Last year, I talked about all of the ways I wanted to use QR Codes in my first grade classroom. I found time to do many of those things and would love to share some examples here.
My teammate and I worked together last year to record and create QR Codes for all 100 of the Dolch Sight Words. We printed these and then backed them on a bigger piece of tag board. We wrote the sight word, bigger, on the top of the card, and put the QR Code on the bottom, then laminated them. We posted these around our rooms as a choice during student ILAs (Independent Learning Activities). They would use a fun pointer to read around the room. They would then use an iPod to scan the code to check to see if the word they said was correct. The codes ended up being a self-monitoring tool. We previously tried to have them scan a code and read whatever word popped up but the size of the font was really child-unfriendly. This was our way around that :) Please click here to download the first 25 sight words or click on the picture. I wish I had a picture of what the finished product looked like but we are locked out of our building for summer construction.
I also used QR Codes to redo my listening center. When I started teaching, I inherited a wealth of books on tapes. This was great...until I realized that there were no working tape players left in the building. I never got rid of the books/tapes because I always felt that there had to be something I could do. What a shame it would have been to throw away such great resources!
Over the summer, I happened to find a tape player at a garage sale for really cheap and I bought it. I spent HOURS playing the tapes on the tape player and recording them using Garageband onto my computer. The sound wasn't phenomenal, but it worked well enough for what I needed. I then made all of these recordings into QR Codes. I printed out these codes and taped them onto the backs of each book. The kids then used 1 iPod with a headphone splitter as their Listening Center. They would each get a book and one child would scan the code with the iPod. They were able to listen to the story while following along in the book. Here is an example of a code that I taped onto the book Rhythm. Please feel free to scan it and check it out!
I hope that this gives you some ideas on how to use QR Codes in your classroom. They have become really easy to make now that I have used them, like, a gazillion times and the kids really like getting to use the iPods/iPads to scan them. :) Happy Creating!
