 Hello hello and welcome to PD in your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you tonight to talk all about QR codes. You should be able to hear me talking now and I do want to tell you that we're going to email you a recording of this session as soon as we conclude tonight so you can watch it at your leisure in the future if needed. And more importantly we'll also send you these slides so those will also be coming your way in an email just as soon as we conclude tonight. Quick introduction I'm Julie. I'm right out of the high school ELA classroom where I've been a teacher for 18 years. I'm just recently joining the teacher community team at CISA so I'm very excited to be working there and with my colleague Angela and I'm going to share a lot of her resources here tonight. You can find me on Twitter at EdTechJulieJ and of course you can connect with all of us on Twitter at CISA. So let's talk tonight about QR codes. I thought before we got too much farther into the topic I should stop and just make sure everybody knows what a QR code is. I'm not sure what your level of experience or expertise is. Those of you who are joining us here tonight so I wanted to stop for a minute and just talk a little bit about what a QR code is. You can actually see one in that picture. It's hanging on the wall in the form of a poster and a student is scanning it with an iPad. A QR code is kind of a matrix bar code that can be scanned electronically and oftentimes it's scanned with a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet like you see in the picture and then when the student or maybe even a consumer if you see it on a product or on a poster when a person scans it then that reveals more information. So CISA uses QR codes in a lot of unique ways and tonight we want to talk to you about ways that you can use the QR codes that are generated by CISA. So let's talk about a few of the ways that QR codes come up in your experience with CISA. First and you probably know this if you're an experienced CISA user in a lot of cases especially if your students are younger they log in using a QR code. So this probably looks familiar to you. You've seen this kind of poster. It's actually what's pictured here that this student is scanning. It's something that helps the student log in. So CISA recommends that younger students who probably aren't old enough to keep track of an email address and password and remember how to type all that in. They log in with a QR code. It's simple and quick and it gets students logged in. But I do just want to include this as a quick public service announcement tonight. You just always want to make sure that you're not accidentally getting a picture of your class QR code in anything that you post on social media and you wouldn't share this code on social media or with anyone either. It's kind of just something to use within your class. A tip that Angela recommends and of course she taught kindergarten students so she was always having her students log in this way even though my big kids were logging in with email. She says an easy tip is just to put a post-it note, a sticky note on top of your code in your classroom so that if you are walking around taking pictures of various things that are going on in your room you won't accidentally get the QR code in the background. We still find a lot of examples of people just very enthusiastically sharing pictures on Twitter or Facebook but accidentally getting that QR code in the background. We really want to protect your students privacy because if someone can see that code in a picture then they could scan it and get in your class and we don't want them to do that. So just really be protective of that. If you have it hanging in your room you could protect a little bit with a sticky note and then your students could always remove the sticky note if they needed to scan it to get in and that way it won't accidentally wind up in any pictures. So just a quick reminder you of course know about this QR code that students use to get logged into your class if it's in that sign-in mode. I also want to talk for a minute about how families sign in with a QR code. That's one other really cool way that CESA uses QR codes. When you print an invitation for family members that invitation comes with a QR code. So you get this prompt in CESA after you click invite families at the bottom right of your class. CESA is going to say okay do you want to print a paper invitation and if you choose that option it's the top blue bar there. It's going to print a paper invitation for you that has a unique QR code for it. It's unique to that student. So then the invitation that prints it's going to print out like an 8.5 by 11 sheet is actually going to have that student's QR code and it's going to let a family member connect right to their journal. The name of the student is at the top of the page. I have that circled in red and then their unique code is at the bottom. So what's really cool about that is a student can have up to 10 family members connected and you don't need a new invitation for each family member. That same piece of paper could be used or duplicates of that paper could be used by up to 10 people so that would work perfectly. So another really great way that CESA uses QR codes is to connect family members. Okay this is something else I'm even going to demonstrate for you tonight here in a minute. I'll pop out into another tab and show you how to do this in real time but one really interesting and unique thing that CESA does is that for every post, any post, the student post in CESA, CESA will make a QR code for you and you don't have to do it yourself. All you do is click the three dots and then say you want to get the items QR code. You can see where that red arrow is pointing there. Three dots, get item QR code and then it generates something that's kind of pictured at the right of the screen there. It generates a unique code for that item. So I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a minute but this is a really special and unique feature of CESA that it's going to let your students share their items with a wider audience. So instead of just the people who can see it within CESA you can use that QR code and I'm going to show you a lot of ways to do that in a minute. You can use that QR code to share it and give them a wider audience for some of their work. You can also print out a PDF with a QR code on it. So you're going to use that same three dots button. You can see the red arrow there and then you just click print and then when you print that it's going to put the QR code at the bottom right of that print out that is like an eight and a half by 11 PDF. So you have that option as well and CESA is generating that code for you. You're not having to do it with another application which is really helpful. As a classroom teacher myself I was using that a lot in a lot of different ways like I said to get more feedback and a wider audience for student creation. Okay, let's practice this. I'm going to show you in real time what I'm going to have to do is pop out and show you in a CESA class what that would look like. Okay, so this is just a demonstration class that I use. It's just something I used to demonstrate MPDs like this one. Okay, so you can see I have a student roster here and some student work samples here. Okay, so what I could do on any student post is click those three dots and then I could say get item QR code and then what CESA is going to do for me is generate that code here and there's a couple different things I could do with it. I can obviously print it and I'm going to show you how to do that from the three dots as well or depending on your keyboard commands or what device you're using I can also do like the right click and save the image if I want to as well. So then it's going to print something even bigger that you could print and cut out or you could actually smash that into some other things if you save the image and then put it into another PowerPoint or a creation so you have lots of options for what you can do with that image now that it's been generated. You can also go three dots and then print. So get item QR code is going to give you what I just showed you like that image. Print is going to give you the PDF and again watch what I'm doing. I'm not creating the codes. I'm just letting CESA think about it and then CESA is going to do it for me and then it's going to generate the PDF that I can just click print. Okay so I can hit print. It's going to show me this journal entry and then print another QR code. This is not a very fancy entry if you had some piece of artwork or whatever that filled up the page more you'd see more of this white space filled and then this QR code so I'm not really going to print it but that's how you do it. Click the three dots and then it'll print that for you like in a full page and so I'm going to show you how that's particularly useful maybe for like some displays and some other things you can do outside of your classroom. While I'm stopped for a minute I'm just going to double check the question box and see if anybody has any questions for me. Nope looks like we're looking good so I'll keep going cruising right through the slides. Okay and then I'm going to also demonstrate this for you too but you also have a built-in QR code reader right in CESA for your students and so one really nice thing about that is that you don't have to have another QR reader app on your device. You don't have to go outside of CESA into another app. Students can scan those codes like all the codes I've been demonstrating so far tonight. Students can scan that right in CESA so when the student clicks their profile icon which I have circled at the top there it's at the top left then that kind of reveals that that bar there and there's the button at the bottom that says scan QR code and that's going to scan any CESA QR code. So one nice option about this and this is a point that Angela always reminds me about that if you have your settings in your CESA class set so that students can't see other students work and sometimes for different reasons it's an appropriate choice for you is to turn it off so students are not seeing other kids work then this is one workaround for that because you could have them scanning codes like if you printed things and hung them on a bulletin board or in the hallway they could scan codes and then get to see that work so if for whatever whatever reason you have it turned off students can't see each other's work then this would be one way that you could share certain selected items by printing that code and sharing it so that's a really nice option let me show you what that looks like you can probably picture it from that screen grab but here's what it looks like so I'm actually logged in as a teacher and this is looking similar if you're logged in as a student but you're clicking that profile icon top left and then you have that scan button right here at the bottom so when a student clicks that then they're able to hold up their device right in front of the code and that is how they can scan an item right from seesaw I should also point out that all of these items like this right here this QR code that you see at the right someone could scan it with another app it wouldn't have to be seesaw like if you send it home and and you thought the kid was showing it to someone who didn't have the seesaw it would still work with another reader okay so I'm going to go through some ideas for QR codes now that you kind of know how to generate them and how to print them I'm going to give you some ideas that many teachers have shared with us some creative ways that you can use the seesaw QR code one thing we like to offer as kind of a back to school or beginning of the year activity is a game we call seesaw go it's kind of a model of Pokemon go which was really popular last summer and that's when the seesaw team created this game what it is is it's an activity that gets kids up and moving using technology collaborating with peers and they're learning about their classroom and some of the procedures and learning a little bit about their new teacher by scanning some codes seesaw has this all ready for you and I'm going to show you what you can find if you click this link remember you're going to get these slides later so you could open this link it's going to take you to seesaw's seesaw go page okay when you get there you get all kinds of link links here you get the game board that your students play with they play the game with this game board and you of course can print that and then you also get I was sorry I closed the wrong thing I should have hit the back arrow then you also have a really detailed set of instructions and plans for teachers so this gives you like a step-by-step how-to you print that game board separately and then these are the QR code images that you cut out and put around your room and that's how kids play the game so we've had lots of teachers share pictures of their students playing this game just around this time of year when a lot of schools are going back to school so check that out on Twitter or Facebook you might be surprised you'd find a lot of teachers who have played this game this is all ready for you so you can read through this plan it's explained in a lot more detail than what I'm explaining it now and then you can cut out the codes and and put them around your room I used a lot of activities with QR codes in my classroom even with big kids I taught 11th and 12th graders but I still did a lot of activities with QR codes and what I always said to people is that it's so engaging because kids get to use technology which we know engages them and in a lot of cases it involves movement so in a big kid classroom where kids are used to sitting for long parts of the day I like to have them up and moving using technology collaborating I found that much more engaging and kids always really enjoyed that so seesawgo which is kind of designed for like a k5 environment but seesawgo is a perfect example of that it's engaging students because they're up and moving using technology collaborating and I think you'll find that game so those are the you'll enjoy that game the little emojis there are icons that are used in seesaw so those probably look familiar to students who have used seesaw and then the QR codes will reveal some information as they scan them during the game okay and I kind of mentioned this earlier in the webinar but the other thing you can do with all the QR codes that seesaw generates is you can use them for a lot of displays either in the room on bulletin boards or out in the hallways teachers share lots of great ideas for this we get a lot of them from social media but what you can do is create like an introduction of the students in your class I think britt's students here on this example that's pictured they did a self portrait and then they made those portraits talk using chatter pics which is an app you might know something about and maybe you know how to app smash that with seesaw and then they hung those portraits in their hallway but they put their their creation their chatter pics creation in seesaw and then they put that the QR code to that seesaw post under their artwork so the artwork is analog it's two-dimensional but if you scan the code you're kind of getting an example of that portrait coming to life talking because they made the chatter pics and seesaw is generating the code and the exact same steps that we followed earlier to generate and print the code and remember you can always cut out the code and glue it to something else or attach it to something else so it doesn't have to be always displayed on that eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper so that's a really cool example the self portrait the chatter pics it's talking great way to introduce your class you could introduce yourself that way students in one of the schools that I worked in used the QR codes for tours like pretend a student was new to the building or new to the school how would they know where everything was or would they know what the significance was of each location or each room so somebody did a video explaining this is the lunchroom this is the jam this is the library and so on and then we put those QR codes around the room in those around the school in those locations outside of those doors so if you did have a visitor or someone new to your building they could walk around scan the codes and hear a little bit of information about the school and about each of those places you can also do it for art shows and that's kind of like what's depicted there with the self portraits you could display a lot of your students artwork but the QR codes could be the students explaining in their own words the process that they use to create that art so maybe the artwork is traditional analog work that they create with hands-on materials in an art class but maybe the digital part is them talking about it in sisa and then you print that QR code and display it near or on the artwork and you also have a lot of students using these QR codes in sisa for book talks something they enjoyed about a book or they liked about a book and then in my classroom I taught big kids we often cut out those book top QR codes and actually glued them on the back of paperbacks so my thinking there was that a student might be intrigued and want to pick up or check out a book if they could scan the code and learn a little more about it so you actually again can do a lot with those codes since you can print them and cut them out and then display or adhere them you know however you see fit so lots of great uses for that. Something else I want to show you because a lot of people kind of don't know it's there it's kind of a hidden feature you can actually if you're using folders in sisa just with one click of a button print an entire folder of work let me show you how to do that and then I'm including a link there you can watch a step-by-step video if you want to see how that works okay I'm going to go back in my class this is the demo class I've been using all night tonight if I click on this blue folder it's going to show me the the number of folders that I have and this is a small demo class so I don't have much to show here but let's say I pick on this language art class I clicked the red folder look I can print every item in that folder just by clicking print PDF so that's a really nice option a lot of people don't really know it's there because if you are going to do one of those things I just talked about like the tour or the art show or the you know some kind of interactive hallway display if you put all of those things in the same folder this is how you can print them all at once rather than having to go all the way through your feed and look through all of your students post I mean you can still do that and you could click the three dots and you could print one at a time the way that I just demonstrated where you click print PDF I mean sorry no that wasn't I I'm not touching the right button there but okay yes print PDF of the whole folder that's what I meant I didn't click the green button a minute ago in the webinar to generate the PDF have too many things too many buttons I'm trying to click if you click this button then you can print them all at once so the recommendation for you is that if you're wanting to do one of those displays like I was just saying put all those items in the same folder and then again I only have five pages here because I don't have that much work but it's going to give you a really nice cover page reminding you what the name of the class is and what folder you printed but you might even just call this hallway tour or art show or hallway display it's going to tell you everything that's in this PDF and then you can print it of course I'm not going to print it right now but that is how you do that so just a reminder if you don't already know you can click this folder button here and then you can manage your folders or always add a new folder so if you hadn't really thought oh I could create a folder for something special like that you know art show interactive book display I mean book talks just create a folder put everything in there that you want in there for your display and then print all the QR codes at once so I think that's a really great workaround because instead of scanning through a bunch of posts and printing codes one at a time you can print a bunch at once that may also be a strategy to use for face to face conferences or parent teacher conferences if there's a certain set of things in cesa that you would like to print hard copies of printing the whole folder is a way to go so you could create a folder in cesa called conferences just a little tip a lot of people don't know that's there um this video is really explanatory too so you can go back after our webinar tonight and take a look at that how to um here's an example that Angela shared and you know I keep saying I taught big kids so I taught 12th graders but Angela my colleague taught kindergarteners and this is an activity that she created that was kind of a scavenger hunt where um her students even as kindergarteners created story problems using a 10 frame you can kind of see it pictured there taped to the wall they created a story problem um maybe like I had five pieces of cake and then four pieces of cake were eaten how many pieces of cake remained or whatever so they create this code um I mean this problem and then what you end up doing the students scanned the code to see if their answer was correct and then if the answer to that problem was one let's say I know four is what's pictured on the wall there but the problem I gave you had the answer of one then they would go to the next spot that was marked station one let's say so this station was marked station four they would check their answer make sure they had the right answer and then they would go to station one and do that problem and then go to the next station and so on so it was a pretty pretty innovative activity and I think why Angela really liked it is because the kids were creating the content themselves they were writing their own problems posting in seesaw and then they kind of got to work out each other's problems they got to work on other people's problems as they were up and moving and using technology in the classroom um there's a really good explanation of that here she walks you through it step by step so if this idea sounded intriguing to you but my explanation was a little fuzzy you can hear Angela's explanation of it here and see it step by step and it'll show you exactly the steps that she used for this type of activity in kindergarten now if you teach other subjects or kids bigger than kindergarten you can think about how the scavenger hunt kind of concept could work for you even if it's not math problems that's still the concept of the qr code in the scavenger hunt can be applied to a lot of other areas we also have this meet the teacher interactive letter template you maybe saw it this time of year because we were promoting it a lot on social media it's a way to take a traditional paper meet the teacher letter but make it a little more interactive by including a c-soft qr code so you as a teacher could introduce yourself put a little video here send home this is a paper note but then the parents families can scan the code so we have that template and it's here the video and the template are both at this link you can check it out you can customize it we have it all designed and laid out for you and you can change the information to fit your situation and put your own name in there um but something to think about is even you know because the time of year may be passed now you may have already done your meet the teacher letter but you can make any sort of paperwork report newsletter any kind of paperwork come to life with the qr code so this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the back to school meet the teacher letter but you could take any other paper correspondence that you need to send home and make it come to life by attaching a c-soft qr code and remember at the beginning of our webinar we talked about how to do that three dots get item qr code and then you can save or paste that code in a lot of different places so you're just getting the qr code from any seesaw item and as i keep saying seesaw is the one generating that code for your you you don't have to create it in any other application so it's super handy um here's another example that was shared by betsy brooks on twitter you can see she was using the book recommendations her kids were recommending certain books and then she created like these nice posters that could be displayed um the qr code is kind of glued there coming out of the kids mouth and you could scan that code and actually i said displayed just then but i think she had that in a listening station so probably not like in the hallway necessarily but in a classroom setting where kids were spending a certain time each day at a station listening to to either kids reading or kids book recommendations so if you have a literacy station or a listening station in your room and that's something you're wanting kids to do is listen to reading this is one option for that can have people reading aloud and then you could generate the qr code and and glue that onto something that kids could listen to in a station you can kind of see some pictures there towards the bottom of the screen of the kids scanning those codes so thanks betsy for that recommendation and then angela also mentioned especially you know she's working with kindergartners in this example um she's wanting to flip or differentiate some of her lessons uh so she creates her own screencast of something you can see that this is about contractions so she creates a screencast but maybe not every group is doing the same thing so she leaves that at a certain location or a certain spot and then um that particular group scans the code to listen to her recording so for her she was saying that the qr code made it really quick and simple instead of having to go through a ton of different instructions or a lot of steps to get kids logged into something to listen to a recording she just had these pdfs with qr codes at various stations or locations in her classroom and her littles could get into that really quickly just by scanning the code so they have seesaw on their tablet they're scanning and then they're hearing the lesson or the instruction that she wants that group to hear but she can do a lot of different ones different qr codes at different locations so that's how she's using those qr codes to differentiate in this example thank you so much this is such a fun topic i hope you feel like you learned a few things about qr codes i am really passionate about kids getting up and moving in classrooms and i think qr codes are a great way to do that just because you can hang them or display them in so many locations so think about ways if you're a seesaw user and you're already posting a lot of content to seesaw think of ways that you can generate and print those codes and get your kids up and moving and scanning i think you'll find it really exciting and lots of cool things you can do if you are using qr codes though be sure to share that with us we love to hear more about that you can join one of our seesaw teachers groups on facebook we seesaw chat on twitter on the second and fourth thursday is at 4 p.m pacific and you can always come back for more pd um find me at edtech julie j on twitter i'd love to hear more from you thanks so much for enjoying us for joining us tonight i really enjoyed this topic and i can't wait to talk to you again soon thanks so much bye