Using Badges to Encourage Work Completion

[jessicah_miller]

Very often times, I find myself promising a child "something in return" in an effort to get them to complete their work. Like "hey, if you'll do this make up assignment, I'll drop your lowest test score." Sometimes it works, sometimes, if they didn't care about the grade in the first place- they aren't going to care now. I teach a group of 120 students, at times even more. I don't always have the resources to buy prizes and I don't like throwing extra credit like free samples at Cosco. I was recently introduced to CanvaBadges at a class I took, where I received a few badges for some course completion. I get to stick them on my email signature and they show up in my Canvas profile. 

Many video games nowadays also give you badges for levels and challenges completed. I know my students love to "receive things" and show off their skills, thus I have made a series of Canvas badges to help keep the competitiveness alive and well in my classroom.

These badges will be assigned for different things, Mastery of Content, project completion, weekly challenges, etc. I also have the Harry Potter houses as my small group teams, so there will also be a badge for winning the TriWizard Tournaments each quarter. I am so excited about this and I know they will be too! They can look at each others' profiles and go home and show their parents the cool badges they earned. 

To get started using CanvaBadges, you will need to enable it as an external app on your canvas course. This awesome video got me started. I also used Google Drawings to make my badges but the external app also has a badge designer you can use as well.

I hope this gives you some ideas of how to use positive reinforcement to really challenge and get your students excited about learning and completing their work!