Readbox Bulletin Board

I love QR codes, especially when they are mixed with great bulletin board displays.  QR codes are a great way to bring student work displays to life.  They can also provide your community an interactive view of student projects.

Ashley Landreth (@mrslandreth3)  a third grade teacher in Greenwood, SC had this awesome bulletin board.  I first saw this idea from her tweet as she was getting ready for open house:

The Third Grade Readbox is ready for Open House! #gwd50mer #learnitall #landrethslearners1516 pic.twitter.com/L4qx3kVoxK

— Ashley Landreth (@mrslandreth3) September 15, 2015

I loved the display so much, I asked her permission to feature it on my blog.  Third grade students at her school created book recommendations using the ChatterPix Kids app.  Now students can scan the QR codes to hear a little book preview before they check out books in the library.

Click the ChatterPix video clips below to see two student samples.

What a great way to get students excited about books!  A book recommendation from a peer can go a long way to encouraging reluctant readers in your class.   I love how this display encourages a community of readers in the school.

Back to School with a Tech Twist

I've been preparing ideas for teachers as they come back to school this week.  With several of my schools moving 1:1, I have been looking for resources around the web to share with them.  Here are a few back to school lesson ideas and freebies I've found.  I hope these will be helpful for your classroom as well.

If you know of other great back to school resource, add them in the comments below.  I hope to continue to add resources to this ThingLink.

QR Code Task Cards

My first graders have enjoyed QR code task cards. After completing several activities made by other teachers, I decided to create one myself.  I began by creating the actual task cards themselves.  I made 12 different problems for my students to solve and created a recording sheet for their answers.

I then saved the task cards as JPEGs and uploaded them to my dropbox.  In dropbox, I clicked the share link button on each image to get the URL.  I copied each URL into the Kaywa QR code generator website to create the QR codes to link to each task card.  I previously blogged about using this website to create QR codes.  Click here for a post with a teacher sheet on how to use this website to create the codes.

I'm so excited to try this activity out with my class.

QR Codes



I have joined the QR Code craze!  

I am loving incorporating these little codes into my classroom.  My students love scanning them, and I am learning more about how to create classroom activities using them.  I found great examples of classroom activites on the blog of Audrey Colwell and tutorials of how to make them on her QR Code Binge post.

 

To introduce QR codes to our school, I first created a staff development for our back to school meeting. I created a QR code scavenger hunt around our library which linked teachers to awesome website examples of creation apps  being used on iPads to demonstrate learning in primary classrooms.  I linked the QR codes to some examples from the great blogs I have seen recently, such as Matt B. Gomez, Kristi Meeuwse, Kristen Wideen, Kathy Cassidy, and Karen Lirenman.

I used the website http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to generate my QR codes for free.  I created a page to show how to make codes on this site for teachers at my school.  Here are the directions.  Click the picture to download a copy.

 One activity my class has completed with the QR codes was to unscramble our sight words.  Each QR code brought up a graphic of a scrambled sight word.  The students unscrambled it and recorded the correct sight word on their recording sheet.

I created QR codes to put on our classroom door.  Each child's photo has a QR code that links to his/her Kidblog site.  I thought this would be a great way to introduce our Kidblogs to parents on "Open House" night.