Completion certificates are an excellent resource to use with students in your classroom as a motivator or supplement within a student’s educational career.
However, many teachers either miss this feature of AES’ curriculum or are unsure how to use it in their classrooms.
In this article, you’ll learn what a student certificate is, as well as the 3 most common ways that teachers use them in their classrooms.
What Are Student Certificates?
Student certificates are PDFs that you can generate for students that have completed entire learning modules.
The certificate has several important components, including the student’s name and the date of their course or module completion.
As the teacher, you can choose from several settings to determine how the certificate will generate:
Generate for an individual student or entire class
Generate for an individual module or for all completed modules in the class
Select the score students must obtain on a module to receive a certificate
These certificates can have several potential uses in your classroom.
What Are Ways You Can Use Student Certificates?
Student Portfolios
CTE students often create portfolios of their achievements, projects, and completed courses as they explore their education pathway.
These portfolios are helpful to include alongside resumes, and do a good job of encapsulating a student’s accomplishments.
By having students add AES completion certificates to their portfolios, you can help them expand their list of achievements in order to secure more educational or employment opportunities.
Student Motivation
Rewarding students for their hard work can be a decisive factor in getting them motivated about their education.
Frequently, teachers hang up their students’ completion certificates in their classrooms or in the hallways of their schools. In that way, certificates can serve as a trophy that helps students get a tangible sense of their progress.
By presenting student certificates as a hard-earned award, you can help your students feel accomplished in their education and motivate them to keep up the good work!
Pass/Fail Grades
AES’ mission is to save as much time for teachers as possible, and we design certain features of our digital courses with that philosophy in mind.
Because you can set the minimum passing grade for a module, looking at the number of certificates that have been generated is a quick way to determine which students passed or failed the module.
This works great for classes that are not based on a letter or number grade, still leaving the student with something tangible that they passed the class.
Now that you have an idea of how completion certificates can be used, the next step is learning how to create them for your students: