QR Codes Bring Art and Poetry to Life

My curiosity about how to use QR codes in the classroom is well documented. I’ve blogged about it several times, and I love reading about how other educators are using them with students. Two articles that have inspired me lately are QR Code Quest: A Library Scavenger Hunt (and its sequel) by teacher librarian Gwyneth Jones, and Transliteracy: QR Codes and Art by Silvia Tolisano.

Gwyneth’s posts are epic and amazing. Inspirational and awe-inspiring. I aspire to her level of brilliance. But as a huge fan of art and cross-curricular projects (and a relative QR newbie), it was the latter post by Silvia that really got me thinking about a specific project.

I shared Silvia’s post with our art teacher and we decided we wanted to collaborate on an art/research/writing/technology project that would be shared during the annual school art show. Here’s what we did…

In art class, students explored the work of several different artists and analyzed their work. Then, they chose an artist and created a painting inspired by their work. After that, they did a little bit of research on their artist’s life and wrote a script for a video. Their script had to include both biographical information and their opinion and analysis of the artist’s work. Students chose whether to create a narrated slideshow or a green screen video.

For last night’s art show, the students’ paintings were hanging on the wall and below them were QR Codes. Scanning each code with a handheld device would take you to that student’s slideshow or video. (We had instructions posted for parents who weren’t familiar with scanning codes, too.) It all worked out splendidly. An interactive art show!

Running at the same time as the art show was our annual Poetry Cafe, featuring an “open mic” for students to read their favorite poems, or poems they had written themselves. In addition to mood lighting and soft jazz, I had my students locate poems that they love on the website of the American Academy of Poets. They used Google’s URL shortener to create QR Codes that linked to these poems. (See either of the aforementioned posts by Gwyneth and Silvia for help creating QR codes.) We then made little slips with the codes on them for people to scan while visiting the Poetry Cafe.

And just to show you how adorable the young poets were…

An impressive and interactive night to be sure. Hopefully you’ll find some inspiration here, and in the posts that inspired me.

Student work and images appear with parent permission.