QR codes promote student literacy in Mineola, New York

mobile qr codes in library

The kids have been encouraged to use mobile technology to share their favorite books with others.

The Hampton Street School in Mineola, New York, is using QR codes and mobile technology as a part of a greater effort to encourage students to read and to start to discover a wider variety of different kinds of books.

The school has now created an interactive recommendation experience based on the scans of quick response codes.

The goal of the use of the QR codes is to encourage students to read more and to broaden the type of books that they are reading. The program was created by Diane Nodell, the school’s library media specialist within the Mineola School District. The result of the idea was an interactive recommendation student that would allow students to be able to further explore possible new selections for books to read.

The QR codes are central to the recommendation station as they provide direct access to video descriptions.

mobile qr codes in libraryIn order to create the foundation for the station, the school invite the participation of about twenty children in the second grade. They chose their favorite book and wrote a “book talk summary” about it. Within that summary, they described what they liked about that specific book and then discussed why they believed that someone else should read it, too.

The students then used iPads that were issued by the district and converted the summaries that they had written into short videos in which they filmed themselves “selling” the book to other students in the school who would use the recommendation station and view the videos. The videos for each book could be accessed for each book through its own unique QRcode.

The same iPad devices could be used to quickly and easily scan the QR codes for the books that had been described. That way, the children who were looking for books to read would be able to view the video descriptions and decide whether or not they would like to choose that book to read. This could help to encourage them to choose a selection outside of the type of book to which they would usually gravitate because they would hear what one of their peers have said about their own favorite books.

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