QR Madness

I need to brag a little bit here. 

In a staff-development session a while back, a rep from Junior Library Guild suggested using QR codes creatively in the library; I thought it would be pretty exciting and epic to have QR codes all over the nonfiction bookshelves, over/near the books, each taking students to reliable links about a certain subject.  For example, if a student were researching Vikings, they could find the Vikings books in the 900’s section, and there would be a “Vikings” QR code over those books.  The code would immediately take them to a school-run page of links (we’re using Google Sites in our school colors, black and silver) that could be used as web sources on Vikings.   

At first, I overzealously decided that I would personally compile and vet the websites myself.  After making a single page of links (on Vikings, incidentally), I realized that doing this all by myself for every subject in the nonfiction section was going to be...well...sisyphean.  About the time I was staring blankly at my computer, wondering how I would ever get it all done, our school’s technology facilitator had the most brilliant idea: “Why don’t we make the kids do it?” 

Eureka! 

One of the goals of our student-media-assistants’ (SMA’s) curriculum is to promote digital citizenship and good research skills.  So, Christy (the aforementioned technology facilitator) and I sat down with the SMA’s to hash out the assignment.  They have to:

1.  Read Kathy Schrock’s Five W’s of Website Evaluation.

2.  Hear a discussion on what does and doesn’t make a credible, reliable web source.

3.  Hear a refresher of school-subscribed services (like Discovery Education and NC Wise Owl) which are generally always accepted by teachers as reliable web sources

4.  Choose a nonfiction topic (they chose things as varied as culinary arts, Greek Mythology, photography, NC ghost stories, outer space, etc.)

5.  Find at least ten links that comply with our research-friendly criteria.

6.  Create a new page on the Google Site.

7.  Add the links.

8.  Create a QR code for their topic’s page.

9.  Label the QR code, print it, and display it over the Dewey section of their topic.

They’re still working on it.  But I cannot WAIT to see the results -- this could be the big project every semester for our SMA’s, and when we run out of topics, we might just have them update old ones, perhaps more involved in maintenance than in creation.  Needless to say, I don’t think we’ll run out of topics any time soon.