Part of the Professional Development solution, the new Badging feature enables educators to view badge criteria, register for courses, and track their progress — all in one seamless system

Sandy, Utah — Aug. 9, 2017 — Micro-credentials and their digital representation, badges, provide a powerful way to identify, recognize, and verify an educator’s skills and competencies. Yet, tracking this information is often cumbersome, requiring individuals to use one system to manage their professional learning and another to track their badges. To provide a seamless, integrated solution for micro-credentialing, Performance Matters has introduced a new Badging feature as part of its PM Professional Development Management solution.

With Performance Matters Badging, K-12 school districts now have the ability to define, create, manage, and issue badges for professional development (PD) work. Administrators can view all available badges, including which badges need action, review, or approval. They can also view the details of any badge, such who has earned it or the status of those completing it. In addition, they can choose to automatically issue badges upon the completion of specified PD coursework, or they can manually award them after assessing the evidence submitted by the earner against the criteria.

For badge earners, the Badging feature provides a convenient way to view the criteria for any micro-credential or badge. Further, because the badges are linked to the district’s online PD catalog within the Performance Matters PM Professional Development Management solution, educators can easily register for the courses they need to earn a badge and track their progress — all in one system. It also gives badge earners an easy way to display and share an online record of their achievements.

“We created a micro-credentialing program to provide a consistent structure for developing and recognizing teacher leaders district-wide. Our biggest challenge, however, was that it required a lot of manual work to track which teachers were taking which courses, and who had completed a micro-credential and who hadn’t,” said Dr. Brent Raby, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for West Aurora School District 129 in Illinois. “Performance Matters Badging will streamline this process, which will save us time and make our program more transparent. Plus, because the Performance Matters system is so flexible, it can grow with us as our micro-credentialing program grows.”

Performance Matters Badging is compliant with the Open Badges specification. The badges can also be exported to Open Badges Backpacks or shared on social and professional platforms.

About Performance Matters

By combining powerful student and educator growth solutions with real-time analytics, Performance Matters helps K-12 school districts drive continuous improvement of instruction and learning. The Performance Matters Platform includes tools for student assessment development and delivery, as well as educator professional development, evaluation, observation, and calibration. The Performance Matters Platform is used by more than 1 million educators and 11 million students in school districts across the country. For information, visit www.performancematters.com.

Media Contact:

Leslie Eicher, APR

(314) 965-1776

Leslie@EicherCommunications.com