Integrating QR Codes

At our previous monthly staff meeting, the principal asked us to brainstorm three topics, and one of those was ideas for school improvement. Our early childhood director noted that her church used sticker codes for young child pickup by parent. The child was "stickered" upon arrival to church and the parent given a matching sticker, placed in the appropriate class for the church service, and then picked up as the sticker was matched by the parent. She wondered if we could also do this at our school. As an early childhood worker, she doesn't know all of the students that come to our after-school care, and this sometimes concerns her as to what allergies the child might have or if all adults picking up the child were approved ones. She definitely has a wonderful idea that we can implement using current technology at no cost.


QR (quick response) codes use smart phone technology. Here's a Common Craft video explaining them. Lee Kolbert shares this and other ideas on her blog about QR codes in education. I've brainstormed how I'm going to use them in the classroom which I'll share in a later writing.


For application to the early childhood director's concerns, QR codes will allow teachers on-the-fly access to pertinent student information. And while it sounds all Big Brother, the goal is to protect the student by giving teachers in charge of unfamiliar students access to important data. If we have a student with life-threatening allergy to a food or insect, the adult in charge that day can find out instantly with a phone snap to the child's code. 


I tried out some resources to creating a code for a student. qrstuff.com provides elements in a wide range of formats. We can implement QR's by making a table of student codes on either a web page or a printout sheet in a folder. The after-school care provider can then access the code of any child she is unfamiliar with for instant information. As our school grows, this gives us an additional safety feature to protect children from unwarranted pickups and access to emergency contacts without stringing through time-negating activities. All that is needed is a smart phone with a QR code reader application and codes made from free resources. 


Mary Beth Hertz at Edutopia has some more ideas about how QR codes can be used in the classroom. Read more here.


How will you use QR codes? How will my students use them? I'm picturing all kinds of ways we can implement these in education, but it necessitates smart phones in the classroom, which is another idea whose time has come.


The QR at the top of this post is a link to my blog. Try it out for yourself!