Hi, this is Jennifer Gonzalez for Cult of Pedagogy.
In this video I'm going to show you how to create QR codes.
That is what a QR code looks like. Let's go.
So I'm making this video for my book, The Teacher's Guide to Tech,
and in that book I feature over a hundred different technology tools. And for each one,
I link the reader to a good video that's online that
shows them the features of that tool,
except I couldn't find any that I really liked for QR codes
so I decided to just make my own.
Now there are a lot of QR code generators out there,
but once you've watched this you'll understand how they're made and you could
basically take this same set of skills and apply it to any other QR code generator,
because it's super super easy.
So basically what a QR code is, is this: It is this picture right here
and when somebody scans that with their phone
or an iPad or another device that has a QR code reader in it,
it will take them automatically to either a website
or to some other place that you've told it to go. Whatever you have associated
with this it's automatically generated. It's a lot like a bar code that has a
price embedded in it, and a --
and the name of a product or whatever at the grocery store.
So let me show you how it works. Right along the side here they're giving you a lot
of different things that you can actually plug into this QR code. So I'm going to
put a URL in. I'm gonna put the URL of my own website.
Now you'll notice that the QR code changed when I did that.
That QR code now is uniquely associated with the URL to my own website.
So what I do now is I'm going to save this picture and I'm going to download it to my
own desktop, and then I can use it wherever I want, I just treat it like it's a picture.
So they give me a lot of different size options. I can make it bigger
or smaller. So I'll just choose this 200 pixels and then I'm going to click Save.
I want to name it something that I remember what it is so I'll call
it "culturl." And they give you three choices for file types
I would say just choose PNG unless you know what these others are. PNG is just a
similar to a JPEG file,
but it's more for, like, non-photographs, other types of images,
and it's just a really common file extension. So just
stick with that, click Save...
and see, it just downloaded.
Okay so I just open the file, I can do whatever I want
to do with this now. I can paste it into a Word document,
I can put it into a PowerPoint, I can print it,
I can print off multiple copies and hang it on a wall. I can do whatever I want to
do with it.
But what's great is that if anybody takes their phone and scans it with a
QR scanner,
it will automatically do that. So suppose I am
out on the street advertising my website and I want people to come and see it.
I can just say here,
hold up, hold up your phone to this QR code and you'll go
right to it. I don't have to stand there and say it's www.cultofpedagogy.com
and have them try to spell all that right. They wil be taken directly to it.
Let me show you what other things you can plug into a QR code.
You can plug in just free text -- let me just type
"I love you." Now what happens is that when someone
scans that with the QR code, they're just going to get basically a screen that has
that text on it. So people can use this for --
One thing I think of a lot is when you have sort of an exhibit,
like a gallery exhibit or something, maybe an art exhibit and you want to
code in there information about the author.
And so you could put -- almost like they do in art galleries have -- those little signs
underneath that tells you about the author.
They can have that come up, so you can have free text come up.
You can have contact information. See I've plugged in John Doe, johndoe@mail.com
What will happen when somebody scans that
is that it will scan it and then their phone will automatically go to their
contacts list and say, do you want to add this as a contact,
yes or no? It's got all the information all plugged in and ready,
you just give it the okay.
You could just plug the phone number in and then the phone would actually go
go to that phone number and it would ask you what you want to do with the phone
number, do you want to
dial it? Do you want to send the person a text? Whatever. It's not going to automatically
make the phone start to actually call.
SMS basically stands for text message
so what you could do is you could put your own phone number in there
and even put in an automatic text message that says,
"Hi. I attended
parent night." And maybe this is something where you
you want parents to send you a text message
when they come to parent night so that you can get their number into your phone
and this just has them automatically send it.
So there are a bunch of different things that you can do with QR codes, but this
just shows you how
to make them. You just go to anything that's a QR code generator,
you plug in your information -- now one thing it's important to know is that
each of these is something different I'm not loading all of this information
into the same QR code these are just different things that you can
create a QR code for. So that's important to know.
Okay so I just want to show you how the QR code reader works
on a phone. So this is the screen on my cell phone and I've got this program
right here called a QR Code Reader so I'm going to just open that up,
and basically it's super simple it just gives you the sort of "reading" screen.
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the QR code
a QR code that I made that basically takes, is supposed to take people to my
website, cultofpedagogy.com.
So now I'm going to take my phone and I'm going to
aim it -- oh, that was so fast I barely even aimed it. And what it says here
is, it's going to open that URL. So I click OK,
and I am automatically loading up
my website. The first time I did this -- there, see --
first time I did this, I started jumping around. I couldn't believe how
fast it was.
That is it. That's how it works.