Fun with QR Codes

QR codes are everywhere and chances are, your students have the means and the know-how to use them.  As I said in my BYOT post, technology is here and you can either embrace it in the classroom, or expend a lot of energy swimming against the current!  QR codes are a great way to cut out the confusion of finding and managing materials while also using students tablets and mobile devices in a useful, meaningful way.

For those who are new to QR codes, it is a scannable image that contains alphanumeric information.  Your mobile phone or tablet device reads the information and understands it as either a web URL, calendar event, plain text, address or link to media, then takes you directly to that site.  For students, it's a great way to guide them to a website or document without copying lengthy addresses from another source.

For example, this is a QR code for this blog.  If you scan it with a mobile device, it will take you directly to this blog with no typing or copying required.

There are countless sites on the web that generate the codes for free.  Once you have the code, you can insert it into documents, posters, business cards and websites.  For our purposes, we created poetry Glogs featuring our favorite poems.  Because Glogs are best viewed online, we showcased them to the school community online.  Each student received a QR coded link to their Glog and we made flyers and cards to share with others.  This way, parents and other students can see the Glogs without actually walking past a bulletin board display.

If you have used QR codes in your classroom, or if you have ideas for other ways to use them, please leave a comment below!