QR Codes
In the Embassy Suites, teachers are packed into a dark meeting room; some sitting at tables, and others forced to sit on the floor. The popularity of the presentation is justified by the excited murmurs preceding it, as teachers excitedly speculate about what new technological knowledge or skills they will learn in the next hour. Most everybody in the room holds in their hands either an ipod, iphone, or ipad, and many already had a QR code app open in anticipation for the upcoming lecture.
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A new tool for teachers to share information with students is the QR Code. QR Codes are simply two-dimensional bar codes that contain information such as text, contact information, web addresses. In the presentation “What’s With QR Codes?,” Shannon Smith and Nancy Brachbill, a mother-daughter team from Illinois, spoke about utilizing the benefits of QR Codes in an educational setting.
QR Codes are unusable without a QR Code Scanner on a cell phone, so the presentation started with a brief overview of some QR Scanners on iOS and Android as well as different ways to make a QR Code. Because most QR Codes link to a webpage, the most obvious use of QR Codes would be to share an online article or activity with students. To help speed up the scan of the code, Shannon and Nancy suggested using a URL shortener. As students progress farther into their education, parents are less and less likely to be a useful resource for students while they are doing homework. The Brachbill team introduced the idea of using QR codes as a link to an answer key to homework problems printed on the actual page.
The duo finally asserted that the reason why QR codes will be so effective is that almost every student nowadays has mobile devices that are capable of scanning the codes, and it is really up to the schools to capitalize on the QR revolution. Truly, many teachers came out of the presentation with a heightened interest of the many benefits that QR codes provide, a testament to the growing trend of the pixilated, black and white square.
by T.Grace, John Burroughs School