Digital Badges in the Wild
As mentioned in my previous blog, I spent the week at a professional development convention called AVID Summer Institute. This conference is about college and career readiness and provides educators with the tools needed to guide students shoolwide and students in the AVID elective calss. AVID students receive intentional support and mentoring in three major areas that help them become confident individuals who can successfully navigate life and careers: Student Agency (SA), Rigorous Academic Preparedness (AP), and Opportunity Knowledge (OK).
This year AVID deployed the use of Digital Bages for students.
AVID recognizes that today’s digital landscape allows students to showcase the learning they’ve acquired through digital badges. Students in 9th to 12th grade can earn a Digital Badge by meeting the criteria listed within the AVID Curriculum resources. The AVID Professional Learning Modules states:
"For students who have previous experience with AVID, the 9th grade lessons will serve as an opportunity for refinement of AVID skills and application in the high school context. For students new to AVID, the 9th grade progression will expose them to all components of AVID. This is the first in a series of high school badges for AVID Elective students."
Although the quote is only in regards to 9th grade students, the opportunity to earn Digital Badges is open to all high school levels. I am a middle school teacher of the AVID elective, so I won't have the opportunity to deploy this in my classroom yet. However, AVID says more digital badges are in the works.
Do you think these digital badges for students bring forth more value to their college applicatiosn versus a transcript?
Avid is such a great program when run correctly. I have unfortunately been at a school where it was just used as a dumping group elective. I don't think digital badges will motivate all students, but I do think some kids will get super into it and try to collect them all. It really taps into their video game completion mode, something I talked about on my blog the other week. I am working on trying to find a way to implement badges into my middles school math classroom next year.
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