open badges...digging deeper

update 29th Sept 2014

I have nailed my colours to the Credly mast. Long may that remain. Also playing with Moodle badges but for smoothness and ability to issue badges from my phone at a click Credly is winning hands down at the moment

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The badg.us site has been down since the weekend apparently and it got me rummaging around on the web again and I have found some things that may be of interest if you are thinking of issuing badges next year. The guy that set it up did have some server space trouble around this time last year and what he has done is remarkable but this is a crucial time for us and maybe it's time to look elsewhere...

You may also want to explore the badge options in Moodle as these can be exported too. For the moment I think there is nothing that individual users can do to author them and those that will exist seem to relate to Moodle use. Watch this space though, it may turn out to be the best option. 

https://app.achievery.com is in 'beta' format and there are definitely things that need ironing out- you need two accounts to make and receive badges for a start so I wouldn't recommend this one in its current manifestation- the badge making tool is a bit fiddly too. The badges can look nice and I also like the way the badge could actually act as a lesson plan with evidence requirements built into the issuing page: https://app.achievery.com/earned/4165 

https://www.openbadges.me/ uses the same designer software and for that reason alone I'd say avoid it for now- the simplicity of the badg.us designer tool was what appealed to me in the first place- having said that, I'm sure it'd be OK once you got to grips with it and had made a few badges. You should also note that this is designed to work as a plug in for other systems such as Wordpress. The completed badges can look very nice too: 

https://credly.com is pretty good- is great for built in icons with which to make the badges and is perfect if you want to make nice looking badges that can be issued electronically. As far as I can tell there is no facility for printing them the way I have with badg.us though and if you want to go down that route you'd best avoid it but for straightforward badge making and issuing this is the one for me. Badges can be uploaded to mozilla backpack (aka 'persona' account) easily as you can see from this collection- it's the last badge in the listr: https://backpack.openbadges.org/share/824391a6e3d2c1ac3d7660831042a461/ you can generate a code to issue to people so they can claim for themselves but the code isn't unique 

The best alternative to badg.us for printable that I have found is ForAllBadges: https://badges.forallschools.com/ - it's set up for schools but enables e-issuing and printables in pdf format. Easy upload to Mozilla backpack too. What you might really like about this one (and it's not something you can do yet in badg.us is set upl classes and it also has the facility to enable students to issue the badges to each other if you want (that appears to be a default setting so be careful)

Each student gets her/ his journal and you can set it so that they can see other people's badges in class

codes are unique in the printable pdf

if you have seen the badges I have been using you will know that the 'hard copy' badge collection has been very popular and competitive so I wouldn't want to lose that functionality and to have the classroom profiles element available too seems like a win win...until this site crashes or needs some downtime!