“I want to dip my feet into badging. I want to introduce it very simply with not a whole lot for me to manage on my end. I want to hold the students accountable for earning it, but don’t want to have a lot to keep track of. Can you help me with this?”
Yes, yes I can. And I did. Before I explain the workflow and embed the documents, etc. I want to layout a piece of background info. The teacher is utilizing Google Classroom, which makes this process very organized, in my opinion.
I started out with an activity connected to what they are working on. This activity was posted in Google Classroom as an assignment, with no due date and it made a ‘Copy for Each Student’.
I designed a simple badge using Google Drawing and made sure that I did: ‘File’, ‘Publish to the Web’ so I could get a link to the image for later use with FormMule.
Now students had the option to complete this for a badge. This also gave the teacher the ability to check their work, leave comments in the Doc (if they wanted) and finally give them a “code word” (via ‘Private Comment’ in Google Classroom) when completed to enter for a badge.
Another item which was attached to the original ‘Assignment’ was a Google Form (embedded below). This Form collected the student’s email address, name, and code word. Using FormMule in the response Sheet, an email is generated to the student which contains their earned badge (an example email follows the Form).
The big key (other than setting a “code” for FormMule to accept), was the html code: <img src=”Publish to the Web URL from Google Drawing” alt=”badge”> entered into the body of the email template, this way the image displays in the message and isn’t added on as an attachment.
The student receives the badge in their email, now what? Great question. There was a third item attached to the assignment in Google Classroom. The Doc below shows four things the student could do with their badge.
Students loved this activity, I think the percentage was about 93% earned the badge. The teacher felt there wasn’t a whole lot to manage on their end and would like to sit down and look at another activity setup similarly to this one.