QR-Codes in education

A few days ago, we were surprised about the great number of ideas going around on internet on the uses of qrcodes in educational environments. Is seems that teachers have recently discovered the eyecathing power of qrcodes and they start using them to liven up learning activities.

So, we decided to write a post about this topic commenting some of the best and most curious proposals about qrcodes pedagogical possibilities. Here they are:

An italian university student designed a curious poster based on the classic periodic table but adding a qrcode to each element. The code containes the complet name of the element, its atomic weight an its density.

It’s quite geek, but maybe it’s also a good manner to dinamize chemical classes: with the poster you could organize a contest where some students have to guess atomic weight of elements while other students check the answers decoding the corresponding qrcode.

Source: http://www.nerdnews.it

According to the blog Mobile-learning, Leicester University professor Dr Jo Badge has suggested to teach students the correct use of laboratory materials sticking a qrcode on each instrument. Scanning the code, pupils could watch on their mobiles an explanatory video about how to use this equipment.

A physical education teacher from Australia, explained in his blog a qr-code orienteering game he developes for his students. They should follow the instruccions hidden on qrcodes and operate compass to reach the final clue. For further details about the activity go on : mrrobbo.wordpress.com

If until now teachers used to write the references on blackboard and you should later take them out from the library. Now it’s over: just including a qrcodes on the class notes, pupils could inmediately look up the references with their mobile phone, and expand their knowledge about this lesson from everywhere.

Moodle (LMS) has recently added a new functionality that includes automatically a qrcode on every document you print from the platform, the qrcode points at the url of the page you print allowing you to acces easily to this specific page later from your mobile.

These are just some proposals, but the possibilities are unlimited. If you have new interesting ideas about aplications of qrcodes on teaching contexts please let us know, send them to: [email protected].

Of course, if you are thinking on using qrcodes on your lessons, forget banning mobiles on the classrom!