One of my favorite things to do is brainstorm with teachers about ideas for using technology with their students. I wish I had more time to have these kinds of conversations with people (in person or online). I almost always start with having the teacher explain what they have done in the past to teach the lesson or concept and then my brain starts spinning.
This page is going to have a “stream of consciousness” approach. I’m going to throw ideas out there and see what sticks. If you see anything of interest, grab it, tweak it, make it happen. If the idea was one inspired by someone else, I will do my best to give credit (if I can remember from where the inspiration originated).
Badge Manager for Google Sites
Our #GTAATA Hangout has been talking about managing badges for recognizing student (and teacher) achievement. Mozilla Backpack is a good option for most. However, I teach at an elementary school and Backpack cannot be used by students under 13 due to COPPA. What would be nice is a way to manage this from within our Google Apps for Education domain. Here is the idea:
Maybe create an AddOn to to a Google Sheet. The sheet would contain all the students, each with their own row. Columns would be there for each badge available. Teacher places an X in a cell when a kid earns a badge. When the AddOn runs, a script would read the sheet to get the list of badges for each student and would update some kind of repository for displaying the badge images. Maybe Google Sites for each student made with Site Maestro which would basically be used as a Badges Backpack. The script would have to have identifying information about each badge so that when it read the X for a particular column, it would know what badge image to display. It might be nice to have the ability to export the badge information when they turn 13 and push those badges out in Mozilla Backpack as well.
What do YOU think?
More ideas coming soon…