Playing the Game of School

This year, I had a group of 10 8th graders as part of a special team designed to help at-risk students before they move on to high school. When describing the goal of the program, perhaps my principal put it best – Our job was to get these kids to buy into school.

The year was not without its challenges, but I enjoyed it. At night while eating dinner with my family and sharing stories of our day, the group affectionately became known as “the bad kids” by my four-year-old daughter. And by the standards of school, that’s what they were. They were always in trouble. They swore. They fought. They were late to class (if they even bothered to come to school in the first place).

Last Tuesday, we loaded the group onto a school bus and headed to a nearby state park for a field trip. We spent the day geocaching, fishing (yes, we let the “bad kids” handle sharp hooks), and cooking hotdogs. And you know what? It was the best field trip I have ever been on. The kids were an absolute delight. They were patient while we bushwhacked our way through the woods in search of hidden caches. They were supportive of each other while fishing – taking turns with the poles and helping each other get their catches off the line. We even let one girl who aspires to attend culinary school someday man the grill and cook for us.

While playing Kanjam with the group, one of the kids joked that he never realized that his teachers were actually normal people who fish and play games, and eat hotdogs. I don’t think he realized how insightful the comment was. Because it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that this wasn’t a group of bad kids. It wasn’t a group of at-risk, attendance problems. It was just a group of kids.


So what if they aren’t good at school. That doesn’t mean they aren’t smart.

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10 Ways to Use QR Codes in the Classroom

QR codes are 2 dimensional computer-generated codes that can be scanned and read by mobile devices or webcams. The first time a colleague showed me QR codes, I was literally giddy with excitement. I immediately recognized the potential for QR codes in my classroom.

Creating the QR code is surprisingly easy. I use QRstuff.com - simply type in the text or url of whatever content you want the code to direct toward, and you're good to go. It's literally that easy. From there, the QR code can be downloaded, added to worksheets, emailed, etc. It can even be scanned directly from an LCD projector or computer screen!

Here are my top ten ways to use QR codes in the classroom.



1. Add a QR code to school letterhead that points to the school website.

2. Use an interactive whiteboard to record notes/math equations/brainstorming/etc. Host the video online and add a QR code to a homework assignment so students can be retaught from home.

3. Hide the answers to a study guide behind a QR code. Copy the code onto the study guide so students can check their answers.

4. Have students write children's books and then record them reading their work. Upload the audio online and add a QR code linking to the audio for each page of the book to create an interactive reading experience.

5. For open house/parent night, have each teacher in the building create a brief video introducing him/herself. Upload the videos and create QR codes that they can hang on their doors. This way parents can take a self tour of the building and get a feel for the quality teachers working in the building.

6. Have students record book reviews and attach the QR code to the inside cover of the book.

7. Create a survey using Google Forms. Print multiple codes (one for each choice in the survey) and then use it to poll the class in anonymous surveys. You'll be able to see immediately how many times a particular code was scanned.

8. Print QR codes that point to your classroom homework/events calendar. Have students attach them to their agendas or daily planners .

9. Create QR codes that link to supplemental materials and add them to the teacher edition of textbooks. This way valuable resources don't get lost in endless network folders on a forgotten flash drive.

10. During a field trip, give students a handout with multiple QR codes that provide supplemental information coinciding with different locations on the trip. Students will have a guided tour even if they are not with the teacher.

Bonus - 11. QR codes are a great way to play pranks (see below, if you dare).

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How to Create Virtual Realty Field Trips

Field trips are a great idea because it exposes kids to things many of them have never seen before. The probem, however, is that the excitement and novelty often trumps any chance for the true real-world learning and teachable moments that field trips offer. Sure, you can take pictures or videos, but these static media just don't compare.

I was thinking about this and I was reminded of a feature I used to like when my wife and I were house hunting. Some realty sites have an interactive feature where the potential buyer can take a virtual tour through the house. It was a great way to really understand the layout of the house and visualize what it would be like to live there.

Why not use this virtual realty technology for field trips? It's actually fairly simple to do. Imagine taking a field trip to a historic location, for example. The trip can be captured by digital camera and later transformed into a virtual trip that be re-explored in depth from the classroom.

Here is my tutorial for creating a virtual reality tour.

Software Needed:
Auto Stitch
Pano Cube
PT Stitcher

(I have included all of these applications in a .zip folder that can be downloaded here. They can also be downloaded individually from their respective companys' sites.)
Image Editor – Photoshop/Gimp/etc

Equipment Needed:
Digital Camera with plenty of memory
Tripod

Part I: Taking pictures

1. Position the tripod and camera in the approximate center of the location that you plan on capturing. Once you begin taking pictures you cannot move the tripod, so choose carefully.

2. You need to be able to move the head of the tripod in a vertical line from bottom to top but keep it level horizontally, so adjust your tripod as necessary. Do this before you begin taking pictures so it doesn’t interrupt the continuity of the shots.

3. Begin taking pictures by tilting the camera as far down on the tripod as it allows. It’s okay if the tripod legs are in the picture – that’ll be fixed later. Take one picture, then move the camera up so that the new picture will have about 60% overlap. In other words, before moving pick something on the camera screen that is about 40% up from the bottom, and then move the position so that target is now at the bottom of the screen.

4. Continue to take a picture and move the tripod position until your camera is facing straight up (or as close as your tripod will allow). One series of vertical pictures should consist of approximately 10-15 shots depending on the overlap for each picture.

5. Swivel the camera counter-clockwise so there’s about 60% horizontal overlap. Aim the camera all the way down to the ground again and begin a new series of pictures.

6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you have moved 360 degrees around your location. Your final series of pictures should overlap with the first series.

Part II: Create the Panorama

1. Run the AutoStitch program. Select Edit from the menu and then choose Options. You can leave everything as it is, but change the Output size height to 700.

2. Go to Open in the File menu. Select all of your pictures (there should be between 100-150 of them depending on how much they overlap).

3. When AutoStitch finishes, it will create a file called pano.jpg.

4. Use the image editor of your choice (Photoshop or its free equivalent, GIMP) and open pano.jpg. In order to display correctly as a virtual reality tour, pano.jpg must be cropped to be exactly twice as wide as it is high. First, crop out any black areas (these are usually on the outside edges where you may not have tilted the camera enough while taking your pictures) as well as any place where you see the tripod legs. If you’re comfortable with your image editor, these can also be removed using the clone tool. Do not crop the width of the image. If you do so, your virtual reality tour will not be seamless.

5. Make note of the width of your image and then increase the canvas height to half the width. This will put a white space both above and below your image.

6. Using the marquee tool, select and copy a 50-100 pixel strip from your image and copy it. Then stretch it to fill the white space. Do this for above and below the image.

7. Save this edited file as a jpg.

Your image should look something like this. Notice the top and bottom of the image are just slices that have been copied and pasted then stretched to fill the space.

Part III: Turning your panorama into virtual reality

1. Begin by moving the PanoCube folder (named PC00292) directly to your C drive (click on my computer and then C drive). This program is pretty finicky and won’t work if it is in a different location.

2. Open the folder and locate both the PanoCUBE.exe file and the PTStitcher.exe file. Drag the PTStitcher.exe file into the PanoCUBE.exe file. This only has to be done the first time you use the program.

3. Now locate the image file you created with the image editor. Drag this file into the PanoCUBE.exe file. PanoCube will work for a while and then create a .mov file with the same name as the image you dragged into it.

4. You’re done! You can either embed the .mov into a website, or play it from the computer by double clicking it.


Here is a sample tour I created of one of the science labs at my school. (If it doesn't display correcly on your computer as an embedded object, you can download the .mov here).

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