have to use all of these principles but there's a lot of really good ideas for how to structure badge systems to accomplish these things. So let's just go ahead and get started with the recognizing learning. So before we go there I just want to say I see a couple of people are writing in now that Mike Barker has posted something about his own attempt at creating badges and he said something I think is interesting to create several badges that fit together. So you do want to... he said for example three puzzle pieces that fit together to create something larger and Natalie answered them. So when I was talking about three different types I was also... when I first started thinking about badges I was only thinking in terms of grades and I was thinking about my curriculum instead of... I started seeing other people who were adding on to the curriculum so I think Mike's point is well taken you can go in many different directions but you do want to see somehow how they fit together. So... and I also want to comment about... as Johnson up there she said she thought that digital badges meant to be given to people who are doing digital accomplishments No, not at all. It is true that that's a little ambiguous but they can be for anything that has to do with in our context of foreign language education so any kind of learning. Okay, so principles for recognizing learning with badges. Alright, so these are just a sampler of different strategies that people used in order to boost that recognition part of badges. So the first one is to use badges to map the learning trajectory. So this is kind of going back to the waypoints of recognizing steps along the way to a goal. It can really provide an illustration of pathways through learning for the learners. The second one is align badges to standards. This is going to give a learner greater recognition if it's linked to some type of standard that's accepted by the community. A lot of the K-12 badges are aligned to Common Core and a lot of other subjects but it's a matter of figuring out what are the standards that are relevant to this community and how should we align our badges to those standards. The third one is to have experts issue badges. So this is going to give the badge a greater weight if an expert is actually recognizing this accomplishment. So if we're giving out a professional development badge, it might be good to have a master teacher or somebody with a lot of expertise to actually be awarding that badge just that's going to give greater recognition to the learner. And you could build that right into your class. I think that's a great idea. Another one is to seek external backing of the credential. And that's going to give the badge an endorsement will make the badge worth more. So one thing that we've been doing is talking to professional organizations both Actful and also AATSP and AATF these language specific organizations because if they're endorsing a badge if they have that name recognition that's going to be better recognition for the learner. Recognize diverse learning with diverse learning. So this is something that badges can do that credentials really can't do. You can recognize the types of learning that don't fit. Maybe soft skills or these micro credentials maybe a piece of a credential. Badges can really be flexible and recognize lots of different types of learning. Use badges to show learning to others as an external communication. Of course this is a major piece of the whole reason that we want badges to exist and it's about having this audience for the badges and who is your audience and what are they going to be looking for when they look at your badges. Determining the appropriate lifespan of the badge so we need to decide is this going to be a temporary badge that somebody needs to renew after 5 years or do we want to really value the recognition going to be increased if we make it permanent and if we do make it permanent we have to think about where we're going to keep the evidence and make sure that everything stays up there. So that's a really important consideration when you're creating a badge system. Recognizing educator learning of course this is one use for a badge system one thing that I've heard from like high school teachers that I've talked to is this would be a really great way to show parents what my professional interests are as an educator so this is the kind of another way another form of recognition specifically for educators. And then finally awarding a formal academic credit for badges would obviously give them more value and we've looked at mapping our badges to CPE credits or looking at ways to kind of map between the systems. And I guess there's actually one more promote discovery so the idea behind this one is that you can build practices to help that badges can actually help learners find more opportunities so because you're posting these badges online others can see can recognize maybe an opportunity that they would like to pursue so that's that discovery of connections is another role that badges can play and again we're looking at this long list you don't have to do all of these things with your badge system you can just pick one or two how are you going to really take advantage of the potential to recognize learning. So assessing there's nothing really earth shattering or groundbreaking here many of you are familiar with a lot of these ideas of assessment we've talked about the idea of using leveled badge systems and designing your assessments around these things to help students to progress through the learning expert judgment you know if you have an evaluation if there's an evaluation piece you would want to bring in an evaluator and have that person do the that piece of the assessment aligning assessment to standards of course creating a measurable learning objective along with the badge is very important performance assessments these are going to be very common with language teachers when a learner has to perform a task or demonstrate a skill that's a way to approach assessment for badges e-portfolios this is a use for badges that I think is very popular at least we think it's very interesting because you've got the evidence there that's the perfect use of a badge that you could link them to the evidence formative feedback in assessment can be useful and then the next one mastery learning you know we talked about this last week how badges and sort of mastery learning or competency based learning really go well together promoting hard and soft skill sets attempting to I think I missed one here actually there was one here 8 sorry I left out a 8 which is rubrics which is an important one rubrics this is something I think that we're finding is really important especially just to be consistent with how you're awarding the badges and then promoting hard and soft skill sets again do you want to measure social practices as well as traditionally quantifiable skills badges let you do both but you have to figure out how are you going to assess those social practices and then finally involving students you can involve students in designing the assessments so that's another idea okay motivating some of the ways that bad system developers are motivating learning with badges first by providing privileges like perhaps $1,000 I was just thinking about that so what Austin Independent School District is doing is trying to motivate their teachers to go above and beyond going beyond expectations the second one recognizing identities so if you name the badge something you know maybe some type of identity that someone would aspire to like badge designer well I want to be a member of the community of badge designers so that's a way to motivate through identities community engagement again if you know you're awarding badges for interaction that could be very motivating to be working in a community with shared goals displaying badges to the public of course you know showing off there is an element there can be an element of motivation by displaying all the cool badges you've earned building outside value so that recognition and public value of your badges can be very motivating if they really are recognized one thing you can do is hook in learners with easy badges to kind of get them started and that can help with motivation setting goals you can allow learners to set their goals and badges can also help them visualize the goals that they've reached so that's another that can be very motivating using different types of assessment so the motivation level is going to you know differ with different types of assessment and so I think the suggestion here is just to maybe play around that you have different types of assessment for different activities and recognizing different outcomes so recognizing both performance based and effort based achievements and promoting collaboration recognizing collaborative achievements can be motivating and finally there's the whole competition angle and this kind of comes from games and leaderboards and point systems and all of that can be motivating as well so a lot of ideas there and then finally the next slide includes and you can just kind of pull those up I'm not going to talk through these but if you are interested in the outline principles for studying learning with badges and I would suggest checking out the badge system design principles website to learn more about that and if you put through the next there's actually they have a kind of cool they have a deck of cards that you can print out so with all of those items that I just ran through there's cards that they've created for each one of them and you can sort of mix and match the you can pick you know what is my badge system going to use for recognition what am I going to use for assessment what am I going to use for motivation because obviously we're not going to do everything that's a good point because all of those bullet points are nobody's going to be able to force all those bullet points into one course or to one badge that's not the idea so it's just giving you an overview yeah okay all right and I wanted to just to end by mentioning that we do have our open badges website if you want to learn more and there I would also encourage you if you're really into this idea of badges Mozilla has a community and it's open to everybody they're they're very open and you can actually join their calls they have a community call every Wednesday and they always have some interesting presentation some a lot of just really good case studies of people who have designed badge systems or who are using badges in some way so I would encourage anyone to get on that call and you know there's a real opportunity to learn and be on the cutting edge of something really I want to tie that into what Amy Pierce just has written here she says I can see collaborating with teachers of other content areas to promote reading and writing skills a consistent area of concern in my school for larger recognition I would say that like the Mozilla open badges community or it's helped me to get out of just foreign language education and look at other fields even fields that aren't related to languages such as the stem fields because at a certain level the principles that Rachel was talking about well let's be frank the stem fields are ahead of us in applying some of these badge principles and so at an abstract level we can see how they're working out at other disciplines and adopt the best practices and kind of tweak them for foreign languages so yeah I just encourage everybody to kind of click go to these sites and start reading about what other people are doing okay well we finished now where time goes quickly thanks very much for all of your great postings and your ideas and again we want to remind you that we're having a webinar on July 27th again it's open to anybody it'll be about designing and delivering online languages so thank you guys so much for your participation today we'll talk to you later I'm really looking forward to seeing your badge system so please keep us posted if you do anything even if you just do one badge we're really interested in knowing what people are doing and how it goes if it's successful or what you like to change or what support you need what would make it a lot easier for you to do this we should have some kind of webinar where we just say what did we do like again when Mike was sharing about his attempts we might do something like that so anyhow thank you guys very much for your attention and participation today bye bye