Rolling Out Our Professional Learning Badges

Well, we did it! We pushed out our new WISD Professional Learning Badges program. It wasn't quite ready, but we pushed it out anyway. Recently, at EdShift 2016, a presenter talked about how companies push out products that might not quite be perfect and allowed their consumers to help them make it better. We felt like our badge program could work like that and it did! Teachers immediately let us know which links weren't working, what badges they wanted added, and suggestions for making the site easier to navigate. You can read about the beginning of our professional learning badges program HERE.

Our site first looked like this:

We thought it looked good, until we saw other sites. Other sites were more polished, more professional looking. Thankfully, I was able to connect with several people at TCEA who helped me improve our site! First, I went to a session by Michelle Phillips of Prosper ISD. She helped me see that a team of ONE can actually create and manage a professional learning badge site. Her site, EdTech in Action covers her process very clearly and has great suggestions for being successful. In addition, I talked with Dr. Roland Rios of Ft. Sam Houston ISD, who gave me access to his entire badging site. What a help that was, as I worked to make our site better! Here is what our site looked like AFTER TCEA:

Thanks to conversations and help from Brandi Rosales, I was able to clean it up and make it look better! And thanks to Google, I was even able to manipulate the HTML code to delete the borders on the table. I just "Googled" it! It has also been great to bounce ideas off of others, such as Sara Romine, a member of my Twitter PLN, who has created a digital badge system for her campus. I am always so appreciative of all who are willing to help! 

I probably should have taken the advice about rolling the program out to just a campus or two, but we decided to roll it out to the whole district. It was first shared  on our monthly Future Ready Focus. Luckily, not everyone reads it, so badge request submissions were slow at first. After I got back from TCEA and sent the information out again, the badge requests started coming in quickly! After a couple of days, almost 70 badges had been requested! In addition, several new badges had been suggested, and the site had been tweaked  a bit more! 

With badge requests coming in, a badge holder had to be created, as well as a plan of how to print & distribute badges. After a vote in the office, this was our chosen badge holder:

Badges were then printed on 1.5 x 1.5 in stickers (Avery 22805), which could them be placed on the laminated poster. We printed and laminated 100 posters and then printed sheets of all of the stickers. Our whole department jumped in to help, which was greatly appreciated! I then went through the different spread sheets and organized badge holders & badge stickers for all who had requested them. 

Today we started distributing badges to the different campuses. It was a lot of fun to see everyone excited about receiving their badges! Here are just a few pictures from the day!

More badge requests are coming in, more badges need to be delivered, and more badges need to be created and added. There are certainly improvements that can be made, but we are excited about where we are headed and look forward to growing our badge program, maybe moving to a digital badge program in the future.

* Something I would recommend, that was recommended to me (that I DIDN'T do) is to create the forms so that they populate just ONE spreadsheet. We will make this change soon, as keeping up with 6 different spreadsheets is a little much. AutoCrat will also make some of this easier, so I hope to become more proficient in that soon.

For more help with creating badging systems, check out Kasey Bell's post on Badges in Professional Learning on her Shake Up Learning website.

TCEA 16 Takeaways

I just returned home from a week FULL of learning, connecting, sharing & growing at TCEA in Austin. The connections I made, both new and old, made the week a great experience! 

My focus for the week was on learning more about creating personalized professional learning opportunities for our teachers and supporting a 1:1 initiative. Google tools and tips are always on my radar, so I planned to work that in also! Thankfully, my TLBFF, Tina Berumen, created a collaborative Google Doc for session notes, so that we could all share & learn! 

The Google Academy was a great day of learning all things Google! From the Keynote Panel to all of the breakout sessions, I learned so much. The session on Google sites by Christy Fennewald gave me helpful information on how to make my WISD Professional Badges site better. I was cautioned to not have too many tabs, and to work on eliminating drop-downs. 

By Tuesday, we had about 35 people from WISD at TCEA to learn! One of our assistant principals, Leslie Ackmann, had create a Google+ Community for all of us to share our notes and presentation information. We also established a district hashtag for TCEA, #WISDtcea16, which enabled us to share learning quickly. It was awesome to see the excitement as they went from session to session, tweeted & posted! We even had one campus, our Ninth Grade Center, that would meet each evening to debrief.  The best part- the teachers organized this! 

As I was gathering information on badging for professional learning, I met so many helpful people! It is so funny how things will transpire, but I mentioned to my friend, Michelle Cooper about the badge system. She introduced me to Scott Floyd who had created a system for White Oak ISD, who introduced me to Dr. Roland Rios, from Fort Sam Houston ISD. Scott also told me that I need to meet Kelly Fitzgerald. What is amazing is how each of these people spent time and shared resources with me, someone they had just met, to help me create a successful badging system for our teachers. Coincidentally, Kasey Bell of ShakeUpLearning also updated a blog post on Badging, which was sent to me no less than four times! Guess what I am working on this weekend?!

I was also reminded that some of the best learning happens outside sessions, in hallways, at tables at the back of the exhibit hall, at dinner, anywhere you are able to have conversations with others. I'm so appreciative of the time Brandi Rosales took to help me with features for the badge site! We truly have some AMAZING people in education in North Texas!!

There were no shortage of sessions offered for 1:1 rollouts, initiatives, PD and support! A couple of the best were Chad Jones from Lamar CISD who went step by step on how to rollout devices or programs. It was so thorough, from starting with the end result and working backwards, to developing a detailed planning document to make sure all stakeholders are involved and informed. Their instructional technology website, iCafe, is amazing and helps teachers find the help they need at any time of day! 

Another great session was by Temple ISD's Instructional Technology team, Jessica Mays & Jacki Wright. What I liked best about this session is they shared how they worked through issues they had when implementing 1:1 at their high school. It is always helpful when people share their failures, along with their successes! Our high school will soon have a student tech team, so it was great to hear about their TechCats & how they work with teachers & students, along side the instructional technology specialists!

Other cool things that happened:
I presented with two out of my three #TLBFFs, Nancy Jo Lambert & Tina Berumen! We presented on Knocking Down Your Library Walls during the Librarian Academy. 

I met Eric Sheninger, author of Digital Leadership and Uncommon Learning. I have recently read both of his books, so it was nice to be able to meet him in person. Hopefully we can get him to our district soon! And that is Matt Arend photo-bombing! He is an elementary principal in Plano and doing great things in education! I've followed his journey on Twitter and enjoy reading his blog.

Being able to see the excitement & engagement of our teachers was awesome! We had two teachers present on Knocking Down the Walls in Your Classroom. Amanda Rogers & Jacqueline Rose connect their students as a normal part of their classroom environment. They even had students join in the presentation! 

And I found two of our teachers, Jessi Medlin & Shelly Stout, being interviewed in the TCEA Radio booth! I know they will be taking their new learning back to their classrooms, teams & campus!



It was a great week and there were many more connections that happened that inspired me to keep learning & growing! I finally was able to meet Jess Malloy & Ryan Steele, who have created an amazing learning commons on their campus! My #oneword for 2016 is ACTION, so I will be immediately putting into action my new learning about badging systems for professional learning. 


** To grow your #PLN on Twitter, be sure to click on names. They are all linked to the individual Twitter accounts**