Taking the “rut” out of “routine”

I have been flipping my biology 12 class this semester and have found the video notes and added time in class to be so valuable.  With that said, the initial appeal of anything new can sometimes wear off after a while.  With only a few weeks to go I could tell the students were needing something “new” and exciting to wet their appetite so i decided to bring back the QR codes.

I’ve used QR codes before to link students to websites and videos but I wanted to try out a new idea I was toying with.

Enter the QR Code Scavenger Hunt…

We are just finishing off the circulation unit and I used this activity to review what they’ve done and to introduce the last fetal circulation part.

First, the students answered a bunch of review questions.  A letter in each answer revealed the location to a QR code (library, gym, drama room and two administrators offices).  The librarian actually hid the QR code on one of the books and gave them other clues to find it.

Side bar- this led to a great idea by the librarian to attach QR codes to books so students could scan them and it would take them to authors websites or sites of books of the same genre…great idea!!

Here is the hand-out I gave them to find the locations- 0_QR Code Scavenger Hunt

When they found the bar code, they scanned it with their electronic devices (I made sure to have at least one person per group with a device).  The bar code took them to a clip that I recorded and uploaded to YouTube.  Each clip was about 1 minute long and they wrote what they saw/ heard on their usual note template.

Here is a sample of one of the QR codes they found…scan it if you have a device

Once they had all of the video notes written down (5 total) they raced back to my room for their prize.

I was very pleased with how this activity went.  The students reviewed previous info and gathered the new content.  We will be going over the new content tomorrow in class.

This lesson could have been done the “traditional” flipped way but I wanted to mix things up.  Today I saw students ridiculously excited.  They were energetically discussing concepts from the review and racing from place to place with the hope that they could be the first ones to get back to me.

Other students, not in my class, were baffled by what was going on and I had a number of them come into my room to find out what was happening.

The goal of the lesson was to check understanding of the previous concepts, acquire new content, and most importantly, to inject some fun into the lull that can sometimes arise during this time of year

Mission accomplished!

***Speaking of “mission accomplished”…that will be the theme of the next QR code activity…”Mission Impossible”! I want to create some more interesting videos with a theme!

Thoughts?

Scott