5 QR Code Activities that Work in Every Classroom

Background Information
 
QR codes are easy to generate and read with free apps and on-line sites.  You can create them for any purpose and they can be scattered around the classroom or school for a scavenger hunt.

Lesson Support

iPads and/or iPods can be used as QR code readers and the apps can be downloaded for free from iTunes or Android and will need to be installed on all the devices. The Gallery contains five QR Codes you can use for a Primary (Kindergarten/Grade 1) Photo Hunt.  You can create your own activities using this QR Scavenger Hunt Generator where you can enter questions for a quiz or hunt.  This link will take you to a site that allows data to be input to create a variety of QR codes.

Guiding Questions

What images did you choose and why?
How do your photos meet the criteria?
Is it possible to find other images that can also meet the criteria?

Curriculum Connections

This activity will facilitate connecting Fine Arts to other curriculum areas, provide alternate assessment ideas, promote critical thinking and inquiry based learning.

My new book:  5 QR Code Activities that Work in Every Classroom

Eliot Eisner is a God

I think Eliot Eisner is brilliant.  The question is how do we make his ideas come to life in a climate where there is little funding for materials and enrichment....where teachers' input and ideas seem to have little value to those in charge......where the money from the LIF fund is going to hire assistants, not teachers (although half the funding came from the teachers' walkout....where we don't even have enough textbooks......where funding is cut for Science World....where teachers can't even agree on what is important within the school....


Here are his thoughts on education....

The ultimate aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their own education and through that process to continually reinvent themselves.  I start with the assumption that in a certain significant sense, mind is not present at birth.  Minds are invented when humans interact with the culture in and through which they live.  Brains are biological.  They are conferred at life's beginnings.  Minds are cultural; and although there is not sharp line between what is biological and what is cultural - they define each other - the overriding perspective I want to commend is that schools have something to significant to do with the invention of mind.  The invention of mind in schools is promoted both by the opportunities located in the curriculum and by the school's wider culture.  They are found in the forms of mediation through which the curriculum and schooling as a culture take place.  In this sense, the curriculum is...a mind-altering device.
The important outcomes of schooling include not only the acquisition of new conceptual tools, refined sensibilities, a developed imagination, and new routines and techniques, but also new attitudes and dispositions.  The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.
- Elliot W. Eisner