QR Adventures

Okay, so we had a big technological adventure last week in preparation for our Open House. Several months ago, one of our wonderful third grade team members visited a technology conference and came back with a myriad of seriously amazing ideas. One of them was implementing QR codes in the classroom somehow. 

Since this was our first experience with QR codes, we figured Open House was a good time to debut them; rather than using them during class time. So as Open House drew closer, we really had to focus our thought process and decide how exactly we wanted to use these codes. 

Because we are third grade teachers, the solar system plays a gigantic role in our spring curriculum. Through the solar system unit, we do a bunch of different projects with a large focus on a research-based planet powerpoint presentation. Now let me tell you, teaching third graders how to use powerpoint is its own adventure....something I would like to block out for about a year....However! The end result was pretty nice. 

The kiddos researched their assigned (i.e. drawn out of a bag) planet and filled out an outline in order to have their slides managed early on. Upon completion of the project, we teachers created a dropbox file for the documents. 

We figured that Dropbox.com was a simple to use, safe place to store the students' digital documents. We even went so far as to ensure that there was a specific account for the documents so that they were secure, though I don't believe that that is entirely necessary if you have our own Dropbox account. From there, Dropbox will assign each file its own URL, which is necessary in completing a QR code. 

All you need to do is right click on the file and select "Share Link."

This will open your link in a new tab and allow you to copy and paste the link into the QR generator of your choice. For our purposes, we used QRstuff.com. This website is incredibly easy to use and allowed us to pop out about 115 QR codes for the grade level in a school day.

Just copy your link from Dropbox into the appropriate box, select the color of your code if you wish, and then hit download or print. Again, for our purposes, we downloaded everything into a Word document and wrote their names underneath.

Because this was for Open House, we printed the codes and mounted them on cute paper for the parents to scan with their phones or tablets. All of this worked to great success! The parents were happy and the kids were stoked to see their presentation live on a tablet!

Most QR zapper apps work just fine, but we loved using Zapper Scan in our rooms. The application takes you directly to the Dropbox file in order to easily download or save the presentation.

Next step....Dropboxing for the whole school!