Tech Tips Newsletter - Digital Badges for Teaching and Training

Editor: Karen Franker
In this Section

Uses of Digital Badges for Teaching and Training

Explore the latest uses of digital badges to assess and support learning, increase motivation, and offer skills credentialing to learners of all ages.

Digital Badges Would Represent Students’ Skill Acquisitions 
Katie Ash examines the arguments for and against the use of badges to provide a more granular view of K-12 students’ accomplishments.

How Badges Really Work in Higher Education 
David Raths explores how and why higher ed institutions are implementing digital badges, including key questions that administrators should ask about alternative credentialing.

The Potential and Value of Using Digital Badges for Adult Learners 
Jonathan Finkelstein, Erin Knight, and Susan Manning's report, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), explores the potential and opportunities for developing and implementing a system of digital badges for adult learners as a form of recognition of an individual’s knowledge and skills.

Design Principles for Motivating Learning with Digital Badges 
Katerina Schenke and others provide eleven key principles for ensuring that badge design successfully motivates learners including: evolving requirements, competition, and identity recognition.

Open Badges: Portable Credentials for Learning 
Bill Brandon explains how Mozilla Open Badges differ from digital badges in providing structured credentialing systems to document learning.

Design Principles for Assessing Learning with Digital Badges 
Rebecca Itow and Daniel Hickey describe their top ten principles for effectively using badges to assess learning including: leveling systems, mastery learning, and rubrics.

7 Things You Should Know About….Badges (PDF) 
The Educause staff provides an overview of the significance of digital badges in documenting learners’ achievements, and focuses on the challenges and teaching/learning implications of using badges in higher education.

Digital Badges: An Annotated Research Bibliography 
Sheryl Grant and Kristan E. Shawgo have created this comprehensive annotated bibliography on digital badges. As this is a collaborative work in progress, the authors invite others to share their favorite resources.

Tech Tip: Top Sticky Note Apps for Student Collaboration - Video

Tony Vincent compares the features of Padlet http://padlet.com (formerly Wallwisher) and Lino http://en.linoit.com/ . The video shows how both digital tools facilitate student sharing of photos, videos, and ideas on virtual walls-- all without requiring students to have email addresses, log-ins, or passwords.