Chesterbrook Elementary has started a new learning and fitness program that uses cool QR code videos.
The teachers at Chestebrook Elementary, a school in McLean, Virginia, have created a new exercise trail around the school property that use QR code stations to provide students with additional information and help them to stay in shape.
According to a student in sixth grade attending the school, Zeeshan Khaliq, when describing the two dimensional barcode being used, “It’s a thing that you can scan that can take you to a website or a video or pictures or something.”
When the students use a smartphone or iPad tablet to scan each QR code found along the trail, the device opens an instructional video that is specific to that specific station. The video stars Jay Levesque, a physical education teacher from the school. Khaliq stated that:
“I like it because Mr. Levesque is funny in most of them, and when pops out of the tree is the best one.”
Levesque also explained that the program has been quite effective so far. He is able to remain in the center of the trail and observe the children while they use it and all of its stations, and he knows that the children are receiving their instructions at all of the various points. He said “it’s like I morphed myself into six people.”
The students have become so good at following the instructions from the various stations that they are now able to teach it to others and answer questions about them.
The QR code is now becoming a regular part of the school’s function.
Bob Fuqua, the principal at Chesterbrook Elementary, said that teachers are starting to use them as a tool for helping to review lessons, and children as young as their fifth and sixth graders are including them in the reports that they are submitting.
Projects displayed on bulletin boards in the hallways are now becoming interactive as the QR code technology they include allow the work to not only be seen, but also heard. Since their use was brought into the school two years ago by Kurt Kohls, the technology teacher, the rest of the educators have continued to come up with creative and unique ways to apply them.
