#30GoalsEDU - Design a Badge

Badges are an effective and appealing way to acknowledge somebody’s work, accomplishment or positive behaviour. So far I’ve used only edmodo as a resource to create and award digital badges to my students. Besides the ready-made badges offered on the edmodo platform, you can make your personalized ones following the detailed instructions offered by the edmodo support service.

This year I’ve come across several additional free online tools which help you create some really awesome online badges. 

My first favourite badge maker is http://www.onlinebadgemaker.com/, which does not even require an account. This makes it easy for my students to create their own badge, ribbon or heart and then download it on their laptop. One more interesting site which can help you generate attractive badges is http://www.typographyeditor.com/. You do not have to register for this tool, as well. One more badge creator site which does not require registration is https://www.makebadg.es/. Once you make your badge you can download it on your device or share it on twitter or facebook.

The next three tools demand the user to sign up for a free account. As a result, I personally use them to receive my professional development badges. I also use them to design my own badges and give them to my students for some sort of accomplishment. So, my third favourite badge creator is https://credly.com/. My fourth favourite badge maker is https://backpack.openbadges.org/backpack/login. Last but not least, Google Drawings is a handy tool which offers plenty of opportunities for increased creativity.

Below are some of the badges and some ribbons I have created and intend to award to my students for various types of accomplishments during the next school year.

Infographics

Piktochart is a cool infographic tool. I am using the free version which offers lots of free stuff to create and display your content in a professional looking way!  

You get the embed code by clicking on PUBLISH (not SHARE). Below is a pictochart  I created during my participation in Professional Practices for English Language Teaching online course.

My social graph for #etwion [Networked Teachers]

Coggle  is a mindmapping tool which helps you share complex information. I am using the free version which is quite satisfactory. It offers 1 private diagram, unlimited public diagrams, real-time collaboration, unlimited image uploads, full change history, pdf and image download, export and import as .mm and text functions, comments and chat and embedded code for your website

The coggle below displays  my engagement in various types of social media I have joined.

Collaboration tools I have curated on Listly

Collaborative Digital Tools

View more lists from Anthippi Harou

My learning diary on the PBL course

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Resilience Poster created on canva

My #NotatISTE16 experience

My name is Anthippi Harou and I am an EFL teacher in Greece. 

ISTE is considered to be the largest teacher-based, nonprofit organization in the field of educational technology. Every year there is a conference organized by ISTE in various parts of America; this year it was held in Denver from June 26th to 29th. For people who cannot join this great annual event live, there is a special community created called NotatISTE.

So this was the first time I'd ever participated in a NotatISTE community using the hashtag #NotatISTE16. Unfortunately, I was not as active as I would like to have been due to an online course on PBL by the European Teacher Academy I had already started. 

I had learned about #ISTE and #NotatISTE through a blog post by Shelly Sanchez Terrell, who has been one of the most significant and inspiring persons in my PLN.

A positive feature I can recall about my virtual participation is the #NotatISTE16 Google Community which I had joined. I felt glad I met Peggy George in the community because she had also been one of my inspirators and I considered her a familiar person. She offered great support by notifying, reminding and praising #Not atISTE16 educators on their work. She also updated the community LIVEBINDERS, a web tool that she really loves - maybe for the practicality it provides educators with to share bulky and valuable resources.

As soon as I entered the community, I read a pinned informative google doc post by the community moderator Jennifer Wagner. I got a first idea of what participants should do. I fell in love with the challenges we were encouraged to join. The whole idea of the challenge concept was so engaging and motivating providing a gamification element! For each challenge you accomplished, you filled the relevant points in a shared google doc we were provided with. Some of the challenges I completed included writing a post 'about me' in the G+ community, contributing to the Badge Share Google Presentation (mine is currently slide 35), creating an extra ribbon for #NoatISTE. By the way, I liked the great variety of ribbon gifs offered to us in order to use and enhance our creativity. Another challenge was to post a selfie with a monument of your area. For this one, I created a blended image with a photo of myself and one of the Acropolis using LUNAPIC. I watched some periscope live sessions and joined the #NotatISTE  remind class group. I also engaged in lots of tweeting, retweeting about the event news, resources and other stuff which were part of the challenges.There were still many more really amazing challenges till the end of #ISTE16 but I was unable to try them all due to personal shortage of time as I have already mentioned.

Besides the gamification element, an extra advantage to my participation in #NotatISTE was my PLN development. I made connections, esp. on twitter, with valuable people who shared similar interests to me. We exchanged ideas and I expanded my knowledge on instruction practices with the use of technology.

All in all, I consider my engagement in #NotatISTE16 a great experience, which kept me updated with what happens in educational technology worldwide. I am looking forward to implementing the useful ideas I have gathered in my EFL classes when Greek schools start again after our summer vacation!

 Below you can see sample of my challenge contribution: