Technology Enhanced Learning were thrilled recently to award the first TEL Champion badge. Open badges have been awarded for a range of TEL workshops over the last year and Lucia Guzman from the Sussex Centre for Language Studies (SCLS)  is the first to collect the 5 badges necessary to earn TEL Champion recognition.

We asked Lucia to tell us about her experience with Open Badges.

At the beginning, I was not aware of the purpose of open badges. I was doing a Spanish online program for teachers development and every time I completed one of the 7 modules, I  obtained a badge. These were gathered in my course account but I did not know what to do with these until I met Anne Hole at her workshop about Digital note-making and bookmarking tools. It was then when I realised that this was an innovatiive form of showing your achievements throughout the internet and was inspired to start collecting badges.

There are many different ways of displaying open badges. Twitter, Facebook and Googleplus are some of the social networking services that allow you easily to public your badges. Moreover during my TEL experience, I learnt how to publish my achievements in LinkedIn . The badges get recorded on your profile as part of your experience or certifications. It is the new way of building a CV. Every open badge has important data built in that links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence.

Lucia Guzman

Lucia found that collecting badges was motivating and added to her learning.

The topics of the workshops were really enhanced and interesting; that was the first thing that grabbed my attention. I booked a few in a row and after the first impression I signed up for more. When Anne explained about the badges I got involved in achieving the TEL Champion badge. It was a plus of motivation to develop myself in teaching and learning, assessment and technology use.

Once you attend the workshop it is very easy to obtain a badge. I only had to claim it, to complete a short form and to create evidence using one of the tools introduced during the session. Which is great because it is a way to start putting in practice the knowledge I have learnt.

The Lights, Camera, Apption workshop showed Lucia how to make a WeVideo and she created this one to tell more of her TEL badges story.

Now that she has the TEL Champion badge Lucia isn’t going to stop collecting TEL badges.

The workshops I have attended lately were productive and useful and thanks to Anne, Kitty Horne and Pete Sparkes who were receptive and good communicators, I have learnt a lot of leading edge tools to improve my skills as a teacher. The University of Sussex affords a great variety of events and exciting courses. I love the upcoming Take 5 offer. Technology is everywhere and always changing. The Take 5 program looks amazing. Despite running my own website and blog, there are still a lot of things I want to learn. It is great that these courses will be online, so I will be able to work on them even if I am away. I am definitely looking forward to collecting the Take 5 badges.

In the Autumn term a new programme of TEL workshops will be announced and staff will be able to start or continue collecting badges towards a TEL Champion badge. In the meantime, you can earn badges on each of the Take 5 bitesize online courses which focus on Blogs, Twitter, Apps, Podcasting and Open.

If you would like to find out more about Open Badges there is background information on the TEL website or you can contact tel@sussex.ac.uk