Canvas Credentials for Professional Development
At GaVirtual, we have been badging professional development courses for 9 years. This helps instructors know that they've completed all necessary requirements, and administration keep track of completion. I will discuss the benefits (and challenges) of implementing badged professional development courses in Canvas and share some best practices and tips.
I'm gonna talk about, Canvas credentials. Like, I feel like called it James Badges earlier this week. It used to be badger badger. So whatever it's called whoa. Now, that's what I'm gonna talk about. And this is our mascot Gasby.
He's brand new as of March, and we don't have that many pictures of him. So I'm sorry he looks sad, but he's probably sad because he's ready to go to bed as well. But anyway so, I'm Emily Crodel, and I am the teacher training specialist at George Virtual School. And I will explain what that even means, in a minute. So, I have a few goals for you guys.
And, So I wanna discuss the benefits we've found to badging professional development or professional learning. The challenges we've come across as we're badging professional learning I wanna give you a chance to explore a badged course that we have, used with our folks. And then, just some tips as, like, I've learned as I've using badges and stuff like that. That I found useful. So I'm just gonna check my notes, make sure I didn't forget to tell you anything.
Yes. Okay. So, from Georgia Virtual School, and we, like I said, we're entirely online, and we're a supplemental program. So, kids come to us to take courses maybe they couldn't get at their regular brick and mortar school or You know, like, we have all sorts of crazy world language courses that maybe like a rural Georgia student might not have access to in their county, or, we also get those kids that, you know, wanna have, like, seven thousand AP courses, and they can fit one more in their schedule because they can take that one online. And then we also have kids that are I mean, I've had, like, I got a kid that was like an Olympic, like, horse jumping thing.
You know? And I had a kid that was in Wisconsin playing like pro hockey. And I had a kid that was in New York as a professional model. And all those kids were Georgia students, and they needed to take Georgia courses. But, you know, obviously, they don't have the time or they're not in actually in Georgia to take those courses so they can take courses with us. And then, we we have kids that, you know, in, like, residential facilities and stuff like that.
Sick or whatever reason that they can't go face to face. So, we have over, two hundred fifty teachers. Most of those are adjuncts So they are, part time, I think we only have, like, twenty or twenty five, full time teachers. And we moved to Canvas, summer of twenty twenty, it was kind of a interesting time to move to Canvas, a perfect time, right, to move to Canvas, because We literally so we had an in person conference with all of us there, like March seventh. And then school closed, like, that Thursday.
And then, like, the world closed, like, you know, like, Friday. So, like, we were like, oh my god, you know, like, we're a person, and, you know, and, you know, we're always at home. And so that was really kinda scary anyway, but it was a great time to move to Canvas because it did allow us to do things that we couldn't do in our other LMS. And, we ended up hiring a hundred teachers that summer, to, you know, cope with the, the, the influx of students because remember, but Georgia, was one of those states, which is this is not on my notes. But, Georgia is one of those states, you know, where, like, everybody went to school and kids don't get sick.
And, you know, so so we need to go to school. And, but there were kids for obvious reasons that didn't, that couldn't go to school for whatever whatever reason. So they came with us. I had a student that, the dad told me he was a chaplain for the hospital. And so he said he was doing last rites, you know, like single day all day long, and he said it he didn't feel like it was fair to send his child to school when he's, you know, being exposed to that really severe cases every single day.
So, you know, he put them online. And then, We we found out a lot of the kids found out that, that they really liked it, you know, and it gave them the flexibility, and they could do all this cool stuff sorry. I'm just going way into I really like what we do. And so, you know, our enrollment actually hasn't dropped back down really. We're we're still pretty much up.
But, we've been badging professional learning for about nine years. And we really got into it within, like, the last couple of years. Like, I remember when I started at Gabs, there was, like, a pathway, maybe, and you could go see it maybe, and know, I didn't really know what it did. And maybe I got a bag on it. Maybe I did I I you know, it wasn't like this cohesive thing that we have now.
But, we've been and now we're badging student courses within, like, the last, like, year or so, we've started, badging student courses, which is really cool. And these numbers, you can't see them. I know I can't see them, but I wrote them down, between these three issuers. So we have, several issuers within, badger, campus credentials, whatever you wanna call it. We have one that is Georgia virtual school, and that's our kids.
And we have Georgia virtual school faculty that that's, you know, our faculty and staff. And then we have this Georgia virtual professional learning, and that's like people that aren't employed by gabbed, but take our professional development courses, they they get their badges are over there. So we kinda separate them. And we've created over seven hundred badges, and over twenty six hundred learners have been awarded over sixty thousand badges. Isn't it crazy? And this was when I wrote the presentation back in, like, you know, April or May or something, because I'm super type a like that.
So it's probably more. So so now, what what do I even know? And and what is a teacher training specialist? Cause I get that a lot. Well, honestly, I don't really know anything. I've been a science teacher. That was my that was my, you know, training.
I was a I was a science teacher and a a scientist and marine biologist, and I graduated with my master's degree in two thousand eight. Great great time to graduate. For trying to get a job. Right? And I said, what am I gonna do? There's no marine biology decrees in the middle of a recession. And I said, I know.
I know. Every kid means a teacher. And teachers are always here. You know, your your people are always having more kids, and, you know, you can do teaching is really really easy because you don't have to dive off of a boat, and you don't have to go outside. And so I could even do it when I'm old.
I was like, this is the perfect career. It's not exactly like that. I found out so but anyway, I've I've been a science teacher. I've been an instructional coach. I've developed content.
A lead teacher, and now I'm a teacher training specialist, and I still don't really have a clear idea about what I do, sorry, Rich, He's my boss. But I I do coordinate our new hires, and I train our new hires, and I manage our coaching team, I work with instruction to plan and keep track of professional learning. So I know that those are the things that I do. I don't know if that's exactly like my job description or anything. But, so that's kinda what I do.
It feels kind of a little bit like Mary Poppins, because it's just all this, like, random stuff. And so as I as I started doing this job, I started, like, we need to keep track of professional learning, we need to, we need to figure out a way for instructors to keep track of their professional learning and know where they stand. We need to figure, you know, like, how do we know who does what? What counts the same as this? You know, like, we wanna give them choice because we don't want everybody to doing doing the same PD all the time because, you know, everybody's not in the same place. And so I kept falling back on badges, and I kept falling back on badges, and, you know, and so these are the benefits that I found. And I'll I'll go into more detail in, the next slides, each one of these.
But, it's really important to me that teachers can easily track their progress because I hate getting those emails. They're like, does this count for my professional learning? Have I done all my professional learning requirements for the year? I don't know. There's two hundred fifty of you. How how do you expect me to know exactly what you've done? Well, now I know because I can check the pathway, but I can teach them to fish, and I can teach them to check the pathway, and then they stop emailing you. Right? And that's one less email I get.
And so slowly slowly, I get much less emails about that. And the next thing that's kind of important is that their their supervisors can track their us. Right? Because we have all these adjuncts and, you know, there's like two hundred fifty teachers divided against six departments. I'm not very good at math, but it's a lot. And so these these ASIs, which is like our department has our assistant principals.
They have a lot of folks. They have to keep track of. And these people are all over the place. You know, it's not like they're in a building or they can like go into their classroom and say, Hey, you didn't do your whatever. And so we have to keep track of it somehow.
And so the admin can also look pathway and keep track of it. And that's been part of it too, is training, you know, the admin to go look there instead of just asking me, you know, like, does so and so have the requirements? Why don't you go check? And then the other thing is that, I found it's kinda cool is that the pathways can kinda be read like a rubric. So if you think of, like, you know, like, if you think about the swag pathway, right, the the the overall, you know, winning your kids a VR headset, That's that's the that's the overall goal. Right? That's a hundred percent on your assignment. So and you can kind of trace it backwards and see what do I need to do to do that.
Right? What do I need to do to win my kids a VR headset besides being lucky? And, you know, I have to visit this booth and and attend this session. And that so our teachers can see what they need to do. And you can see, you know, on a swag pathway. Some things are required. Sometimes it's, like, do two out of three or whatever.
So you have some choices to what you wanna do. Like, for example, I don't know where that bean bag thing is. I'm gonna find it because I'm not going to dance. So, and it's and that's three out of four. Right? That part of the pathway.
It allows choice, because again, right? I don't I don't have to dance. I can choose to do this beanbag game wherever Robert ends up being, which I'm I'm gonna find it, gosh, darn it. And and so our teachers can choose what they wanna do. And we can have things, and we can say, all of these type of things are basically the same weight or whatever. You can do any of these.
We don't care. We just want you to learn something. Right? And so we can we can do that kind of thing. And then, another cool thing is that we can check the historical award of badges. So we we've been doing bad just so long, it it's like a thing at our school.
Right? Like, you can get a Marigold award, you can get, like, a science team year of the year award or a teacher of the year award or or whatever. And those are like big deal. Right? So when the ASI is trying to decide who get the award for the next year, sometimes they forget who they've given it to. So they can go back and they can check next day. Oh, okay.
These are the people that have had the award before. I wanna give it to someone different because usually they try and, like, you know, spread the love because the badges are so, you know, coveted. And so they they can check, and they can see who got that award. And as long as we've been giving out that badge, they can see who got that badge, you know, all those years. And then the really cool part, which is kind of new for us, I feel like, is, the integration with Canvas keeps a record of the work submitted to earn that badge.
Right? So if a student or and when I say a student, I mean like an adult student, like a teacher student, the teachers are my students. So if one of my students, which is an adult, submits an assignment And to and they earn a badge, you know, I can always go back and say, this is what they did to earn that you know, to demonstrate that they were competent enough to earn the badge for this skill. So that's kinda cool too that we can have that. And we make them, you know, submit everything in, and they still try and do you know, we don't let our students submit work via email, but gosh. They think they try and, you know, email me in.
I'm like, you gotta put it in a canvas. You gotta put it in canvas because the bad auto awards based on your campus grade. Right? And so if they email it to me, okay. Cool. But I can't get you your badge that way, and you can't you know, we don't have any VR headsets to give away, but you can't, I guess, stay employed that way.
Which is goals better than a PR headset. Right? So here's the first one. Teachers can easily track their progress. So I don't know if you guys can see this very well, but, and again, when I say teachers, I mean, students. Right? So this is one of my coaches.
I always like to put her in a course and have her submit fake stuff to see if it's working. And then she sends me screenshots of, like, what it looks like to her. So this was a course, we just recently transferred to Zoom, like, literally in May, so we wanted to make sure it worked correctly. And so I had her in there. I submitted fake stuff, and I gave her great.
Or she submitted stuff and give her grades. So this and it's kinda like what you see, right, when you look at the swag pathway on your phone, you see that list of all the badges that you've earned, and it looks like a for long ways because it's on your phone, but it's, you know, if it was on the computer, it wouldn't be that long. And then at the very bottom, you can check your pathway progress. If you click on it, You can see the badges that you've earned in your progress towards possibly winning the VR headset. Right? And then on the, on the right, you can see, you know, that's that's what you see when you click on the the pathway.
Right? And that and you guys have experience if if you're doing the the swag thing. I I really did not know that they were gonna have a swag pathway, but it's very handy because now you guys all have experience with earning badges doing pathway so you know kinda how it works. The cool thing is is that admin can also check your progress. So If I'm going in here, and this is like from the the adult view, like the teacher view. We can see that Corinne, she's one of our teacher one of our instructional technologists You can see that she did everything, and she turned in all of her stuff, and she's like, good to go.
And then you can see that knee over there. I haven't turned in anything. I wrote the course, but I didn't turn anything in. So I don't I don't have a badge. Right? And and if my boss can see I I have it now, by the way, but my boss can see that that, I earned I'd earned the badge or I didn't earn the badge and and can come and say, Hey, you think they might wanna do that? Cause if it's due next week or, you know, whatever.
And then they can make sure that they have that skill for, like, Zoom meetings or demonstrate. And you can also see here that is this does this work? Oh, yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Cool. Okay. So you can see that the only thing we actually required was to rate assignment. Right? So they had to do certain things in Zoom. They had to, show a PowerPoint play a video with sound and do some other thing, like annotate or show a whiteboard or something, turn on the captions.
And that's all we really require. Right? Cause we knew that we had a lot of teachers that have already used Zoom before because, hello, we've had COVID. Right? So and I didn't wanna make those teachers do all this stuff that they already knew. You know? So we made the demonstrate was the only thing that was required. On the pathway.
So if you did the demonstrate assignment and nothing else, you got the overall badge, and you were good to go. But let's say you've never used Zoom before, because we do have those teachers that, like, you know, they teach online, but I I don't know how. You know? And and so they might need more stuff. And so we gave them the option. We said, okay.
Have you ever used Zoom before? No. Okay. Then you might wanna take the getting started with zoom course. And honestly, they were really honest about it. You know, like, I didn't have a lot of people that tried to go straight to demonstrate and just like totally screwed it up and had to go back.
Like, I didn't have that many people to try to do that. You know? Like, they were really honest. Like, I really don't know what I'm doing. And so they could do getting started. And then let's say you've used it a little bit, but not really, like, taught in it, but you know, like, how to, like, open the browser and turn it on and that kind of stuff.
Then maybe you want the in engaging students and the demonstrate, you know, so so the kid the the teachers could choose what they wanted. And how much they needed to learn. So they didn't have to do all of the things because I'm the worst busy work person in the whole world. And the last thing I wanna do is make our teachers that are super busy and have so much going on force them to do something that they already know how to do. You know? So if they can spend two minutes and show me what they need to know in the video, and some of them, like, I said two minutes or less, they send me these, like, thirty minute videos.
I'm I don't really wanna know about the American Revolution. Like, I just wanna see that you can, like, show a PowerPoint, you know, do the things, but they did this, like, whole lesson. But you can play it two times speed and speed grader, just so you know. And so that's kinda the pathway we did for that. So we can make things optional.
We can make them required And so they, again, they could choose what they wanted to do. That's that's our big thing is, like, let's not make the teachers do things that they don't have to do because they're not gonna be engaged and they're not gonna enjoy it. So here's the reading like a rubric. And this is a more difficult difficult, like, more complicated pathway. This is for a new instructor preparation course.
So these are that are new to us. They might be new to online. They might not be new to online, but we teach them policy, and we make sure we have a very, like, we have a template for our courses, and we have a specific way that we like our teachers to do things to make sure that the experience is seamless between all of our kids. We have places where you can customize it, but we don't want, like, finding the modules page to be the place where you're customizing it. Like, we want all the kids to know how to get to the models, how to grade, how to get to the link for their live learning sessions.
So we have some stuff that we need to teach them how to do and make sure they know how to do it correctly. And so that's kinda what this is. We need this pathway aligned to the NSU, the national standards for online teaching. And, if I were to open this, it would show, like, all sorts of stuff But you can see, like, for the professional presence, there's some things that we, ask them to do, and this is, like, so tiny on here, but you can only see if I can make it bigger. So I can understand that.
Okay. So you can see right here what we're looking at is the earned five of the seven badges in this category, and you can see I've got a couple things in there. And so they can pick, like, what they want in there. And they have to get, like, an eighty or above or something like that. And so, you know, if they don't do well on a quiz, whatever, you know, like, everyone gets a hundred on a discussion, right, as long as you reply to your peers.
I mean, these are adults, so they're not they're not putting things like, I agree. You know? Two plus two is four. I agree. And so they can see what's required. They can see what's optional.
Once they get, like, the professional presence part, they get that little mini badge, you know, those, like, moments of fun or moments of whatever badges that they're giving the little mini badges, you can, you know, they can get the mini badge. They can track the progress. They can see where they're at. And every single person that filled out the new teacher survey, which is approximately four, of the sixteen, said that they use the pathway to track their progress through the course. Now, of course, these are probably our, like, you know, type a a plus teachers because they're the only ones that actually filled out the survey.
But they enjoyed it. I don't know if they enjoyed it, but they they used the progress. They used it. And you can see every single assignment, you can see, like, what it says on there. So this one says, the teacher created and updated their LinkedIn profile and tied their personal badger to their GABS badge.
So that was like that assignment. And then we have little emojis here, and you can see like anything that had a, like, magnifying glass emoji was required. So you had to earn that badge because that's a non negotiable skill. That we need you to have when you're setting up your course. Anything that has like a little red push pin is a boring assignment that is just follow the instructions to the letter, and that's that.
And then anything that has, like, a little, like, art thing, art palette thing. It means that you can, like, inject some creativity into that assignment. So they knew going into the assignment because we got we had some questions for folks. That they they knew going into the assignment that it was going to be boring, but, you know, it was it was a follow the instructions, and that's that's what you need to do kind of assignment. So is that? What's that? But they could, you know, they could see where they needed to go in the course, you know, like the very first day, they could see where they're going.
Yes. Yes. Well, well, there's There's a badge for the course, and there's a badge for each assignment. In our school does it kind of a a weird way. Do you see how all of those, like, badges for the same, standard.
They look exactly the same. So I don't have to make, like, seven thousand different badges. I think the lord, right? I just it that's all the badges for that standard. They all look the same And then the one the, like, mini badge about that standard, like so if you can see, like, their little rocket ships, It's like a space theme for little rocket ships, and then you can see, like, the little NSQ logo thing on the rocket ship. And then the mini the mini mini badge is just like the little hands or, you know, like the little logo.
Yeah. That would be cool. You can't do that, but you can link the assignment to the badge. So if a student gets a sixty five on the assignment, they don't get the badge. If a student, if you do it in point, If you do it in percent, I learn it multiplies it by like a thousand, and they get sixty five thousand out of a hundred, and then they they all everyone gets bad.
So you have to do points. I I learned that the hard way this summer. So if you do it by points, then, you know, but then if they get, like, a ninety five and your threshold is in eighty, they automatically get the batch. And so it's kind of tied to the rubric, but not exactly if that makes sense. You know? Okay.
And so it allows choice. I know I say this like every single slide. I feel like I said, choice. Choice. But the teachers can choose what they wanna complete, you know.
So they can say, and honestly, most of our teachers, they'd, like, try all of them. They do all of the things because that's just, you know, that's who we hire because we hire great teachers. But, they can. Like, if they don't do really well on a quiz or something, that's okay. It's not gonna, like, ruin their life because we had to think about it If you have to get the badge to be able to teach, you have to make the badge giddable.
Right? We can't, like, say, like, have, like, one thing, like, say this professional presence assignment is required, and you don't do that assignment, then you don't get the badge, Well, that's because that's really important. We have to have a, you know, they can turn, and we have to have a way for them to do it. Right? Like getting a seventy five on one quiz shouldn't preclude you from being able to teach with us. Right? So, and and we allow, like, multiple submissions and stuff like that if they do it wrong and, you know, that's part of the process. You know, I don't expect them to turn in everything right the first time.
So some of these, we we require, you know, because it's a non negotiable skill. Like, we have, All of our, like, professional stuff, I guess, at our school is tied to a specific yammer group called professional learning. And so we need every single person, gaz, that's an adult to join the pro professional learning group, and that's how we keep things on the students. So if we have, like, videos, we don't want students to see your files, we don't want students to see, we we tie them to the professional learning group. So we need every single teacher to join that So we literally ask them to join the group and submit a screenshot of them in the group.
And that's, you know, that's the thing. Because we it's that important. Right? And so that's a required one. That's that's required. But, like, which discussion you do? I I don't care.
You know, like, I I want you to get practice with it, but I don't care which one you do. And so you can also check the historical awards Total I feel like I'm totally switching gears, of the badgers. I didn't put these in a very good order. And so you can see, like, this is had to blur it out because it has the people's names on it. And I wanna, you know, protect their privacy even though they they earned something.
So we we're working through, Georgia's really into, like, personalized learning, what you could tell. But, so one of the things that we're doing is our instructors can get a personalized learning endorsement for free. And so when they get the endorsement, they can send me their, like, schedule or whatever, like, their transcript, and I give them a badge, and then they can, you know, so they can that was on the pathway for, like, professional learning. Right? That was part of it. That was one of the things that they had done.
So we can we can look back. And I I talked to you about the teacher of the year one already. Okay. So, again, it it keeps track of the work earned to earn the badge. So you can see here, here's all of our assignments.
Right? And I can click on that badge And then I can click on one of our people, and then I can click on her assignment or his assign. I don't remember if it's a girl or a boy, but And you can see the assignment. You can see the comments I left them. You can see the feedback, you know, the rubric. It's all right there, and it's tied to that badge.
So anybody comes over my shoulder, you know, and says, oh, the heck did this teacher get by you? Oh, what? I mean, their work is good. Right? I I don't know what they're doing once they left me, but but the work was good for me. You know? So we have that, that record of what they did. So that's kind of neat too. And so the challenge is so, obviously, it's not all rainbows and butterflies.
There's gotta be something that's not perfect. Right? Creating the pathway can be time consuming. Creating the badges requires creativity and time. The creativity part I struggle with, well, the time too, I guess. But, it feels like the creativity part's harder.
And then, training again, like I mentioned, training the teachers to check that pathway for the progress. They're getting better at it now because we've been using them for a couple years, but they were you know, and and then again, the buy in of, like, like, I told you, they, like, I really want the miracle badge or the, you know, Science teacher or the ear badge, but But that was a, you know, that's a culture that we've kind of developed where the badges are important to them. They're not tracked. You know. So let's talk a little bit about it.
So this is our master teacher pathway. And look how long it is. It's crazy. Right? It's so long. And the reason is, to earn the master teacher badge, you get a raise.
Right? You have to have taught with us for five years any good of race. So it's important. It's really important. But there's so many things that we offer and so many things that they could do to, meet the different parts of the pathway that, we had to put all those things on there. Right? If say, like, teacher of the year, instructionally teacher or science teacher of the year, whatever, all of that counts as like leadership or something, then you could, you know, you could put it there.
And this is it keeps looping, so it's really not like a never ending pathway. I I don't know if you didn't notice me that, but, but so we can put all this different stuff in there. Right? And and we can give them all these and so you can you can really make the choice as much as possible. Like, you know, and it's also for something for every three years they have to renew. This is like three years worth of PD on here too.
So that's another reason why it's super long. But the cool thing is, you know, now that we have this pathway, We can just choose, like, make copy, and it makes a copy for the next year, and then we can just adjust it a little bit, you know, and then it's done. And and can you imagine, like, I don't even know. What did you guys do before this? Like, have a spreadsheet? Like, I mean, can you imagine trying to, like, keep track of, like, okay, this counts for this section, and this counts for this. I don't it would be, like, a nightmare.
You know, but here, you just load the people in, and it automatically populates, and they see exactly what they need to finish, and they see exactly what they've got, and what counts, what's you know, what's working and what's not. And then and then once it once you've made it, then you can copy it, you know, over and over. Next year and the next year, next year. So this is, so the creating creativity and time We do have some guidelines in place for our badges, for our student badges, but the teacher badges are a little more wide open. Sort of.
Don't tell me what the view you want. But they're, you know, I I have some flexibility with what I can do for the badges. And I always wanna make them, like, fun interesting, like, oh, I got this cool badge. So I try not to make them all look exactly the same because I want it to be like, you know, when they look at their badge page, if they ever do, It's like this rainbow of fun things that they've done. And so and you can see that, like, my thought process Sometimes it struggles a little bit.
Like, do you see this, like, the gatsby in the suit and, like, these random kids, like, this, this is, like, orange square with a like, what is going on here, you know? And you can see so one of the things we have to do is is, like, for our events, we have a theme. So we have to I almost have to, like, decide on the theme before I do the batch, and sometimes as I'm making the batch, it kind of helps me decide on the theme. Like, this was a lunch and learn. So I was like, oh, we're gonna do, like, zoom into Zoom. And I was like, okay, that's boring.
And I was like, oh, I like rainbows. Let's see that. And then I was like, okay, that's nobody wants that. Nobody like that one. My test group so then we did this, like, big zoom, and I was, like, and there was, like, oh, it's lunch alerts this summer.
We'll have an ice cream. And each layer of the ice cream could be I mean, I spent hours on that one. Everybody hated it. They hated the ice cream. I was so upset because I spent so much time on the ice cream.
And they was like, oh, ice cream and rainbows. There we go. There we go. Nobody like that either. And so then we went with this cruising theme.
And so then I was like, oh, let's do a life wrap, life wrap, and I was like, oh, that might be frustrating. Me to this beach, and then we ended up with this passport theme. So, like, each session you went to, you got a stamp on the passport. And then at the end, you got the badge that had, like, all all the stuff on it, and it had our new mascot. And you would not believe how long it took to put a Hawaiian shirt on that freaking frog.
It's forever. Like, oh my gosh. And so you could see that the badge is, like, like, this one was kinda messy. Right? And then it it just became a little smoother. And then you could see we had this, like, nice, like, HD globe, but then this is, like, kind of like a flat I don't know.
I used that, and I put it everywhere. And then, like, the next week, I was like, I don't like that. So I I made a new one, and then I had to re put it everywhere. Luckily, it wasn't released yet or anything. But, so that that part takes a long time for me because it it I think some things are like a really great idea and obviously, you know, like the ice cream and rainbows, and and nobody else does.
So then I have to go back. But it helps me kind of solidify my theme and, like, all of that kind of stuff too. So it's I mean, it's a it's a process. I know whatever the first thing I think of for the badge is not gonna be the thing. And I just know that.
So training the teachers to check the pathway. So, I don't know if you guys get these questions. What do I need to do? What counts for this requirement? Where do I stand? Is this required? Does this how, you know, all these type of questions I get, like, emails. And, I mean, we don't have a ton of teachers, but two hundred fifty teachers is kind of a lot, and most of them are adjuncts. So, you know, Are they paying attention, well, or not? You know? So we we get a lot of questions.
So I and I get these a lot. But far fewer. And since we start our new teachers with the pathway and everything like that, we've noticed that there's less and less questions, like, because they're used to the way. They're used to the badges. They're used to checking it.
And so it, you know, it kinda helps. So, slowly, slowly where yeah. Right? I know how to check my pathway, if only. You know? But You guys think I'm kidding for every single online conference we have, I have a fake badge that so they can practice scanning the QR code. And when they scan the QR code, it has the guy, you know, like, little feral from elf, and he's like, you did it.
You did it. And they so they can practice because otherwise, someone's gonna say, I don't know how to use a QR code. So So again, why do they care about it? Why why is this better? And so you can see it kinda it came in really fast. But remember, we used to have to keep that log. It was like a written log.
And you had to write. Like, I went to a faculty meeting, and it was, like, one hour. And my, you know, my principals signed on it or whatever. And it was just like this long paper log. And if you lost it, good luck.
Right? Because you weren't gonna get credit. For any of that stuff again. You don't have to do that, right? Cause it's all in the pathway. It's all right there. And then, And so and then you don't have to do these certificates.
Right? You don't have like, we used to have to do this thing. We're like, rolling line. Right? So we would do, like, like a suicide prevention, let's say, course. And, then we'd have to, like, label our certificate with, like, our last name and our first name and this, like, very specific thing, and we had to upload it to this very specific folder, and then someone would check it off. You don't have to do that.
You just I got the badge, so I'm I'm done. Right? I did it. So you don't have to worry about that. So it's a little easier. For their side, but, right, because they don't have to check my certificate in my side because I don't have to upload anything.
So it's it's nice. So okay. Now, I have this video that I made of a bad batch pathway course in Canvas. And, one of the things I hate more than anything is listening to myself when I've been recorded. So if I'm grimacing, that's that's what's going on here.
Now what I'd like to do is give you a tour of our new instructor preparation course for our brand new instructors. So if we go over here and click on batches, on the left navigation bar, it will take us to the Vaging dashboard where we can view all of our batch data directly in the course. You can see all of our assignments in the course here. Each one is tied to a badge. You can also see the progress of the cohort through the course.
You can also track badges earned outside the course. I awarded this one annually to track their completion of the ferpa course. We just started this course, so they haven't earned a lot of badges yet. You can also the different trigger criteria for the badges. Clicking on the pathway allows you to track students progress through the pathway.
Here can see the entire pathway. Some badges are required, and some are in a group or a number of badges from the group must be earned. You can select a student the course and track their individual progress on the pathway. You can see this student has completed thirty one percent of the course. You can see the badges she's earned and still needs to earn.
When she clicks on the badges, can also see this view. So she always has a good idea of what she's done and where she needs to go. If we go back to badges and way progress and click on lunar progress, we can see her progress displayed in a different way. She can also see this screen. If we go back to Bandison way progress again and click on a badge, you can see more about that badge.
This one is a badge that was awarded based on attendance at a live session, so as soon I mark through tenants, the badge released. This one is tied to an assignment with the same name. You can see the trigger criteria here and individual learner progress here. Again, just started the course, so many aren't quite here yet, but we do have a few that have earned this badge. And you can see that on the next page.
If you click on badge details, you can see what the learner had to do to earn the badge. And of course, because this is a canvas course, we can click on the assignment and see their submission right here. So everything is in one place. If you go to the syllabus page, you can see discuss the pathway on the syllabus page as well. We explain that they need to complete the pathway to move on from the course.
Last thing that's pretty neat. The course will automatically check for badges at what seems to be random times, but if you have just finished grading a chunk of submissions, you can actually go to badges and click update now, and it will force update, including all those assignments you just created. So this was just a brief overview of how we use badges in Canvas for professional development. And I'm not kidding when I see random times. It's like three thirty six AM.
It's always a different time. So, but it's kinda cool how you could see. It's like all in there, and they can, you know, they can always point. So what are my tips after dealing with this? I mean, using it for a while. Use Canva If you don't have Canva, like, I'm telling you get the canva.
It's free. It's literally free for educators. You can get, like, the super version that has all the things if you're a teacher. You get all the extra teacher y stuff too. It's it's totally worth it for, you know, free.
Yeah. We now have the Nice. I haven't done that before. And you can, one of my friends, she likes to map out the pathway before she publishes it she like, gets like a PowerPoint file and like makes like a flowchart and stuff. I don't do that.
I just make the pathway and start putting stuff on it and figuring it out and moving stuff around, and then I publish it, and then it's not working quite right, and then I move it around anyway. Because I forget to publish it to let someone else see it. And then talk it out, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is that's really important. And then test test test always always, like, have folks tested about. And then think about what you care about, and then also I don't know if I mentioned this before, but choice.
Okay. So Canva is great for designing badges. Like I said, it's free for educators upload your brand fonts, your colors, your images. So, like, I have the, you know, the hex codes or whatever for our school, so I can make everything look like all schooly. And then you can collaborate with others.
And I I don't know if you guys can get this. I'll figure out a way to get this to you, but I made an example badge template for you guys to use, and so we'll figure out a way to get this for you. I kinda thought that they would already have, like, PowerPoints, like because I had to upload it, like, you know, like, a long time ago, that they would have it somewhere for you guys to look at, but, no. So, but I'll I'll figure it out. I promise.
And then, this is what I'm talking about. Mapping the pathway before you publish it and and just FYI, because I tried this, you have to publish the pathway to link it to the Canvas course, and you also have to publish the Canvas course. To link it to the pathway, which I tried to do that a couple times without doing that. And I was like, why can't I find my stuff? And then again, like I just I and I I try and share it with others to say, like, if they can poke holes in it, which is kinda my next thing, in the talking it out is, find your people. Right? These people that do not mind that you ask them Lots of questions.
Like, do you like a rainbow ice cream badge? And they say no. And then listen to what they say because they're usually right. And so these are, you know, I have two people usually that I I I I put things to. And and one of them, Elizabeth. She's one of my coaches.
She's so good because I'm one of those people, like, you know, I have an idea. And by tomorrow at noon, it's gonna be done. Because I it's I'm I'm doing it, and I'm there, and I'm hyper focused, and it's done. And so I always try and at ask her, because she'll say, have you thought about how that's gonna work? Oh, no. So she's really good because she she thinks all of the the what ifs that I don't think about.
And then again, Greer, she's the other one. She she's the one that's like, yes, cruises. You know, yes. So but it's good to have both of them, to, like, to, to ask about stuff. So I I always ask them to put hold in my stuff try and put holes in it because you know your teachers are gonna poke a hole in whatever you've done.
So I would really, really like them to poke the holes first before the teachers do it because, you know, that's the last thing I want. And then again, like testing it. So this is Elizabeth again, you can try it with test student, but it doesn't really work because you can't see the badges of test student is getting because test student doesn't have an email. And doesn't have a badger account. So I always put, like, Elizabeth in here as a student and have her, like I said, do stuff, and I wanna make sure, you know, that the badger populate correctly, and let's say I give her a low score, like, make sure that she doesn't get the badge anyway, like, multiply by a thousand percent thing.
And so I I, you know, I wanna check that. Two minutes is what that means? Yeah. Okay. And then the I'm almost done. I swear.
And then, Gash. This is the third time this year you've been sent -- What do y'all care about? Right? Out. And so I always think about this part of the incredible -- -- constructive outline. -- where Dash says, like, everyone's special. There's no one special.
Right? My pro So so what we what is important? It won't be the best. What's the important? Dashing, Robert. You are an incredibly competitive boy. And a bit of a show. And so it's so elastic.
What is important? What do they want to? Do you? I'm gonna ask. We don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do? Right now, honey. The world just wants us to fit in and to fit in. We just gotta be like everybody else.
Our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made it a special. Very long. Every place you know. I only have two minutes left.
Which is another way she so that's what he says. He said, when everyone no one is. So, like, you don't wanna badge, like, all of the things. I mean, we do badge like the individual assignments, but they know that those badges don't, you know, they just progress to the most important one, which is the big one. You know? And so what what do we care about? What's what's required? What's optional? What do we want them to do? And then again, like I said, choice.
Let them choose what they want to learn. And I will try and tell the story like super super quick. I one time, was teaching at a school, and we had someone that maybe, like, made the principal angry, And so is in retaliation, he made us all do this, all this professional development, like all these courses. And I taught AP, environmental science and physics, and I had to sit in an hour session on how to make a foldable Right? Like a month before the AP exam. And I was like, oh my god.
I'd like the worst attitude in that thing. Like, why am I learning how to fold paper? I need to be grading effort queues. Like, what the heck? And and I I was not invested. I didn't engage in the whole session. You know, I had that bright attitude sitting in the back, And it was it wasn't fair to the presenter, right? Cause she had to deal with me.
And and it wasn't fair to me because I shouldn't have had to be there. So So let them choose what works best for them, the PL that works best. Like, why couldn't I have gone to, like, a PL on, like, how to grade FRQs, or how to prepare kids for the AP exam, right? It's still it's still learning. Right? So that's that's kind of the deal. It's let them choose.
And so the last thing is we made a special badge for you guys. So you guys can get a badge from the Georgia Virtual ecosystem or whatever, and you can get poor little sad Gabsby. And then, like I said, I will are are they gonna put these presentations, like, online, like, the PowerPoint? Okay. Here we go. Cool.
So then you will get the resources. I don't mind claiming a badge on my phone, but I really, really, really don't like getting, like, powerpoints and, like, you know, like, files and stuff on my and I feel like it's it's hard to read. It's too much. Yeah. So, your teachers benefit any of those get badges to their department of education using some professional development that they can really add.
So we do. This is how we, when we renew their certificates, This is how we keep track of their professional learning that they need to renew their certificate. In addition, I'm trying to get them to put it all in one place then they can like print it out, you know, all of us are adjuncts, right, almost all of them. So they can send it to their face to face school and go, look at all this stuff I did. Right? Because that's part of their observation, right, that they're face to face school is like doing professional learning.
So that's my hope, but I don't know if they do. But they're always gonna have that badger account. Right? Cause you can tie, like, I have my personal email tied to my badger. So, like, I did, like, a learning how to advocate for your kid IEP course. And it's it's in my badger, even though it's not from Gap.
Yeah. We do have like a log, you know, that like keeps track of that kind, but like in our internal system that that you could print out, I guess, an individual certificate for it. It's not official one. You know, it's not like official from the course because they have the badge, but it's an open badge. So, like, you know, anyone can go see what they had to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can see what they had to do to get that badge. I don't know.
Nope. But, I mean, we've been using it. So long. Like, I think we're, like, grandfathered into some stuff, and I don't know. That's not my deal.
Paying is not my deal. I don't know. I don't know. Let your users -- Yeah. -- download JSON.
Oh, there you go. Yeah. And I and I have mine, you know, to my personal. So if I were to log in with my personal email, I would see all my Gabs badges, even if we stopped offering it, I guess. Yeah.
He's brand new as of March, and we don't have that many pictures of him. So I'm sorry he looks sad, but he's probably sad because he's ready to go to bed as well. But anyway so, I'm Emily Crodel, and I am the teacher training specialist at George Virtual School. And I will explain what that even means, in a minute. So, I have a few goals for you guys.
And, So I wanna discuss the benefits we've found to badging professional development or professional learning. The challenges we've come across as we're badging professional learning I wanna give you a chance to explore a badged course that we have, used with our folks. And then, just some tips as, like, I've learned as I've using badges and stuff like that. That I found useful. So I'm just gonna check my notes, make sure I didn't forget to tell you anything.
Yes. Okay. So, from Georgia Virtual School, and we, like I said, we're entirely online, and we're a supplemental program. So, kids come to us to take courses maybe they couldn't get at their regular brick and mortar school or You know, like, we have all sorts of crazy world language courses that maybe like a rural Georgia student might not have access to in their county, or, we also get those kids that, you know, wanna have, like, seven thousand AP courses, and they can fit one more in their schedule because they can take that one online. And then we also have kids that are I mean, I've had, like, I got a kid that was like an Olympic, like, horse jumping thing.
You know? And I had a kid that was in Wisconsin playing like pro hockey. And I had a kid that was in New York as a professional model. And all those kids were Georgia students, and they needed to take Georgia courses. But, you know, obviously, they don't have the time or they're not in actually in Georgia to take those courses so they can take courses with us. And then, we we have kids that, you know, in, like, residential facilities and stuff like that.
Sick or whatever reason that they can't go face to face. So, we have over, two hundred fifty teachers. Most of those are adjuncts So they are, part time, I think we only have, like, twenty or twenty five, full time teachers. And we moved to Canvas, summer of twenty twenty, it was kind of a interesting time to move to Canvas, a perfect time, right, to move to Canvas, because We literally so we had an in person conference with all of us there, like March seventh. And then school closed, like, that Thursday.
And then, like, the world closed, like, you know, like, Friday. So, like, we were like, oh my god, you know, like, we're a person, and, you know, and, you know, we're always at home. And so that was really kinda scary anyway, but it was a great time to move to Canvas because it did allow us to do things that we couldn't do in our other LMS. And, we ended up hiring a hundred teachers that summer, to, you know, cope with the, the, the influx of students because remember, but Georgia, was one of those states, which is this is not on my notes. But, Georgia is one of those states, you know, where, like, everybody went to school and kids don't get sick.
And, you know, so so we need to go to school. And, but there were kids for obvious reasons that didn't, that couldn't go to school for whatever whatever reason. So they came with us. I had a student that, the dad told me he was a chaplain for the hospital. And so he said he was doing last rites, you know, like single day all day long, and he said it he didn't feel like it was fair to send his child to school when he's, you know, being exposed to that really severe cases every single day.
So, you know, he put them online. And then, We we found out a lot of the kids found out that, that they really liked it, you know, and it gave them the flexibility, and they could do all this cool stuff sorry. I'm just going way into I really like what we do. And so, you know, our enrollment actually hasn't dropped back down really. We're we're still pretty much up.
But, we've been badging professional learning for about nine years. And we really got into it within, like, the last couple of years. Like, I remember when I started at Gabs, there was, like, a pathway, maybe, and you could go see it maybe, and know, I didn't really know what it did. And maybe I got a bag on it. Maybe I did I I you know, it wasn't like this cohesive thing that we have now.
But, we've been and now we're badging student courses within, like, the last, like, year or so, we've started, badging student courses, which is really cool. And these numbers, you can't see them. I know I can't see them, but I wrote them down, between these three issuers. So we have, several issuers within, badger, campus credentials, whatever you wanna call it. We have one that is Georgia virtual school, and that's our kids.
And we have Georgia virtual school faculty that that's, you know, our faculty and staff. And then we have this Georgia virtual professional learning, and that's like people that aren't employed by gabbed, but take our professional development courses, they they get their badges are over there. So we kinda separate them. And we've created over seven hundred badges, and over twenty six hundred learners have been awarded over sixty thousand badges. Isn't it crazy? And this was when I wrote the presentation back in, like, you know, April or May or something, because I'm super type a like that.
So it's probably more. So so now, what what do I even know? And and what is a teacher training specialist? Cause I get that a lot. Well, honestly, I don't really know anything. I've been a science teacher. That was my that was my, you know, training.
I was a I was a science teacher and a a scientist and marine biologist, and I graduated with my master's degree in two thousand eight. Great great time to graduate. For trying to get a job. Right? And I said, what am I gonna do? There's no marine biology decrees in the middle of a recession. And I said, I know.
I know. Every kid means a teacher. And teachers are always here. You know, your your people are always having more kids, and, you know, you can do teaching is really really easy because you don't have to dive off of a boat, and you don't have to go outside. And so I could even do it when I'm old.
I was like, this is the perfect career. It's not exactly like that. I found out so but anyway, I've I've been a science teacher. I've been an instructional coach. I've developed content.
A lead teacher, and now I'm a teacher training specialist, and I still don't really have a clear idea about what I do, sorry, Rich, He's my boss. But I I do coordinate our new hires, and I train our new hires, and I manage our coaching team, I work with instruction to plan and keep track of professional learning. So I know that those are the things that I do. I don't know if that's exactly like my job description or anything. But, so that's kinda what I do.
It feels kind of a little bit like Mary Poppins, because it's just all this, like, random stuff. And so as I as I started doing this job, I started, like, we need to keep track of professional learning, we need to, we need to figure out a way for instructors to keep track of their professional learning and know where they stand. We need to figure, you know, like, how do we know who does what? What counts the same as this? You know, like, we wanna give them choice because we don't want everybody to doing doing the same PD all the time because, you know, everybody's not in the same place. And so I kept falling back on badges, and I kept falling back on badges, and, you know, and so these are the benefits that I found. And I'll I'll go into more detail in, the next slides, each one of these.
But, it's really important to me that teachers can easily track their progress because I hate getting those emails. They're like, does this count for my professional learning? Have I done all my professional learning requirements for the year? I don't know. There's two hundred fifty of you. How how do you expect me to know exactly what you've done? Well, now I know because I can check the pathway, but I can teach them to fish, and I can teach them to check the pathway, and then they stop emailing you. Right? And that's one less email I get.
And so slowly slowly, I get much less emails about that. And the next thing that's kind of important is that their their supervisors can track their us. Right? Because we have all these adjuncts and, you know, there's like two hundred fifty teachers divided against six departments. I'm not very good at math, but it's a lot. And so these these ASIs, which is like our department has our assistant principals.
They have a lot of folks. They have to keep track of. And these people are all over the place. You know, it's not like they're in a building or they can like go into their classroom and say, Hey, you didn't do your whatever. And so we have to keep track of it somehow.
And so the admin can also look pathway and keep track of it. And that's been part of it too, is training, you know, the admin to go look there instead of just asking me, you know, like, does so and so have the requirements? Why don't you go check? And then the other thing is that, I found it's kinda cool is that the pathways can kinda be read like a rubric. So if you think of, like, you know, like, if you think about the swag pathway, right, the the the overall, you know, winning your kids a VR headset, That's that's the that's the overall goal. Right? That's a hundred percent on your assignment. So and you can kind of trace it backwards and see what do I need to do to do that.
Right? What do I need to do to win my kids a VR headset besides being lucky? And, you know, I have to visit this booth and and attend this session. And that so our teachers can see what they need to do. And you can see, you know, on a swag pathway. Some things are required. Sometimes it's, like, do two out of three or whatever.
So you have some choices to what you wanna do. Like, for example, I don't know where that bean bag thing is. I'm gonna find it because I'm not going to dance. So, and it's and that's three out of four. Right? That part of the pathway.
It allows choice, because again, right? I don't I don't have to dance. I can choose to do this beanbag game wherever Robert ends up being, which I'm I'm gonna find it, gosh, darn it. And and so our teachers can choose what they wanna do. And we can have things, and we can say, all of these type of things are basically the same weight or whatever. You can do any of these.
We don't care. We just want you to learn something. Right? And so we can we can do that kind of thing. And then, another cool thing is that we can check the historical award of badges. So we we've been doing bad just so long, it it's like a thing at our school.
Right? Like, you can get a Marigold award, you can get, like, a science team year of the year award or a teacher of the year award or or whatever. And those are like big deal. Right? So when the ASI is trying to decide who get the award for the next year, sometimes they forget who they've given it to. So they can go back and they can check next day. Oh, okay.
These are the people that have had the award before. I wanna give it to someone different because usually they try and, like, you know, spread the love because the badges are so, you know, coveted. And so they they can check, and they can see who got that award. And as long as we've been giving out that badge, they can see who got that badge, you know, all those years. And then the really cool part, which is kind of new for us, I feel like, is, the integration with Canvas keeps a record of the work submitted to earn that badge.
Right? So if a student or and when I say a student, I mean like an adult student, like a teacher student, the teachers are my students. So if one of my students, which is an adult, submits an assignment And to and they earn a badge, you know, I can always go back and say, this is what they did to earn that you know, to demonstrate that they were competent enough to earn the badge for this skill. So that's kinda cool too that we can have that. And we make them, you know, submit everything in, and they still try and do you know, we don't let our students submit work via email, but gosh. They think they try and, you know, email me in.
I'm like, you gotta put it in a canvas. You gotta put it in canvas because the bad auto awards based on your campus grade. Right? And so if they email it to me, okay. Cool. But I can't get you your badge that way, and you can't you know, we don't have any VR headsets to give away, but you can't, I guess, stay employed that way.
Which is goals better than a PR headset. Right? So here's the first one. Teachers can easily track their progress. So I don't know if you guys can see this very well, but, and again, when I say teachers, I mean, students. Right? So this is one of my coaches.
I always like to put her in a course and have her submit fake stuff to see if it's working. And then she sends me screenshots of, like, what it looks like to her. So this was a course, we just recently transferred to Zoom, like, literally in May, so we wanted to make sure it worked correctly. And so I had her in there. I submitted fake stuff, and I gave her great.
Or she submitted stuff and give her grades. So this and it's kinda like what you see, right, when you look at the swag pathway on your phone, you see that list of all the badges that you've earned, and it looks like a for long ways because it's on your phone, but it's, you know, if it was on the computer, it wouldn't be that long. And then at the very bottom, you can check your pathway progress. If you click on it, You can see the badges that you've earned in your progress towards possibly winning the VR headset. Right? And then on the, on the right, you can see, you know, that's that's what you see when you click on the the pathway.
Right? And that and you guys have experience if if you're doing the the swag thing. I I really did not know that they were gonna have a swag pathway, but it's very handy because now you guys all have experience with earning badges doing pathway so you know kinda how it works. The cool thing is is that admin can also check your progress. So If I'm going in here, and this is like from the the adult view, like the teacher view. We can see that Corinne, she's one of our teacher one of our instructional technologists You can see that she did everything, and she turned in all of her stuff, and she's like, good to go.
And then you can see that knee over there. I haven't turned in anything. I wrote the course, but I didn't turn anything in. So I don't I don't have a badge. Right? And and if my boss can see I I have it now, by the way, but my boss can see that that, I earned I'd earned the badge or I didn't earn the badge and and can come and say, Hey, you think they might wanna do that? Cause if it's due next week or, you know, whatever.
And then they can make sure that they have that skill for, like, Zoom meetings or demonstrate. And you can also see here that is this does this work? Oh, yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Cool. Okay. So you can see that the only thing we actually required was to rate assignment. Right? So they had to do certain things in Zoom. They had to, show a PowerPoint play a video with sound and do some other thing, like annotate or show a whiteboard or something, turn on the captions.
And that's all we really require. Right? Cause we knew that we had a lot of teachers that have already used Zoom before because, hello, we've had COVID. Right? So and I didn't wanna make those teachers do all this stuff that they already knew. You know? So we made the demonstrate was the only thing that was required. On the pathway.
So if you did the demonstrate assignment and nothing else, you got the overall badge, and you were good to go. But let's say you've never used Zoom before, because we do have those teachers that, like, you know, they teach online, but I I don't know how. You know? And and so they might need more stuff. And so we gave them the option. We said, okay.
Have you ever used Zoom before? No. Okay. Then you might wanna take the getting started with zoom course. And honestly, they were really honest about it. You know, like, I didn't have a lot of people that tried to go straight to demonstrate and just like totally screwed it up and had to go back.
Like, I didn't have that many people to try to do that. You know? Like, they were really honest. Like, I really don't know what I'm doing. And so they could do getting started. And then let's say you've used it a little bit, but not really, like, taught in it, but you know, like, how to, like, open the browser and turn it on and that kind of stuff.
Then maybe you want the in engaging students and the demonstrate, you know, so so the kid the the teachers could choose what they wanted. And how much they needed to learn. So they didn't have to do all of the things because I'm the worst busy work person in the whole world. And the last thing I wanna do is make our teachers that are super busy and have so much going on force them to do something that they already know how to do. You know? So if they can spend two minutes and show me what they need to know in the video, and some of them, like, I said two minutes or less, they send me these, like, thirty minute videos.
I'm I don't really wanna know about the American Revolution. Like, I just wanna see that you can, like, show a PowerPoint, you know, do the things, but they did this, like, whole lesson. But you can play it two times speed and speed grader, just so you know. And so that's kinda the pathway we did for that. So we can make things optional.
We can make them required And so they, again, they could choose what they wanted to do. That's that's our big thing is, like, let's not make the teachers do things that they don't have to do because they're not gonna be engaged and they're not gonna enjoy it. So here's the reading like a rubric. And this is a more difficult difficult, like, more complicated pathway. This is for a new instructor preparation course.
So these are that are new to us. They might be new to online. They might not be new to online, but we teach them policy, and we make sure we have a very, like, we have a template for our courses, and we have a specific way that we like our teachers to do things to make sure that the experience is seamless between all of our kids. We have places where you can customize it, but we don't want, like, finding the modules page to be the place where you're customizing it. Like, we want all the kids to know how to get to the models, how to grade, how to get to the link for their live learning sessions.
So we have some stuff that we need to teach them how to do and make sure they know how to do it correctly. And so that's kinda what this is. We need this pathway aligned to the NSU, the national standards for online teaching. And, if I were to open this, it would show, like, all sorts of stuff But you can see, like, for the professional presence, there's some things that we, ask them to do, and this is, like, so tiny on here, but you can only see if I can make it bigger. So I can understand that.
Okay. So you can see right here what we're looking at is the earned five of the seven badges in this category, and you can see I've got a couple things in there. And so they can pick, like, what they want in there. And they have to get, like, an eighty or above or something like that. And so, you know, if they don't do well on a quiz, whatever, you know, like, everyone gets a hundred on a discussion, right, as long as you reply to your peers.
I mean, these are adults, so they're not they're not putting things like, I agree. You know? Two plus two is four. I agree. And so they can see what's required. They can see what's optional.
Once they get, like, the professional presence part, they get that little mini badge, you know, those, like, moments of fun or moments of whatever badges that they're giving the little mini badges, you can, you know, they can get the mini badge. They can track the progress. They can see where they're at. And every single person that filled out the new teacher survey, which is approximately four, of the sixteen, said that they use the pathway to track their progress through the course. Now, of course, these are probably our, like, you know, type a a plus teachers because they're the only ones that actually filled out the survey.
But they enjoyed it. I don't know if they enjoyed it, but they they used the progress. They used it. And you can see every single assignment, you can see, like, what it says on there. So this one says, the teacher created and updated their LinkedIn profile and tied their personal badger to their GABS badge.
So that was like that assignment. And then we have little emojis here, and you can see like anything that had a, like, magnifying glass emoji was required. So you had to earn that badge because that's a non negotiable skill. That we need you to have when you're setting up your course. Anything that has like a little red push pin is a boring assignment that is just follow the instructions to the letter, and that's that.
And then anything that has, like, a little, like, art thing, art palette thing. It means that you can, like, inject some creativity into that assignment. So they knew going into the assignment because we got we had some questions for folks. That they they knew going into the assignment that it was going to be boring, but, you know, it was it was a follow the instructions, and that's that's what you need to do kind of assignment. So is that? What's that? But they could, you know, they could see where they needed to go in the course, you know, like the very first day, they could see where they're going.
Yes. Yes. Well, well, there's There's a badge for the course, and there's a badge for each assignment. In our school does it kind of a a weird way. Do you see how all of those, like, badges for the same, standard.
They look exactly the same. So I don't have to make, like, seven thousand different badges. I think the lord, right? I just it that's all the badges for that standard. They all look the same And then the one the, like, mini badge about that standard, like so if you can see, like, their little rocket ships, It's like a space theme for little rocket ships, and then you can see, like, the little NSQ logo thing on the rocket ship. And then the mini the mini mini badge is just like the little hands or, you know, like the little logo.
Yeah. That would be cool. You can't do that, but you can link the assignment to the badge. So if a student gets a sixty five on the assignment, they don't get the badge. If a student, if you do it in point, If you do it in percent, I learn it multiplies it by like a thousand, and they get sixty five thousand out of a hundred, and then they they all everyone gets bad.
So you have to do points. I I learned that the hard way this summer. So if you do it by points, then, you know, but then if they get, like, a ninety five and your threshold is in eighty, they automatically get the batch. And so it's kind of tied to the rubric, but not exactly if that makes sense. You know? Okay.
And so it allows choice. I know I say this like every single slide. I feel like I said, choice. Choice. But the teachers can choose what they wanna complete, you know.
So they can say, and honestly, most of our teachers, they'd, like, try all of them. They do all of the things because that's just, you know, that's who we hire because we hire great teachers. But, they can. Like, if they don't do really well on a quiz or something, that's okay. It's not gonna, like, ruin their life because we had to think about it If you have to get the badge to be able to teach, you have to make the badge giddable.
Right? We can't, like, say, like, have, like, one thing, like, say this professional presence assignment is required, and you don't do that assignment, then you don't get the badge, Well, that's because that's really important. We have to have a, you know, they can turn, and we have to have a way for them to do it. Right? Like getting a seventy five on one quiz shouldn't preclude you from being able to teach with us. Right? So, and and we allow, like, multiple submissions and stuff like that if they do it wrong and, you know, that's part of the process. You know, I don't expect them to turn in everything right the first time.
So some of these, we we require, you know, because it's a non negotiable skill. Like, we have, All of our, like, professional stuff, I guess, at our school is tied to a specific yammer group called professional learning. And so we need every single person, gaz, that's an adult to join the pro professional learning group, and that's how we keep things on the students. So if we have, like, videos, we don't want students to see your files, we don't want students to see, we we tie them to the professional learning group. So we need every single teacher to join that So we literally ask them to join the group and submit a screenshot of them in the group.
And that's, you know, that's the thing. Because we it's that important. Right? And so that's a required one. That's that's required. But, like, which discussion you do? I I don't care.
You know, like, I I want you to get practice with it, but I don't care which one you do. And so you can also check the historical awards Total I feel like I'm totally switching gears, of the badgers. I didn't put these in a very good order. And so you can see, like, this is had to blur it out because it has the people's names on it. And I wanna, you know, protect their privacy even though they they earned something.
So we we're working through, Georgia's really into, like, personalized learning, what you could tell. But, so one of the things that we're doing is our instructors can get a personalized learning endorsement for free. And so when they get the endorsement, they can send me their, like, schedule or whatever, like, their transcript, and I give them a badge, and then they can, you know, so they can that was on the pathway for, like, professional learning. Right? That was part of it. That was one of the things that they had done.
So we can we can look back. And I I talked to you about the teacher of the year one already. Okay. So, again, it it keeps track of the work earned to earn the badge. So you can see here, here's all of our assignments.
Right? And I can click on that badge And then I can click on one of our people, and then I can click on her assignment or his assign. I don't remember if it's a girl or a boy, but And you can see the assignment. You can see the comments I left them. You can see the feedback, you know, the rubric. It's all right there, and it's tied to that badge.
So anybody comes over my shoulder, you know, and says, oh, the heck did this teacher get by you? Oh, what? I mean, their work is good. Right? I I don't know what they're doing once they left me, but but the work was good for me. You know? So we have that, that record of what they did. So that's kind of neat too. And so the challenge is so, obviously, it's not all rainbows and butterflies.
There's gotta be something that's not perfect. Right? Creating the pathway can be time consuming. Creating the badges requires creativity and time. The creativity part I struggle with, well, the time too, I guess. But, it feels like the creativity part's harder.
And then, training again, like I mentioned, training the teachers to check that pathway for the progress. They're getting better at it now because we've been using them for a couple years, but they were you know, and and then again, the buy in of, like, like, I told you, they, like, I really want the miracle badge or the, you know, Science teacher or the ear badge, but But that was a, you know, that's a culture that we've kind of developed where the badges are important to them. They're not tracked. You know. So let's talk a little bit about it.
So this is our master teacher pathway. And look how long it is. It's crazy. Right? It's so long. And the reason is, to earn the master teacher badge, you get a raise.
Right? You have to have taught with us for five years any good of race. So it's important. It's really important. But there's so many things that we offer and so many things that they could do to, meet the different parts of the pathway that, we had to put all those things on there. Right? If say, like, teacher of the year, instructionally teacher or science teacher of the year, whatever, all of that counts as like leadership or something, then you could, you know, you could put it there.
And this is it keeps looping, so it's really not like a never ending pathway. I I don't know if you didn't notice me that, but, but so we can put all this different stuff in there. Right? And and we can give them all these and so you can you can really make the choice as much as possible. Like, you know, and it's also for something for every three years they have to renew. This is like three years worth of PD on here too.
So that's another reason why it's super long. But the cool thing is, you know, now that we have this pathway, We can just choose, like, make copy, and it makes a copy for the next year, and then we can just adjust it a little bit, you know, and then it's done. And and can you imagine, like, I don't even know. What did you guys do before this? Like, have a spreadsheet? Like, I mean, can you imagine trying to, like, keep track of, like, okay, this counts for this section, and this counts for this. I don't it would be, like, a nightmare.
You know, but here, you just load the people in, and it automatically populates, and they see exactly what they need to finish, and they see exactly what they've got, and what counts, what's you know, what's working and what's not. And then and then once it once you've made it, then you can copy it, you know, over and over. Next year and the next year, next year. So this is, so the creating creativity and time We do have some guidelines in place for our badges, for our student badges, but the teacher badges are a little more wide open. Sort of.
Don't tell me what the view you want. But they're, you know, I I have some flexibility with what I can do for the badges. And I always wanna make them, like, fun interesting, like, oh, I got this cool badge. So I try not to make them all look exactly the same because I want it to be like, you know, when they look at their badge page, if they ever do, It's like this rainbow of fun things that they've done. And so and you can see that, like, my thought process Sometimes it struggles a little bit.
Like, do you see this, like, the gatsby in the suit and, like, these random kids, like, this, this is, like, orange square with a like, what is going on here, you know? And you can see so one of the things we have to do is is, like, for our events, we have a theme. So we have to I almost have to, like, decide on the theme before I do the batch, and sometimes as I'm making the batch, it kind of helps me decide on the theme. Like, this was a lunch and learn. So I was like, oh, we're gonna do, like, zoom into Zoom. And I was like, okay, that's boring.
And I was like, oh, I like rainbows. Let's see that. And then I was like, okay, that's nobody wants that. Nobody like that one. My test group so then we did this, like, big zoom, and I was, like, and there was, like, oh, it's lunch alerts this summer.
We'll have an ice cream. And each layer of the ice cream could be I mean, I spent hours on that one. Everybody hated it. They hated the ice cream. I was so upset because I spent so much time on the ice cream.
And they was like, oh, ice cream and rainbows. There we go. There we go. Nobody like that either. And so then we went with this cruising theme.
And so then I was like, oh, let's do a life wrap, life wrap, and I was like, oh, that might be frustrating. Me to this beach, and then we ended up with this passport theme. So, like, each session you went to, you got a stamp on the passport. And then at the end, you got the badge that had, like, all all the stuff on it, and it had our new mascot. And you would not believe how long it took to put a Hawaiian shirt on that freaking frog.
It's forever. Like, oh my gosh. And so you could see that the badge is, like, like, this one was kinda messy. Right? And then it it just became a little smoother. And then you could see we had this, like, nice, like, HD globe, but then this is, like, kind of like a flat I don't know.
I used that, and I put it everywhere. And then, like, the next week, I was like, I don't like that. So I I made a new one, and then I had to re put it everywhere. Luckily, it wasn't released yet or anything. But, so that that part takes a long time for me because it it I think some things are like a really great idea and obviously, you know, like the ice cream and rainbows, and and nobody else does.
So then I have to go back. But it helps me kind of solidify my theme and, like, all of that kind of stuff too. So it's I mean, it's a it's a process. I know whatever the first thing I think of for the badge is not gonna be the thing. And I just know that.
So training the teachers to check the pathway. So, I don't know if you guys get these questions. What do I need to do? What counts for this requirement? Where do I stand? Is this required? Does this how, you know, all these type of questions I get, like, emails. And, I mean, we don't have a ton of teachers, but two hundred fifty teachers is kind of a lot, and most of them are adjuncts. So, you know, Are they paying attention, well, or not? You know? So we we get a lot of questions.
So I and I get these a lot. But far fewer. And since we start our new teachers with the pathway and everything like that, we've noticed that there's less and less questions, like, because they're used to the way. They're used to the badges. They're used to checking it.
And so it, you know, it kinda helps. So, slowly, slowly where yeah. Right? I know how to check my pathway, if only. You know? But You guys think I'm kidding for every single online conference we have, I have a fake badge that so they can practice scanning the QR code. And when they scan the QR code, it has the guy, you know, like, little feral from elf, and he's like, you did it.
You did it. And they so they can practice because otherwise, someone's gonna say, I don't know how to use a QR code. So So again, why do they care about it? Why why is this better? And so you can see it kinda it came in really fast. But remember, we used to have to keep that log. It was like a written log.
And you had to write. Like, I went to a faculty meeting, and it was, like, one hour. And my, you know, my principals signed on it or whatever. And it was just like this long paper log. And if you lost it, good luck.
Right? Because you weren't gonna get credit. For any of that stuff again. You don't have to do that, right? Cause it's all in the pathway. It's all right there. And then, And so and then you don't have to do these certificates.
Right? You don't have like, we used to have to do this thing. We're like, rolling line. Right? So we would do, like, like a suicide prevention, let's say, course. And, then we'd have to, like, label our certificate with, like, our last name and our first name and this, like, very specific thing, and we had to upload it to this very specific folder, and then someone would check it off. You don't have to do that.
You just I got the badge, so I'm I'm done. Right? I did it. So you don't have to worry about that. So it's a little easier. For their side, but, right, because they don't have to check my certificate in my side because I don't have to upload anything.
So it's it's nice. So okay. Now, I have this video that I made of a bad batch pathway course in Canvas. And, one of the things I hate more than anything is listening to myself when I've been recorded. So if I'm grimacing, that's that's what's going on here.
Now what I'd like to do is give you a tour of our new instructor preparation course for our brand new instructors. So if we go over here and click on batches, on the left navigation bar, it will take us to the Vaging dashboard where we can view all of our batch data directly in the course. You can see all of our assignments in the course here. Each one is tied to a badge. You can also see the progress of the cohort through the course.
You can also track badges earned outside the course. I awarded this one annually to track their completion of the ferpa course. We just started this course, so they haven't earned a lot of badges yet. You can also the different trigger criteria for the badges. Clicking on the pathway allows you to track students progress through the pathway.
Here can see the entire pathway. Some badges are required, and some are in a group or a number of badges from the group must be earned. You can select a student the course and track their individual progress on the pathway. You can see this student has completed thirty one percent of the course. You can see the badges she's earned and still needs to earn.
When she clicks on the badges, can also see this view. So she always has a good idea of what she's done and where she needs to go. If we go back to badges and way progress and click on lunar progress, we can see her progress displayed in a different way. She can also see this screen. If we go back to Bandison way progress again and click on a badge, you can see more about that badge.
This one is a badge that was awarded based on attendance at a live session, so as soon I mark through tenants, the badge released. This one is tied to an assignment with the same name. You can see the trigger criteria here and individual learner progress here. Again, just started the course, so many aren't quite here yet, but we do have a few that have earned this badge. And you can see that on the next page.
If you click on badge details, you can see what the learner had to do to earn the badge. And of course, because this is a canvas course, we can click on the assignment and see their submission right here. So everything is in one place. If you go to the syllabus page, you can see discuss the pathway on the syllabus page as well. We explain that they need to complete the pathway to move on from the course.
Last thing that's pretty neat. The course will automatically check for badges at what seems to be random times, but if you have just finished grading a chunk of submissions, you can actually go to badges and click update now, and it will force update, including all those assignments you just created. So this was just a brief overview of how we use badges in Canvas for professional development. And I'm not kidding when I see random times. It's like three thirty six AM.
It's always a different time. So, but it's kinda cool how you could see. It's like all in there, and they can, you know, they can always point. So what are my tips after dealing with this? I mean, using it for a while. Use Canva If you don't have Canva, like, I'm telling you get the canva.
It's free. It's literally free for educators. You can get, like, the super version that has all the things if you're a teacher. You get all the extra teacher y stuff too. It's it's totally worth it for, you know, free.
Yeah. We now have the Nice. I haven't done that before. And you can, one of my friends, she likes to map out the pathway before she publishes it she like, gets like a PowerPoint file and like makes like a flowchart and stuff. I don't do that.
I just make the pathway and start putting stuff on it and figuring it out and moving stuff around, and then I publish it, and then it's not working quite right, and then I move it around anyway. Because I forget to publish it to let someone else see it. And then talk it out, which we'll talk about in a minute, which is that's really important. And then test test test always always, like, have folks tested about. And then think about what you care about, and then also I don't know if I mentioned this before, but choice.
Okay. So Canva is great for designing badges. Like I said, it's free for educators upload your brand fonts, your colors, your images. So, like, I have the, you know, the hex codes or whatever for our school, so I can make everything look like all schooly. And then you can collaborate with others.
And I I don't know if you guys can get this. I'll figure out a way to get this to you, but I made an example badge template for you guys to use, and so we'll figure out a way to get this for you. I kinda thought that they would already have, like, PowerPoints, like because I had to upload it, like, you know, like, a long time ago, that they would have it somewhere for you guys to look at, but, no. So, but I'll I'll figure it out. I promise.
And then, this is what I'm talking about. Mapping the pathway before you publish it and and just FYI, because I tried this, you have to publish the pathway to link it to the Canvas course, and you also have to publish the Canvas course. To link it to the pathway, which I tried to do that a couple times without doing that. And I was like, why can't I find my stuff? And then again, like I just I and I I try and share it with others to say, like, if they can poke holes in it, which is kinda my next thing, in the talking it out is, find your people. Right? These people that do not mind that you ask them Lots of questions.
Like, do you like a rainbow ice cream badge? And they say no. And then listen to what they say because they're usually right. And so these are, you know, I have two people usually that I I I I put things to. And and one of them, Elizabeth. She's one of my coaches.
She's so good because I'm one of those people, like, you know, I have an idea. And by tomorrow at noon, it's gonna be done. Because I it's I'm I'm doing it, and I'm there, and I'm hyper focused, and it's done. And so I always try and at ask her, because she'll say, have you thought about how that's gonna work? Oh, no. So she's really good because she she thinks all of the the what ifs that I don't think about.
And then again, Greer, she's the other one. She she's the one that's like, yes, cruises. You know, yes. So but it's good to have both of them, to, like, to, to ask about stuff. So I I always ask them to put hold in my stuff try and put holes in it because you know your teachers are gonna poke a hole in whatever you've done.
So I would really, really like them to poke the holes first before the teachers do it because, you know, that's the last thing I want. And then again, like testing it. So this is Elizabeth again, you can try it with test student, but it doesn't really work because you can't see the badges of test student is getting because test student doesn't have an email. And doesn't have a badger account. So I always put, like, Elizabeth in here as a student and have her, like I said, do stuff, and I wanna make sure, you know, that the badger populate correctly, and let's say I give her a low score, like, make sure that she doesn't get the badge anyway, like, multiply by a thousand percent thing.
And so I I, you know, I wanna check that. Two minutes is what that means? Yeah. Okay. And then the I'm almost done. I swear.
And then, Gash. This is the third time this year you've been sent -- What do y'all care about? Right? Out. And so I always think about this part of the incredible -- -- constructive outline. -- where Dash says, like, everyone's special. There's no one special.
Right? My pro So so what we what is important? It won't be the best. What's the important? Dashing, Robert. You are an incredibly competitive boy. And a bit of a show. And so it's so elastic.
What is important? What do they want to? Do you? I'm gonna ask. We don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do? Right now, honey. The world just wants us to fit in and to fit in. We just gotta be like everybody else.
Our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made it a special. Very long. Every place you know. I only have two minutes left.
Which is another way she so that's what he says. He said, when everyone no one is. So, like, you don't wanna badge, like, all of the things. I mean, we do badge like the individual assignments, but they know that those badges don't, you know, they just progress to the most important one, which is the big one. You know? And so what what do we care about? What's what's required? What's optional? What do we want them to do? And then again, like I said, choice.
Let them choose what they want to learn. And I will try and tell the story like super super quick. I one time, was teaching at a school, and we had someone that maybe, like, made the principal angry, And so is in retaliation, he made us all do this, all this professional development, like all these courses. And I taught AP, environmental science and physics, and I had to sit in an hour session on how to make a foldable Right? Like a month before the AP exam. And I was like, oh my god.
I'd like the worst attitude in that thing. Like, why am I learning how to fold paper? I need to be grading effort queues. Like, what the heck? And and I I was not invested. I didn't engage in the whole session. You know, I had that bright attitude sitting in the back, And it was it wasn't fair to the presenter, right? Cause she had to deal with me.
And and it wasn't fair to me because I shouldn't have had to be there. So So let them choose what works best for them, the PL that works best. Like, why couldn't I have gone to, like, a PL on, like, how to grade FRQs, or how to prepare kids for the AP exam, right? It's still it's still learning. Right? So that's that's kind of the deal. It's let them choose.
And so the last thing is we made a special badge for you guys. So you guys can get a badge from the Georgia Virtual ecosystem or whatever, and you can get poor little sad Gabsby. And then, like I said, I will are are they gonna put these presentations, like, online, like, the PowerPoint? Okay. Here we go. Cool.
So then you will get the resources. I don't mind claiming a badge on my phone, but I really, really, really don't like getting, like, powerpoints and, like, you know, like, files and stuff on my and I feel like it's it's hard to read. It's too much. Yeah. So, your teachers benefit any of those get badges to their department of education using some professional development that they can really add.
So we do. This is how we, when we renew their certificates, This is how we keep track of their professional learning that they need to renew their certificate. In addition, I'm trying to get them to put it all in one place then they can like print it out, you know, all of us are adjuncts, right, almost all of them. So they can send it to their face to face school and go, look at all this stuff I did. Right? Because that's part of their observation, right, that they're face to face school is like doing professional learning.
So that's my hope, but I don't know if they do. But they're always gonna have that badger account. Right? Cause you can tie, like, I have my personal email tied to my badger. So, like, I did, like, a learning how to advocate for your kid IEP course. And it's it's in my badger, even though it's not from Gap.
Yeah. We do have like a log, you know, that like keeps track of that kind, but like in our internal system that that you could print out, I guess, an individual certificate for it. It's not official one. You know, it's not like official from the course because they have the badge, but it's an open badge. So, like, you know, anyone can go see what they had to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can see what they had to do to get that badge. I don't know.
Nope. But, I mean, we've been using it. So long. Like, I think we're, like, grandfathered into some stuff, and I don't know. That's not my deal.
Paying is not my deal. I don't know. I don't know. Let your users -- Yeah. -- download JSON.
Oh, there you go. Yeah. And I and I have mine, you know, to my personal. So if I were to log in with my personal email, I would see all my Gabs badges, even if we stopped offering it, I guess. Yeah.
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