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.