Badges using Flippity
In order to help my course become gamified, I have added digital badging as a way to assess and track student growth. Badging is a part of our modern world in all parts of our lives. Many track their health by earning badges using a step tracker, or for checking into the gym so many times a week or for drinking enough water in a day. Professional development in many careers uses badges to track growth or experience. Digital badges are a great visual way to demonstrate that an accomplishment has been reached.
In my classroom I use digital badges in place of grades. The badges track student effort given to an assignment and their learning in my class. The badges are earned for both easy and difficult tasks. My students enjoy seeing and sharing the badges they earn in computer science. I believe for some students they hold more weight than grades for them.
There are plenty of applications available for you to use to create and share digital badges with your students. At the elementary level Class Dojo is a great option for tracking student behavior. For middle and high school students ClassCraft is a semi-free option. If you would like to create your own as I have for my students I use Flippity. Flippity is a teacher-made website that uses Google Sheets as templates for building quick web-based tools for the classroom.
The Flippity Badge Tracker is an awesome template that is easy to work with and the directions that Flippity provides make it simple to implement in your classroom today.
Below is a sketchnote I made for a presentation with links to various resources:
