Digital Badges- Digital Age Teaching & Learning

        Learning today happens everywhere. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen online or out of school. Mozilla Open Badges helps solve that problem, making it easy for any organization to issue, manage and display digital badges across the web. The OBI isn't a badge issuing platform. Issuers need a system that assesses learning and awards badges within their own site.It's a lightweight specification. The concept of digital badges has been gaining momentum in states and school district initiatives across the world. Its a new standard, emerging technology also experts are calling digital badges the next 'disruptive'technology, not only for students, and also for teachers and administrators.  Digital badges are a digital credential that represents an individual's skills, interests, and achievements, and can convey academic content knowledge as well as 21st century that cannot be measured by traditional assessments. They have recently gained traction in state education, educator professional development, and initiatives.
                    The U.S. Department of Education connected Educators initiative solicited additions for a database of professional development opportunities for teachers to earn badges.The objective of Teacher Learning Journeys is to ameliorate gaps in content and pedagogical knowledge in the STEM areas through six types of activities including pedagogical content knowledge, assessment and collaboration.The purpose is to help teachers engage students more effectively in STEM subjects by making instruction more participatory and hands-on learning opportunities.
             In the high school education contexts, forward thinking educators such as Alex Halavais, Arizona State University and Daniel Hickey, Indiana University have piloted the use of badge schema to supplement or replace more traditional grading schemes in courses. Digital badges are essentially credentials which may be earned by meeting established performance criteria. A digital badge, much like its boy or girl scout's cloth sounterpart is an image or symbol representing the acquisition of specific knowledge, skills or competencies. A critical design point of the OBI is the metadata or descriptive information embedded into the digital badges provides data describing the badge issuer or authorizer, data earned, criteria for earning the badge as well as assessments. Badges may then be viewed through a "digital backpack". Educational administration faculty, visionaries in learning, have unique opportunities and challenges to become leaders in these crucial conversations, or to watch and follow as new paradigms of learning emerge.