Peer to Peer University (P2PU) has a variety of badges. In Language Arts, many are connected to the National Writing Project's "Youth Voices" site. Students can earn badges through assessment by the badge creator (some times it appears to be an NWP teacher) or by a peer who earned the badge. The student applying for the badge can see samples of work that already earned the badge.
Several P2PU badges might help students reach learning objectives in Fundamental Reading:
- Digested Reader (reading whole books and writing about it)
- Independent Reading (citing and discussing books and articles read)
- Thank You for Listening (could be after paired reading in Reading Apprenticeship)
- Bluntness (reading, writing, speaking where you tell it like it is)
Thinking about the Reading Fundamentals course, where students are encouraged to do independent reading in order to improve fluency and develop self-confidence as readers, I am investigating this badge:
Here are the badge tasks:
Looking for more info. on #5 "show demonstrable proof..." I scrolled down and found:
Following the Independent Reading link (a link to another reading badge)
I found this:
To find"four tasks" and what to do about quoting and citing (incomplete description) I clicked on the url and found:
The material on the left side seems easy to enough to apply and use assuming I already know how to use those four reading strategies.
The material on the right is more structured. There are set four tasks with time requirements (2 hours of reading followed by 30 minutes of writing for each). For writing I could use free write or use an online writing guide with a madlibs/close structure. The goal is to create google document links to share in the Youth Voice discussion forum as evidence of my progress. Responding to peer postings in the discussion forum is part of the process as well. This is a 10-hour project with multiple instructions at multiple steps.
To evaluate the peer review option, I posted a functional version of a writing about a book that meets the requirements on the left, above, to see what feedback I get, or whether I have to do the fully structured option on the right, above, to earn the badge.
Here is what it looks like as a badge project on the P2PU site:
I had a little trouble submitting the badge after filling out the fields. I thought I had submitted my project (I clicked the green submit button) but when I checked my badge dashboard there was nothing there:
It turned out I needed to upload an image:
I note that the P2PU web sample shows the peer review took place two weeks after submission. I am interested to see what the reviewing time will be, although to be fair, it's August and most teachers are offline. About an hour after submission I did get an auto confirmation by email:
Concerns in mind about this foray into 3d party badging, as I progress:
Concerns in mind about this foray into 3d party badging, as I progress:
- the criteria for this sample P2PU badge was not transparent
- understanding how to earn the badge required advanced online hunting
- there is no information about the badge creator or way to contact them
- it's not clear if students will be evaluated by a teacher or by a peer (how much peer traffic?)
- there may be a time lag between submission and award that stretches beyond the 10 week term
- the structured option takes students to the "Youth Voices" site - would older students feel shame treating middle and high school students as "peers" and lose interest in the online collaboration
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