Wordless Books

In early October I was approached by the grade 2 team about collaborating on a wordless book project. Their students were hard at work writing stories to go with the images of wordless books from the school library.  The teachers wanted to find a technological way of sharing these stories with the rest of the students in the school.  I shared a few options with them and we settled on QR Codes.

After completing their writing process (pre-write, write, revise and edit) the students came to the lab to "publish" verbally their stories.  Each child recorded themselves telling their stories, then listened to the playback and decided if they liked what they heard. If they were happy we saved it, if not they were able to a second reading.

Audio Recording

Once all the students had completed "publishing" their stories I stepped in. I took photos of each child holding their book and imported both the photos and audio into MovieMaker and I published these movies. The next step was to upload the movies to YouTube.  Once on YouTube they were marked as unlisted to protect the students' privacy.  I then took the URLs for each video and created a QR code for them using a QR Code Generator.  Next, I modified a bookmark template in MS Publisher to fit my needs.  I imported each student's photo and QR codes and put some basic instructions on the bookmarks.  These were sent to be printed in color and laminated.  Next, I created two small posters.The first poster explained what a QR Code is and where to get one based on platform, the second was other a how to use a QR Code poster.  Finally, the books, poster and bookmarks were used to create a display in the school library.  When students check out one of the wordless books they get to take the bookmark home to hear the stories created by the grade 2 students!

Wordless Book display in the library

Close up of the books with their QR code bookmarks