With school districts keeping a close eye on funding, are our teachers getting professional development that fits their needs? Are our students able to get a deeper understanding of skills and content? Receiving badges through micro credentialing could be a way to develop our teachers and students toward life-long learning.
Earning badges is not a new idea. Boy scouts and girl scouts have been earning them for years. However, it is a new idea in our school systems for both teachers and students.
Earning badges
Th badge is record of an achievement and work of the person. The digital accomplishments are visible to employers, teachers, and communities. Learners have a method of receiving the educational development needed to enhance their knowledge of a particular subject. For students, it is a method of broadening knowledge and understanding of the content that is studied in class. It is a method to build life-long learning through technology and to strengthen the learning experiences.
How Badges Help
Daniel Hickey lists four functions of badges:
• They represent credentials.
• They assess learning as either summative and/or formative.
• Badges motivate students to extend their learning.
• They have the potential for evaluating students, teachers, schools, and programs.
Today, students and teaches are earning digital badges. They are learning on-line about various subjects. Digital badges are earned for a variety of reasons and in various places that include after-school programs, summer workshops, classrooms, and colleges.
Arguments Against
Many educators question the merits of earning badges because the concepts are relatively new and not fully developed in or out of the classroom.
Others argue that introducing digital badges in the classroom could bring too much structure in a place where students seek sanctuary from formal instruction. However, we need to meet the needs of the 21st century student and digital learning is the place to start. Earning badges develops self-learning.
Why Schools Should
Schools must develop and implement high quality learning for both teachers and students. Technology is a tool that is used for enriching skills and content.
Research on the trends of the digital environment reports several findings: students adapt technology to their own individual needs and they share and discuss the personalized learning. It also provides students and teachers an element of control over time, place, pace, and path as to what they need or want to learn.
Digital learning engages learners as scientists, writers, producers, inventors, collaborators and problem solvers. Today, great teachers and great schools find ways to foster deep learning. They provide opportunities to advance readiness that links digital learning to a fuller, broader level of understanding. Schools using digital badges find students have a sense of autonomy, a variety of assessments as a result of the work, more feedback on the variety of subjects, and a continued effort for students to show mastery.
