I’ve had time to think about badges and their impact to teaching and learning. This session helped to solidify to me why incorporating badges could help to fill a need in providing feedback and meaning for tasks that are not currently being assessed.

To start the session, Kyle Peck talked about how badges could potentially replace grades and transcripts. To me, this is way down the road. We first need to start small and allow for a testing and development of a program of badges to exist before we could replace a huge system like this. Applying Johansson’s approach, we could start with staff and professional development. Using Mozilla Open Badges may be a good start that then leads to a more involved system as we learn from our successes and failures.

I was interested in a statement by Ken Layng. He said that badges may be a way for students to create their own paths of learning. Currently, there are many lock-step programs. If students could accumulate badges based upon their interests, maybe they could forge their own learning path.

I also liked the thought presented by Kyle that maybe badges would help us better run the srdp process. It would be so nice if the professional development that we currently do would be captured and automatically populate our reviews, instead of us having to frame all of our professional development from our own perspective.