Issue Badges with ForAllRubrics to the Chicago City of Learning

February 26, 2015December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey

As a part of the Hive Interoperability and Portability Coalition (HIPC), ForAllRubrics has been working along with Iridescent, Chicago City of Learning, Youtopia, Chicago Architecture Foundation and Chicago Hive to improve the interoperability between learning platforms. Last week we completed one of goals in the HIPC project by making it possible for organizations to issue badges to the Chicago City of Learning using the ForAllRubrics Badging Platform (which includes the ForAllBadges Mobile App available on AppStore, Google Play and the Firefox Marketplace).

This blog post will walk through how the Chicago Architecture Foundation can now issue badges from ForAllRubrics to the Chicago City of Learning.

Now that the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has given permission on the Chicago City of Learning for ForAllRubrics to access their account, CAF users can access their Chicago City of Learning Badges on ForAllRubrics.

CAF users can issue badges on ForAllRubrics to learners participating in their programs.

Learners can connect their ForAllRubrics account to their Chicago City of Learning account.

And the badges issued via ForAllRubrics are available on the Chicago City of Learning!

HIPC Update: Open Sharing of Learning Opportunities

January 12, 2015December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey

ForAllRubrics is proud to be a member of the Hive Interoperability and Portability Coalition (HIPC). This blog post describes the HIPC team’s plans for a pilot system that supports “Open Sharing of Learning Opportunities”. In our project description, this is Item 3, Distributed Discovery & Recommendation of Learning Opportunities.

The Problem

1. As an organization, it is hard to publicize learning opportunities.

2. As a learner, it is difficult to find relevant learning opportunities.

Our Solution

We are creating a pilot implementation that leverages RSS and open source software to experiment with a model implementation for Open Sharing of Learning Opportunities. For this pilot, we are collaborating with the Community STEM Badge Ecosystem and the Ultimate Hub Moonshot.

ForAllRubrics is going to host WordPress sites for organizations that want to publish information about learning opportunities. The learning opportunities will be shared as blog posts with event metadata to support discovery and recommendation.

Learning Opportunties will include:

Programs by organizations such as the Notebaert Nature Museum
Events such as Destination Chicago
Online learning activities such as those at Curiosity Machine

Recommendation and publication of learning opportunities will be done on various platforms including WordPress and Tiki-Toki. The recommendations will be filtered and presented as appropriate for the target learners. The HIPC, C-STEMBE and Ultimate Hub teams will be working together to create effective pilot examples. These examples will help identify what is working and what steps we should take next.

ForAllRubrics: an Integrated Rubric & Badging Platform

July 10, 2014December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey / 1 Comment

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We are releasing a major update to ForAllRubrics this Sunday, July 13th. This update will combine all of the capabilities of the current versions of both ForAllRubrics and ForAllBadges into one integrated Rubric & Badging platform. ForAllBadges will no longer exist as a separate product. Below is the overview of the integration.

We now support competency-based assessment with a choice of 3 types of scoring: Rubric, Checklist or Basic Badge.

No matter what form of scoring you choose, all assessment data collected can be viewed as an open digital badge.

While designing your assessments, you can choose to see an overview of all your assessments by viewing the badge images.

Or you can choose to view and manage the details of your assessments in list view.

While viewing your class, you can choose to see an overview of how your students are making progress towards reaching competency on all assessments.

Or you can choose to focus on one assessment, view details of each student’s performance and manage communication with students and their parents.

When a badge is issued, it signifies that a student has achieved competency according to the criteria described in the badge definition.

When a list is scored, each checked item signifies that the student has reached competency for that item. When all items are checked, the student has achieved competency and the corresponding badge is issued to the student.

When a rubric is scored, each score that is in a “green” rating signifies that the student has reached competency for that item. When all items are scored with “green” ratings, the student has achieved competency and the corresponding badge is issued to the student.

When students login, no matter what scoring method you have chosen, they first see a badge view that shows them their progress toward reaching competency. They can click on their badge to see the scoring details.

We hope you’re as excited about this new version of ForAllRubrics as we are! There are lots of other new features as well and we will be following up with more information on the details.

Badging the C-STEMBE Maker Party

May 12, 2014December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey / Leave a comment

On Saturday, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Level Up, the Adler Planetarium and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum used an early version of our Maker Party Web App to issue C-STEMBE Maker Party badges at the absolutely amazing event Destination: Chicago.

Here are some stats as of a day or so after the Maker Party. About 50 participants earned badges at the event and approximately 100 badges were issued. So far around 15 participants have registered their access codes to retrieve their badges.

In this post, we are going to share:

our initial goals
our plans for how to achieve those goals
our experience and what we learned
our future plans and next steps

Our goals going into the event were:

Badging should be easy. The Maker Party is a busy and exciting event, so the actual issuing of badges needs to be quick and easy.
Badging shouldn’t require internet access. Internet access seems to always fail at the least convenient time, so we don’t want to rely on it.
Badging should engage learners. Learners should be actively involved in the badging process and not just badge recipients.
Privacy should be respected. Badge issuers and earners should be able to participate without being required to provide their email address or other identifying information.
Badge earners should own their badges. Earners should be able to retrieve and save their badges, including all evidence and criteria. Earners should also be able to share their badges with the Mozilla Open Backpack.
Badges should highlight achievements at the event. Badges should include evidence of the learning that happens at the event, so that learners can reflect on what they accomplished and also share their achievements with others.
We should learn a lot. This is an opportunity to learn about badging at an event and for us to figure out ways to improve how well our Maker Party Web App supports learners at a Maker Party.

Our plan for how to achieve all this was:

We will give out cards with unique anonymous access codes for each participant. Below is design of the cards we’re going to give out. We are keeping the cards small (the size of a business card), to make it easy to carry the card in a pocket and also to force us to keep our instructions simple.

MakerParty_Front_v2

Two types of badges will be issued: Maker Party Badges and Evidence Badges. Everyone who registers their access code will receive the C-STEMBE Maker Party badge. All participants can also earn and issue evidence badges. The evidence badges will be referenced as evidence for the C-STEMBE Maker Party badge.

Issue badges via a mobile web app. We are adapting the current ForAllBadges mobile web app to create the C-STEMBE Maker Party app. The images below are designs for the Maker Party app. All a participant needs to earn a badge, is a card with an access code. They don’t need to access the app.The first time a participant accesses the app, they will need to register their access code and set a password for their account. If they choose to register their email address or telephone number, they will receive a notification that they have earned Maker Party badges by email or sms.

Participants will be able to view badges they have received and also issue badges. They can email open badges (baked with the badge meta-data) to the email address of their choosing. If they tap on an earned badge, they can view the details of the badge and push the badge to their open backpack.

3_MyBadges 5_AwardDetails

To issue a badge, the earners’ access codes are entered in the comments box. Participants do not need internet access to issue badges.

This web app will run on pretty much any device and automatically adapts to the screen size (desktop computer, laptop computer, tablet, handheld or smart phone).

Our experience and what we learned:

The Maker Party was amazing! The experience was so much better than I could have anticipated. My 8 and 9 y.o. daughters came along and they LOVED everything. The high quality of the activities and the enthusiasm of the folks from all the various organizations was inspirational. I don’t know how the organizers from Chicago Hive and Chicago City of Learning had so much energy or managed to make everything go so smoothly.
The badging was really easy if you had a smart phone with wireless access. If you were offline or on an ipad, the badging experience was still good. If you were trying to use a connection that was slow or unpredictable, things didn’t work all that well.
It wasn’t practical to have learners issue badges at this event. It was nice that people who were issuing badges could also have badges issued to them.
The access codes and the cards worked out really well. Everyone seemed to understand how they worked right away. Having everyone write “their mark” to identify their card was really helpful.
As people came by our table, we told them, “bring cool stuff you make back here and we’ll take a picture and issue you a badge.” Kids and parents were both excited about it. The kids also seemed to appreciate the opportunity to tell us about what they made and show it to us. It seems like having a table like this is a nice addition to the Maker Party, especially since the activity tables can get really busy and also doing badging can get challenging.
Right now participants can email their baked badges to themselves and upload them to the Mozilla Open Backpack. The basic idea of emailing baked badges to participants seems good, but there are still some technical details to work out in order to have this work smoothly with the current standards. Luckily there is an Open Badges Tech Panel on Wednesday about evidence. I’m going to write a separate blog post on badge baking and evidence and hopefully get more feedback then.
The Maker Party was an amazing learning experience and we’re looking forward to participating in one again!

Our future plans and next steps:

We are already starting on our next blog post on Baked Badges and Evidence. We’re looking forward to the Open Badges Tech Panel in a couple of days and collaborating with others in the badging community.
We have a list of improvements that we are going to make to the Maker Party App. The next version will be awesome.
We are going to release the code to our Maker Party App as open source on GitHub. Right now the app relies on using ForAllBadges as the backend and all communication is done via a simple API. Others should be able to either tinker with our code and connect with the FAB backend or use the app with their own website.

If you’ve read this far in the post, you deserve a badge! Please do share your thoughts with us. We appreciate the feedback.

Why are Badges for School-Age Learners Different?

October 17, 2013December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey

I just finished watching the video of the fantastic second live session for the MOOC Learning Beyond Letter Grades. The panelists Sheryl Grant, Jonathan Finkelstein and Sunny Lee present an excellent introduction to Open Badges and the reasons that we at Forall Systems are so enthusiastic about the Open Badge movement. The panel got me thinking about some of the ways that badges are different for school-age learners.

For most learners, the main focus of Open Badges is to “Get recognition for skills you learn anywhere.” Inherent in the idea of getting recognition is the assumption that badges can open up opportunities and the viewer/evaluator of a badge will be a potential employer, a university or colleagues. In developing ForAllBadges, we have been interested in thinking about badges for kids as a tool for supporting learning. In a perfect world, learning opportunities are not a limited resource and children don’t have to compete for access.

During the live session, I jotted down some of the ways that thinking about badges as a tool for learning changes how badges are designed, issued and displayed.

The most important evaluator of badges for learning is the learner themselves. Badges can provide the framework for learners to reflect on their learning experiences and plan for future learning activities. Teachers and parents can use the badges to help support learning, but ideally the learner takes ownership of their own learning process.
Authentic assessment and the evidence associated with the badge is often more important than the badge itself. A video of a science fair presentation or an essay often has more value than the badge or evaluation rubric associated with it.
Badges for learning are inherently lifelong. For a seven year old, their third place finish in the 2nd grade science fair at their elementary school is an accomplishment to be proud of. Ten years later, when they’re applying to university, the badge itself isn’t worth much. However the evidence associated with the badge provides an opportunity for the young adult, in writing their application essay, to reflect on their lifelong interest in ecology and include a quote or video from their 7 year old self. In many ways, these authentic assessments become more valuable as life goes on.
Badges can provide the structure for effectively reflecting on progress. Fundamental skills are often a lifelong pursuit. For example, writing well is something that all of us can always improve on. By presenting a timeline view of badges that are aligned with the Common Core Anchor Standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.1, learners can reflect on their progress over time in learning to write strong arguments. The badge and the standards alignment provide the structure to display the authentic writing samples in a meaningful way.
Badges can provide the structure for discovering learning opportunities. A badge displayer such as Badgopolis can provide a view of learning opportunities that relate to the learners previous interests and also present information about how to access those opportunities.

Of course this approach of designing badges for learning is not only applicable to school-aged learners and is a perspective that can also be valuable in other circumstances. If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading my thoughts! Please share your you ideas too. This is a fascinating topic and is only just starting to be explored.

21st Century Badge Pathways

October 6, 2013December 13, 2016 / Karen Jeffrey

The website for the 21st Century Badge Pathways project is up! The project will be officially announced in November at the Association of California School Administrators Leadership Summit. At that time, 21st Century Badge Pathways will also be available as an open source project. We’re looking forward to sharing the outstanding work Corona-Norco USD has done in designing Passport to Success: College and Career Readiness.

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