QR-codes with Windows phone

Natural Sciences and QR-codes

Mrs. Paula Vorne

1st grade teacher

1st grade students have been studying birds that stay in Finland in the winter and animals that spend winter in three different ways. At first we decided together what kind of information we are trying to find, which questions we should answer to find the right kind of information. Children worked in pairs and used books as reference material. They wrote the answers using Skydrive and Word Web App. They added pictures and video links to the file too. In art lessons the students drew a picture of their own bird or animal.

Once the files and the drawings were ready, we published the Skydrive file and made a QR-code of it. After trying a few QR-code generators, I choose to use goqr.me because it was simple enough to use with the younger students and printing from it worked well.  The drawings and codes formed control points and the task was to find all control points, open the file using the QR-code and find right answers to questions in a cross word puzzle. Students made the questions to the puzzle based on the information in their own file.

The evaluation of this project was made in pairs. I asked the students to talk about what they had learned from this. Here are some of the answers:

• ·         co-operation

• ·         using Skydrive with the computer and the with a phone

• ·         how to draw a bird or an animal

• ·         how to find information from books

• ·         a lot of new things about birds and animals

• ·         how to make and open a QR-code

Finally I asked the students to show with their thumbs their feelings about the project. Thumb up means very much, thumb down not so much and when I counted to three almost all the students lifted TWO thumbs up! That really made my day!