9 BOY Tips for Teachers Using QR Codes

QR codes are a quick way to distribute links and other information, which is perfect during the busy back-to-school season. (Need a refresher on what QR codes are and how they work? This article reviews the basics.) 

How to use QR codes to minimize stress at the beginning of the school year

1. Help parents or students quickly enroll in Remind. Link the phone number and enrollment code to a QR code. Participants only have to scan and send the text, and they'll automatically be connected to your Remind class. Learn more about connecting more than just a link to a QR code in this article. Read more about Remind's features by clicking here.
2. Link to a Google Form to collect information digitally. Create a Google Form that asks for contact information, allergies, tutoring times, or anything else you need at the beginning of school (more information on using Google forms can be found here), and link it to a QR code. (More suggestions for collecting parent information digitally are in this blog post.) 
3. Share contact information with parents. Connect a QR code to a mobile number or e-mail address so that parents can quickly contact you. 
4. Share back to school information with parents. Do you typically distribute a paper packet of information in August? Save a tree and impress your class by scanning the papers to PDFs, uploading them to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, and attaching the document link to a QR code. 
5. Lead your audience to a specific iOS or Android app. Need students to download very specific apps that they may have difficulty finding in the iTunes or Google Play store? Attach one app link per QR code, then collect the QR codes into a collage or photo slideshow so that your audience can quickly scan and download all the apps they need in one sitting. 
6. Create a welcome message. You can attach freely-formatted text or an audio recording to a QR code, so it's like a secret, "welcome back" message for students. Read more about freely-formatted text codes by clicking here. Create an audio QR code by using Vocaroo or Croak.it. 
7. Share your Twitter profile to make connections. You can connect to your overall profile, a specific tweet, or the last tweet from a user. Learn more in this blog post. 
8. Sign in for tutoring or club meetings. Create a Google form that just asks the student for their name. Link that form to a QR code. When students come to tutorial or club meetings, they can scan the code, type their name, and submit the Google form. This creates a time-stamped document so you can tell who attended and when they were there. 
9. Need students to visit a link quickly and can't use AirDrop? Turn the link into a QR code!

Ways to Share QR Codes

1. Display the code(s) on the Promethean board. (You may need to turn the classroom lights out for this to work.)
2. Print the code and post on a wall or on your door. 
3. Need to print but don't want to use a lot of paper? Insert one code into a photo collage or PowerPoint, print several small copies, and distribute the slips of paper in student backpacks.
4. Sharing several codes? Insert the photos of the QR codes into a photo slideshow (PhotoPeach and PhotoSnack are free options); the audience can scan as the photos rotate. (You can even include a caption on each photo so the audience can keep track of which codes they've seen and scanned.)
5. E-mail it. 
6. Working with newer iPads? AirDrop the QR code(s) into your class's camera roll. 

How to Make a QR Code

There are a ton of options, but here are some common web-based QR code generators:

• Kerem Erkan (my personal favorite because it allows you to attach so much to a code)
• QR Code Generator
• QR Stuff
• QR Maker
• GoQR.me

Be a Genius with this App of the Week

 Genius Scan

Recently, while waiting for my tires to be rotated, I wasn’t able to finish a great gardening article I had been reading.  No problem.  I used the free Genius Scan app on my iPhone to scan the last few of pages of the article and save them into one PDF document to read later in iBooks.  Genius Scan detected the page orientation, let me adjust the sides of the image to include a whole page or crop only a portion, enhance the image, and combine multiple scans into just one document.  I also had the option of emailing the scans to myself as a JPGs or PDFs or uploading them to other apps like Kindle, AppToolkit, Evernote and Dropbox. With Genius Scan + ($2.99), I could have also exported to Google Docs, Twitter and Expensify or printed them with an Air Printer.  In the past, I would have simply used my phone’s camera, but with Genius Scan’s ability to correct the keystone effect of snapping a photo from an angle and its ability to create multiple page PDFs, it will be my app of choice in most similar circumstances. If you don’t have an iPhone, there are other similar apps available for Android, Blackberry, and WindowsPhone 7.  Genius scan should be coming to Android very soon and you can sign up here to be notified when it available. 

  

My Top 5 uses for Genius Scan

• Scan receipts for expense reports 
• Scan articles to read later.
• Scan recipes, notes on a bulletin board, displays etc.
• Scan student work and or artwork.
• Since iPhones have a limit of 5 photos for email, create a PDF with as many photos as needed. 

What can you scan today?

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 Tip of the Week

Before you head off to summer conferences or an island vacation, visit SnapMyInfo and enter any contact information you might want to share with others that you meet. Click the “Create VCard QR Code” button and voila – you have your own contact QR Code.  If you do this on your phone or tablet, you can save the resulting QR code as an image in your photos. To share your contact information, have the other person use the QR code reader app of their choice to read the code. The contact information is immediately available to be added to their contacts.  It worked great with these free scanners: Qrafter, ATTScanner, and i-nigma.

QR Codes: It’s Not Just for Geeks!!

Have you seen these black and white bar codes?

They are beginning to appear everywhere. You may have seen them on magazine ads, cereal boxes or even movie posters. QR stands for “quick response” and they’re used in marketing, entertainment, and commercial tracking.

Anyone with a smart phone can download a FREE QR code reader (I like i-nigma) and scan the code. QR codes typically contain web addresses, emails, or other contact information. (And by the way, Angie, you can scan QR codes in print or on the screen!) Try it and find out where this code takes you.  

How can you use QR codes in your classroom?

·   Create QR codes to link to book trailers and paste the QR codes inside the book jacket. Students can use their phones to browse for a good book.

·   Generate QR Codes that link to video tutorials for Math problems, Science labs, etc.

For more ideas view this presentation: http://tinyurl.com/2b4224k

To create a QR Code, visit: http://www.qrstuff.com/

Web Site of the Week:
Flisti is a free online polling site. No registration required.

http://flisti.com/

Tip of the Week:
In PowerPoint 2010, you can “nudge” an object one pixel at a time by selecting ctrl+ any arrow key.