 Hi, this is Jennifer Gonzalez for Cult of Pedagogy. In this video, I am going to show you how to create QR codes. That is what a QR code looks like. Let's go. So I'm making this video for my book, The Teacher's Guide to Tech. And in that book, I feature over 100 different technology tools, and for each one, I link the reader to a good video that's online that shows them the features of that tool, except I couldn't find any that I really liked for QR codes, so I decided to just make my own. Now there are a lot of QR code generators out there, but once you've watched this, you'll understand how they're made, and you could basically take this same set of skills and apply it to any other QR code generator, because it's super, super easy. So basically, what a QR code is this? It is this picture right here, and when somebody scans that with their phone or an iPad or another device that has a QR code reader in it, it will take them automatically to either a website or to some other place that you've told it to go. Whatever you have associated with this, it's automatically going to read it. It's a lot like a bar code that has a price embedded in it and a name of a product or whatever at the grocery store. So let me show you how it works. Right along the side here, they're giving you a lot of different things that you can actually plug into this QR code. So I'm going to put a URL in. I'm going to put the URL of my own website. Okay? Now you'll notice that the QR code changed when I did that. That QR code now is uniquely associated with the URL to my own website. So what I do now is I'm going to save this picture, and I'm going to download it to my own desktop, and then I can use it wherever I want and just treat it like it's a picture. So they give me a lot of different size options. I can make it bigger or smaller. So I'll just choose this 200 pixels, and then I'm going to click Save. I want to name it something that I remember what it is. So I'll call it CULT URL, and they give you three choices for file types. I would say just choose PNG unless you know what these others are. PNG is just similar to a JPEG file, but it's more for like non-photographs, other types of images, and it's just a really common file extension. So just stick with that, hit Save, and see it just downloaded. Okay, so I've just opened the file. I can do whatever I want to do with this now. I can paste it into a Word document. I can put it into a PowerPoint. I can print it. I can print off multiple copies and hang it on a wall. I can do whatever I want to do with it. But what's great is that if anybody takes their phone and scans it with a QR scanner, it will automatically do that. So suppose I am out on the street advertising my website, and I want people to come and see it. I can just say, here, hold up your phone to this QR code, and you'll go right to it. I don't have to stand there and say it's www.cultipedagogy.com, and have them try to spell all that right. They will be taken directly to it. So let me show you what other things you can plug into a QR code. You can plug in just free text. Let me just type, I love you. Now what happens is that when someone scans that with the QR code, they're just going to get basically a screen that has that text on it. So people can use this for, one thing I think of a lot is when you have sort of an exhibit, like a gallery exhibit or something, maybe an art exhibit, and you wanted to code in their information about the author. And so you could put, almost like they do in art galleries, have those little signs underneath that tells you about the author. They can have that come up, so you can have free text come up. You can have a contact information. So you have plugged in John Doe, JohnDoe at mail.com. What will happen when somebody scans that is that it'll scan it, and then their phone will automatically go to their contacts list and say, do you want to add this as a contact? Yes or no, it's got all the information all plugged in and ready. You just give it the okay. You could just plug a phone number in. And then the phone would actually go to that phone number, and it would ask you what you want to do with the phone number. Do you want to dial it? Do you want to send the person a text, whatever? It's not going to automatically make the phone start to actually call. SMS basically stands for text message. So what you could do is you could put your own phone number in there, and even put in an automatic text message that says, hi, I attended parent night. And maybe this is something where you want parents to send you a text message when they come to parent night so that you can get their number into your phone and that this just has them automatically send it. So there are a bunch of different things that you can do with QR codes. But this just shows you how to make them. You just go to anything that's a QR code generator, you plug in your information. Now, one thing that's important to know is that each of these is something different. I'm not loading all of this information into the same QR code. These are just different things that you can create a QR code for. So that's important to know. Okay, so I just want to show you how the QR code reader works on a phone. So this is the screen of my cell phone. And I've got this program right here called a QR code reader. So I'm going to just open that up. And basically it's super simple. It just gives you the sort of reading screen. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the QR code, a QR code that I made that basically takes, is supposed to take people to my website called to pedagogy.com. Okay, so now I'm going to take my phone and I am going to aim it. God, that was so fast. I barely even aimed it. And what it says here is it's going to open that URL. So I click OK. And I am automatically loading up my website. The first time I did this, there, see? First time I did this, I started jumping around. I couldn't believe how fast it was. That is it. That's how it works.