Wednesday, February 15, 2012

QR Coded ipad Self Portraits

At the beginning of the year I usually get my class to create self portraits focussing on sketching techniques etc. While most students usually find success with this activity, I always have a few who really struggle with the drawing process. This year I chose to do something completely different, the focus was on getting every student to feel successful in what they had created. The ipad self portrait provided the perfect vehicle for this.

Creating a self portrait using the ipad is a relatively simple process. The student takes a photo of themselves (head / face etc) using the front camera of the ipad. The second stage involves the student positioning the ipad with the photo while another student takes a separate photo of them.


I thought it would be a great idea to also get my class to add some biographical details to their self portraits via QR codes. For this task we used www.qrstuff.com to make our codes. The codes were printed out and glued to the portraits. Scanning the codes with a smartphone or other device reveals added detail about the person in the portrait. The finished products were displayed on our classroom windows.

All the children were quite impressed with what they had created ... so was their teacher.