Badges

When I was planning out my blended learning classroom, I really wanted to make sure that students were being held accountable and were being recognized for their work.  After hearing quite a lot about gamification and badges, I wanted to incorporate this into my new classroom management system.  While this could work in certain classroom situations, for me it ended up being a failure and was completely abandoned by third trimester.  I’m not opposed to trying badges again sometime in the future, but my initial attempt did not work in my situation.

In terms of badge management, I incorporated the badge tracking system into each student’s progress monitoring document.  I used reference documents from Alice Keeler’s Teacher Tech website including Gamify your PD and Creating Badges with Google Sheets.  My plan was to have the secret codes in the same way that she did so that the students would enter in the code and would be able to see their new badge.  I was able to get all of the technical aspects set up but I ran into the biggest problem of not knowing what to create badges for.  I had a list of ideas, but my problem stemmed from remembering when to give students badges and on having them follow through and actually add the badges if they earned them.

I also planned to divide up the badges into Skill Badges and Achievement Badges.  The skill badges were supposed to be a way for students to prove that they understood how to use something in the room (i.e. scissors, the makerspace bins, the hot glue guns, etc), which would help me keep track of the students who were able to use those tools.  My plan was to create instructional videos about proper usage and then have students take a short quiz to prove their understanding of the rules.  Sample Quiz: goo.gl/2f2qTS  Unfortunately, life got in the way and I never actually made the videos.  I really think the videos should actually have been student-made so that may be a project for another year.  Students took the quizzes and were able to figure out the answers on their own so I rewarded those students with the badges they had earned.  As we began our engineering projects, most of the students at some point needed to use scissors or some other tool and I didn’t have a fast enough way to keep track of who had which badge to police who was using scissors and who couldn’t yet.

For the achievement badges, I really wanted to be able to recognize students who revised their work or students who put forth extra effort, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to put forth the effort to remember to recognize them.  The only badge I issued consistently was for students who completed all of their reflection journals in each month.  This was a motivating method to get students to complete their journals at first, although as expected the same students tended to forget repeatedly while others never missed any.  I also had a badge for students who caught my mistakes and had a few boys who tried to nitpick everything I did to earn that badge more than once.  Part of the problem was that for the most part, students didn’t know what badges they could earn so they weren’t able to adjust their behavior to strive for a specific badge.

Second trimester I adjusted the badging system so that I had total control over it.  The badge list was still linked to their Progress Monitoring document, but they could see the badges that I added rather than adding them on their own.  This streamlined the process quite a bit but decreased student involvement in the process.   Then the question became what could they do with their badges and what was the point of the badges.  When I didn’t have a good answer to either of their questions, I ended up deciding that this was indeed a failed experiment and elected not to continue them for the 3rd trimester.

I like the concept of badges and having goals to work for.  Khan Academy is an excellent example of clear badges that work well as motivators.  I also prefer to instill the intrinsic motivation rather than the “What do I get?” attitude.  If I were to launch this again, I would definitely need a much clearer list of badges and tasks that students needed to complete in order to earn a badge. I also might have to find some way to delegate or automate the system so that the students are in control but don’t need to rely on me to tell them various passwords to get their badges.  I’m glad I gave this a valiant effort but it’s going to take a bit more work and thought before this will be a functional part of my classroom management.