Becoming a Game Manager - Awarding and Posting Digital Badges

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Last week we discussed some recent research about why "gamifying" your classroom can engage learners who have otherwise turned off school. We also introduced you to OpenBadges.me, a free tool you can use to create digital badges for your students.

Adding elements of gaming to your class can be powerful, but it isn't easy, and creating digital badges for your students is just one step in the process. Probably the bigger, and more important, step is to actually create a system for rewarding your students with badges and providing them with opportunities to "level up." ClassBadges is a tool that can help make that process easier:

From the ClassBadges website: "ClassBadges is a free online tool where teachers can award badges to students for accomplishments or academic mastery. Through your teacher account, you can award badges customized for your classroom or school. Badges can easily be aligned to academic goals or associated with existing school awards."

Here is one of their examples on a Science badge and how you might use the badge in a lesson, posted by contributor, Jordan Aitkins:

Space Time TED Ed below.

ClassBadges is probably not a platform you'll want to use if you plan to add Gaming on a large scale (I'll have a couple of examples of those in the coming weeks), however, if you are looking to add some gaming elements to a single lesson, or offer your students something extra, ClassBadges could be just the tool you are looking for.

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Thanks to Jaime Stasiorowski for bringing ClassBadges to our attention!