Turning a QR code fail into an epic win, AMLE Magazine

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Turning a QR
Code Fail into
an Epic Win
By Jessica Herring & Michael S. Mills
The day could have been bad. In fact, it could have
been absolutely awful. In the process of making the
seventh grade classroom a more “edtech-friendly”
environment, we planned to do a Bring Your Own
Device lesson. Together, we designed what we
thought would be a fantastic, high-level critical
literacy lesson around The Diary of Anne Frank that
required students to analyze multiple primary and
secondary sources and evaluate the relevance of the
sources to two questions related to the story. It all
sounded so great before our problems with technology
threatened to jeopardize the whole lesson.
QR Codes Are Great, When They Work
To promote the idea that students should learn how
to use their personal mobile devices responsibly, we
planned to have students access research through QR
codes linked to primary and secondary text sources.
Many educators love a good QR code. QR codes
allow us to bypass the need to have a large number
of students
logged onto the
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time, which is
usually under a
heavy load as it is. QR codes also eliminate the need
for students to type in lengthy website addresses
should they need to access the Internet. All things
considered, QR codes are great when they work.
However, on this day, they did not work.
In our efforts to bypass the need for the Internet,
we designed QR codes that directly connected to
embedded text. One thing we didn’t consider was
that QR codes increase in detail as you add more
embedded information. In other words, a paragraph of
text will result in a more detailed QR code image than
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a QR code image that represents a simple URL. The
problem gets worse when the QR code is duplicated
using a standard office copier. The result was that
only the students with the latest smartphones could
read the highly detailed, poorly duplicated QR codes.
Love/Hate Relationship
And thus, we have come to the center of our love/
hate relationship with technology. We both adore
technology. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that we
both have an addiction to several social networks.
True confession: one of us has never taught without
a whiteboard. But when technology fails, it’s not just
a minor hiccup. It’s an epic fail.
In the moment when we realized the QR codes
weren’t going to work, we could have panicked. We
could have said, forget it kids, we’ll just read The
Diary of Anne Frank today. Some people may have
found that perfectly acceptable. But not us. We’re
teachers. We believe that learning is more than an
app or a device. We refuse to lose to technology.
Technology is the tool. It is not the goal of learning.
A Community of Learners
So we did what every good teacher does. We
monitored and adjusted—quickly. In the early
morning classes, we struggled through the process
of frantically downloading new QR scanner apps and
trying to increase the size of the codes to see if they
scanned more easily.
This helped some students but not all. We even
pulled up some of the sources on the whiteboard
and worked through part of the activity as a class.
Thankfully, the early morning classes were receptive
to the fact that we were doing our very best to make
things work.
Students used their own devices and the evidence
provided to answer research questions. Photos
Students fulfilled their commitment to foster a
collaborative learning environment.
courtesy of Michael S. Mills.
Understanding that we all belonged to the same
community of learners and that we were learning
together, the students did their best with what they
had and worked cooperatively to try to get the work
done.
This instinctive cooperation did not happen
spontaneously. During the first week of class, students
helped create the classroom vision statement. It
appears that laying the foundation of a shared
learning community at the beginning of the year
really seemed to come into play on this day.
The kids were living out their commitment to foster
a collaborative, solution-driven learning environment,
and we didn’t even have to ask them to do it. It was a
proud moment for us. It wasn’t about accomplishing
something with the help of technology; it was about
dealing with problems in a constructive, positive way
as a part of a learning community.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
By mid-morning, we solved the problem with help
from the students. Rather than having students scan
codes to access the sources, we put the research
information on a handout and had students cut out the
12 sources and sort them into three groups: images,
primary sources, and secondary sources.
After sorting their sources, students used their
devices to search for and identify the people in
each of the images. Since we’ve been reading about
Anne Frank, they identified her right away. But the
students were a little unsure about some of the other
images. Since we couldn’t use the QR codes, this was
a great way to integrate technology into the lesson
extemporaneously. In the end, it was a meaningful
mini-lesson in identifying appropriate search terms,
which is a Common Core technology standard and a
vital part of media literacy.
The last step was to sift through the evidence
with a partner and determine which pieces of
evidence were relevant to the research questions we
had posed. We gave students 12 pieces of evidence,
and they needed only 8 of them to answer their two
questions—4 pieces of evidence for each of the two
questions. This meant that students had to sift out the
4 unnecessary sources and determine which sources
applied to each question.
Once the students evaluated the evidence and
selected the correct pieces of evidence, they could
answer each question and glue their evidence to their
paper. By the end of the day, we finally hit our rhythm
with this lesson, and even had time to spare! Students
used that time to reflect on their process during the
lesson.
Lessons Learned
Overall, we learned two things on this day. First,
we reaffirmed that a strong classroom management
foundation is essential in implementing a BYOD
AMLE Magazine · SEPTEMBER 2014
41
Figure 1. Worksheet
Sample with the “Bad” QR Codes.
program in any classroom. A mutual trust and respect
must be built in order for students to be successful in
the process of learning how to use their devices for
instructional and educational purposes and not just
as playthings.
Second, if a teacher thinks he or she has to be
flexible when a traditional lesson tanks, just multiply
that by 100, and that’s how flexible teachers need
to be when integrating
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education should never be
about what apps we used or
what technology we’re able to integrate. Above all
else, education must always focus on learning and,
ultimately, student empowerment.
There was little doubt that students were going
to achieve the instructional objectives because we
were committed to modifying the lesson to suit their
needs. But the epic win was that students felt that
they were part of something more than just being
passive learners. They shared our problem and, more
important, shared in creating a solution.
Bottom line: we’re glad technology failed during
the lesson because it gave students the opportunity
to create for themselves an epic win.
Jessica Herring teaches seventh grade at Benton
Middle School in Benton, Arkansas.
jherring@bentonshools.org
@jessicarae929
Michael S. Mills is an assistant professor at the
University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas.
mmills@uca.edu
@aquiamigo
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