Tech Tac Toe #3 QR Codes

Using QR Codes is something I have wondered about since my younger son was in kindergarten and I didn't even have a smart phone to be able to scan the code and find out what what his hidden message was!  I won't tell you who his kindergarten teacher was (initials K.B., member of our class!) but I thought to myself that I had better get with the program and figure it out...

Not only do I now have a smartphone, which I love, I installed a QR Reader on it, as well as on my iPad after learning more in one of our early EDU776 class sessions.  Then, I went to QRStuff and started wondering about a follow-up activity to the Thinglink map of the themes from Peter and the Wolf that I had already made.  Within a very short time, I found it was easy to make a QR Code for each character's musical theme using the same short YouTube clips I had used previously.

I named each one on my desktop, since I didn't want to have to try to determine which was which later, and then opened SMART Notebook and made a new file.  For each character, I inserted their QR Code with the words "Who am I?"  under the code.  The example on the left is Peter, but only those students who have really listened and learned each theme would be able to recognize that.

What I imagine doing with this lesson is printing out all seven QR codes individually and placing them at seven numbered stations around the room.  Students would scan each code, and write down the name of the character and the corresponding instrument next to the number of their station.  The room might look something like this:

Then, students could use a worksheet to record their answers after scanning the code at each listening station.  For example:

I am looking forward to testing both my Thinglink introductory activity and the QR Code Follow-Up out in the spring when I often use this piece in 5th grade.  It would be a fun way to shake things up and introduce the piece in an unexpected way.  I think QR Codes are a nice way to add an element of discovery for students rather than having the teacher present material in a predictable way.

Since it is relatively easy and fast to generate QR Codes, students could use them to send their parents an audio file of their own compositions in music, for example.  It might be a nice "gift" for parents around holidays, such as Christmas, Hanukkah, or Mother's Day.

Tech Tac Toe #1 Using Tagul to Make Word Clouds

For our Tech Tac Toe project, we were instructed to try out three new "tech tools" we hadn't used before but were curious about.  For my first tool, I wanted to learn more about making word clouds.
To make word clouds, there are multiple websites that will create these based on the words you input.  I chose Tagul, and could not figure out how to get the program to generate the cloud once I had typed in the words I wanted.  After struggling with this for a while, and losing a few sets of words, I tried clicking, "Visualize," and voila!, a beautiful word cloud was created.  I then played around with colors, font sizes, importance of certain words, and capitalization.  In the end, I made two word clouds about Orff-Schulwerk teaching, and one about the qualities I would like to see in my music students.  As it turned out, the Music Student word cloud was my favorite.

I really enjoyed doing these, and I think kids would, too. Students could reflect on their favorite parts of music, and how it makes them feel, and create a word cloud at the end of the school year, for example.  Or, it might be a good activity to do with a sub, since most subs do not have music training, but could certainly help kids work on these as an in-class project.

I will definitely use this Tech Tool in the future, maybe even for this year's Christmas card!