As part of our Digital Leaders programme, we are starting to explore the use of Open Badges to recognise / reward students' achievements.


What are Open Badges?

Open Badges is a new digital reward system which allows students to verify their skills, interests and achievements and store them all in one place.  The badges are awarded by completing a series of tasks or meeting a set of criteria for which students must supply evidence.

What makes these different to other online reward systems is that all the evidence such as, criteria, name of issuer, date of issue, student’s evidence and standards for each achievement are stored or ’baked‘ inside each badge in the form of metadata. To find out more about Open Badges, visit my blog post: Give recognition for your student's achievement - Award them Open Badges


Making waves with Digital Leaders and Open Badges

One model which we have started to use and demonstrates how Open Badges can successfully be used to recognise and reward student achievement is Makewaves. Makewaves (https://www.makewav.es/) is a safe social learning platform for 5-19 year olds (ideal for students and teachers). Makewaves fully integrates with Open Badges allowing teachers to make and award badges to their students. Students under the age of 13 can earn badges through Makewaves and convert them to Open Badges when they are old enough. Badges are currently available from a number of organisations including Computing At School, Rising Stars, Comic Relief and the National Literacy Trust.

Chris Sharples (@gr8ict), Head of ICT at Lady Lumley's School has created a set of badges especially for Digital Leaders called DLOpenBadges. For those new to the concept, Digital Leaders are students who are adept at using technology and are willing to share their knowledge and skills with others. Through working with staff, peers and school leaders, Digital Leaders are able to help shape how technology is used in and outside of the classroom. Chris has also kindly created a network to allow Digital Leaders from different schools to share best practice and celebrate their achievements. To find out more, visit the Makewaves dedicated Digital Leaders network: https://www.makewav.es/digitalleaders or Chris Sharples official Digital Leaders blog: http://www.gr8ict.com/

It gives me great pride to announce that 3 of our Digital Leaders have been invited to take part in a debate with leaders from industry / government on the topic of education technology at Bett 2015.

Bett is the world's leading technology event that brings together innovation and inspiration to the education sector. The event attracts 35,000+ professionals within the industry and has been celebrated for over 30 years. The theme of Bett 2015 is inspired by and built around Thomas Jefferson’s quote “Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity”.


Students’ Debate – What is it that we want from edtech?

During the debate, students will be exploring: 

• What do students actually want from edtech?
• What does edtech signify regarding enhancing personalised learning, support and feedback and lifelong learning?

Student will also be live voting and reacting to audience pre-dispositions about what educators and industry think they want.

If you want to find out more about Digital Leaders or any of the topics covered in this blog, myself and a team of Digital Leaders from my school will be available to answer questions in the main Arena at Bett on Friday 23 rd Jan (11.15 - 12.00). Please feel free to come down and chat. Myself and my team of Digital Leaders will be happy to answer any questions. Alternatively, you can find out more by following the hashtag #dlchat on twitter every Thursday evening (9 pm GMT).