Experimenting with QR Codes

Cell phones. Students have them. We have them. I've reached a point where I'm tired of fighting them. They aren't going anywhere. Instead, I'm trying to come up with ways to integrate them into my lessons and classroom procedures. A good friend of mine who is a tech coach in another district mentioned to me that some teachers are using QR codes for tardies, tutoring, and retesting. So I figured, why not give it a shot? After all, iOS 11 has a built in QR code scanner for the camera that was included with the update. In theory, this should be pretty easy to implement.

I started out by making 3 different google forms. The nice thing about these forms is that I can export the results into a spreadsheet. In the case of the tardy form, this gives me lots of data to use when a kid tells me "I haven't been tardy!" Also, whenever a student fills out one of these forms, I get an email with all of the details. There's supposed to be a way to make it email the students parent when they're tardy as well, but I haven't figured that out yet.

Here are the links to the different forms (please don't fill them out, unless you just really need some tutoring from me :) )

Tardy Form

Tutoring Form

Retest Form

I then used the-qrcode-generator.com to generate QR codes using the URL for each form. I found that this site makes good, high quality QR codes and also allows you to download different sizes. I found the 4500 pixel size to fit best onto my posters. Here is what one of the posters looks like. The others are basically the same just with slightly different words.

My goal with all of this isn't necessarily to be ultra techy in my classroom, but to give students another avenue to take ownership of their learning with tutoring and retesting. The tardy form hopefully will reduce the clutter on my desk with excess passes from the office. I also like that it does my documentation for me in the form of a spreadsheet. I'll try to do a follow up post in a few months to see if this has worked out how I wanted it to!

How are you using phones to your advantage in your classroom? I'm hoping to find more ways to turn them into allies and not distractions.