QR Codes Part 8: Wrapping Up! More Ways to Use QR for SLPs

This series has been really fun to write, and I appreciate all the feedback!  It's been busy here with all this content- November will be a little slower! I have several presentations scheduled and have to start writing evals! This final post (for now) in this series deals with a bunch of ideas on how to use QR as suggested recently by some SLPs and other educators.

For a ready-made halloween lesson plan for kids in upper elementary, MS or perhaps HS, please check out my crossover post on the Mindwing Concepts Blog.  It features a spooky story broken down into narrative elements, each with its own QR code for you to print.  I had a lot of fun with my students doing this find-scan-and-story-map activity!

Thank you to Tara Roehl of SpeechyKeenSLP who sent in these wonderful ideas:

1. I know someone at Palm, so they donated a bunch of old Palm phones in developer mode for me. I simply sync them to the clinic wifi and let the kids loose around the room/halls/clinic/building. I have a HP touch pad, so they can bring back their phone, touch it to the touchpad and we can all see what they found! 
2. Expected and Unexpected (see the Social Thinking™ methodology) behaviors around the building. We have QR codes on the front door, all around the lobby, in the halls and in each room. As an "intro" to the clinic they get to go around and find the QR codes to read what is expected or unexpected in our clinic! 
3. We have mandatory fire drills here this month. So we will be having the students find all the pieces to the "Drill" on QR codes, then see if they can put them in the correct order and complete the drill! 
4. Organization was a big puzzle for me. A way to tuck them away, remember what they are, preserve them, etc. We aren't laminating them, as the glare messes with the phones reading it. I went to Office Depot, got the "business card size name badge insert sheets" that you can put through your printer. They are the appropriate size to fit into the baseball card binder pages - so I store them in there in between!

A colleague of mine at school, came up with the clever idea of using QR Codes with the Visualizing and Verbalizing® Program.  QR codes could link to pictures to be used in the "Picture by Picture" level of V/V, or could link to the structure words that help students construct and describe mental images.

I also received a great suggestion via anonymous comment- "This is very easy to do. I actually gave my artic. kids their homework words in the QR Code. They are motivated to go home and see which words they need to practice." Thanks, commenter! 

Thank you also to Tanya Coyle, our Twitter Yoda, who initiated a discussion on Twitter about QR codes this week as part of her awesome #SLPsnQs series of discussions.  


Still curious about different ways you could use QR codes in your work? Check out this collaboratively developed presentation from Tom Barrett, educational technologist: 40 Interesting Ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom. Tom has curated a whole slew of these presentations, created by educators adding slides to a collaborative Google Docs Presentation.  You can see all of the "Interesting Ways Presentations here.

Note: author is a contractor for Mindwing Concepts.