Friday, January 15, 2021

Remote Teaching and Digital Badges



Student engagement in virtual teaching can be challenging.  Having students interact with you with their cameras off or responding to a question in the meeting chat is not a normal.  For me, it is hard to adjust to this type of interaction and unfortunately, it is the new normal. 

During my robotics club, I wanted to encourage student engagement and spark conversations.  I wanted to see and hear my students.  So, I decided to take old concept of digital badges, and use them in my robotics club.  I explained to them how they would earn a digital badge and it  worked! The students turned on their cameras and unmuted themselves and even chatted with each other during club. I was so happy the digital badges sparked this type of engagement and conversations.

I created my own badges in Canva, downloaded them and added them into a Google Slide presentation.  I told the students to create a digital avatar of themselves and add it to the a slide.  Once they did that, I changed the Slides to view only, and started to add the badges.









You can also create a badge grid in Google Drawings. 

  • Set the page up for 9600 x 5400 pixels
  • Insert a table with the amount of rows and columns
  • Insert each badge into a cell in the table
  • Download the grid as an image
Use Jamboard
  • Create a new Jam and share it with your students as view only
  • Change the background image to the badge grid
  • Duplicate the frames
  • Add a shape to cover the badge
  • Add a label to describe the badge
  • When the student earns the badge, delete the label and text box to reveal it.
 

Here is a sample Jamboard of Badged Up.

Enjoy!



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