Using URL shortening comes in very handy with students. With my elementary students, I typically post a link to my Symbaloo since it's very colorful with pictures. I can say something like, "click on the pick button" and they will know where to find the link. When I taught high school I used url shorteners more often because I would email or post a link on my website for my students. At conferences, when sharing a link to something I created, url shorteners come in handy as well. I created a url using bit.ly and tinyurl.com for this assignment. When I use shorteners, I gravitate toward goo.gl so I decided to try two others. Both are easy and fast. Bitly has a great options for creating an account and enabling the user to track how their links are being used. If I was a professional wanting to expand my brand, this would provide me with amazing information.
Bookmarklets
It's interesting we are writing about bookmarklets because a friend just sent me a new one that I thought would eventually be useful. The bookmarklet that was sent to me is called CraftyText. It puts a big text box on the front of your webpage so you can type right on top of the website. For me, this will be beneficial when wanting to write down a few short steps for my students to reference when working on a website. Of the options from the list, I chose prinliminator. When printing off websites, I always find it annoying to see all the extra stuff on the bottom and top of the website. For example, I don't always need the website address and date I accessed it. This bookmarklet is good for when students print off information during research as there is often wasted paper. I can see teaching my 4th and 5th graders how to use the bookmarklet to save on paper. Personally, I do not print often anymore, but when I do, I hate wasting paper.
QR Codes
There are many uses for QR codes in the classroom. I've always wanted to create QR codes that link to a book review created by my students. During check out, students could walk around with an iPad and scan a QR code that is on the front cover of a book. This would then take them to a recording or video of a student giving a book review. However, this idea has yet come to fruition. Currently, I have my 2nd and 3rd graders using QR codes to investigate the nonfiction section of the library. As a team, they walk around the nonfiction section and scan QR codes they see. The QR codes takes them to the description of which section they are currently standing in.
At the high school level, I had students create QR codes that were placed outside of classrooms. When new students came to tour our school, they would then scan the QR code outside of the classroom, which then took them to a video about that class. In the video, students explained what class was in that room and typically interviewed the teacher of that class as well. A few years ago I used QR codes at the middle school level in a health unit utilizing what my students learned on Heart Healthy Day. We created yoga poses and posted QR codes that linked to videos of how to do the poses. A handout with the QR code was placed around the school. Here are the instructions I posted on my old website. I like to use http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to create QR codes because there is no sign up needed.
For this project I created a QR code to be placed in our bathroom for use by my two young boys. They have a hard time brushing their teeth for a sufficient amount of time. I am going to place the QR code in our bathroom so that when it's time to brush teeth, my boys can listen and song along to the song to ensure they have brushed long enough.
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