When we present our seminars to live audiences, we cover a lot of information. We want people to be paying attention and not taking notes, but we know they’ll forget most of it unless they have a takeaway – something written, so we offer detailed handouts for everyone in the audience. We also play some of our tutorial videos during the presentation.
How can we give our audience one of our videos as a takeaway?
QR codes is the answer! A QR code is one of those funny looking square barcodes. When you scan them with your smartphone or tablet, they act like a Link on paper. Whatever is programmed into that QR code will be accessed by your smartphone. Here is a piece of our Picasa handout that includes 4 different QR codes. If you scan them, they will play different tutorial videos about using Picasa. We think this makes our handouts even more valuable than they already were. A seminar on a piece of paper!
If you don’t know how to scan a QR code with your smartphone or tablet, here’s a past article for you to read: What are QR Codes and how do I use my Smartphone to Read Them?
Make your Own QR Codes
Many people are now putting QR codes on their business cards and brochures. They can be as simple as a link to your website or email address. They can also be a geo location that can help people navigate to a given location. Or, they can be a video about you or your products, or whatever you want! There are several websites that will create QR codes for you. Our current favorite is QR Droid Zapper. This website can create a QR code for:
- A website URL – that can be a simple page, or a link to a video or other content
- Text
- Phone #
- SMS – a text message. The person scanning the code will instantly be sending the specified text message to the specified number
- E-mail – an email message. The person scanning the code will be sending the specified email message to the specified address
- Contact – a way to give the person scanning the code your complete contact information
- Calendar Event
- Geo Location – a Latitude/Longitude which opens the specified place in Google Maps
- Android App – will point to App’s details in the Google Play store
Add a Video to a Greeting Card
So, let’s say you made a video of your family vacation and you want everyone on your Christmas Card list to watch it. You just need to put a QR code on the Christmas Card!
First, you need to make the video and upload it to Youtube (Geeks on Tour Videos can teach you how to do that!) It doesn’t have to be a public video if you don’t want, just make it Unlisted and only people with the direct link will be able to see it.
We have a video of last year’s family vacation already uploaded to Youtube. I just visited it, clicked the Share button and copied the link provided. I pasted that link into the URL box as shown in the screenshot above, then clicked on “Generate QR Code.” Here’s what I get:
To get that image to your computer, simply right-click on the image and find “Save Picture as …” or “Save Image” or something like that depending on what browser you’re using. Then you can save it to a specified folder. It is a .png picture and can be used just like a .jpg picture. There are a lot of ways to make greeting cards and add your own pictures. One that we can recommend is SentOutCards with our friend Laura Baker. In fact, we have an hour-long webinar/video all about it: Send Out Cards Webinar.
Can you scan that code above? It’s intended for paper, but you can point your phone at the screen and scan it just as well. Watch the video and tell us if you’ve ever had a family vacation like ours.
Here is the fifth in our series of Review Questions from our “What Does This Button Do?” show. These can’t be graded, but if you want to see the discussion of our answers to these questions, you can click the link provided. The link will take you to the time in the specific episode where we start the discussion of review questions. Since we have produced 79 episodes so far, this “Test Your Smartphone Smarts” will be an ongoing series of posts here.
June was primarily spent preparing and attending the Good Sam RV Rally in Louisville, KY. We presented 7 different seminars. The large seminar room ‘C109’ at the Kentucky Expo hall was basically all ours for the week of the rally! 
What are QR Codes and How do I use my Smartphone to Read Them?
You may remember this video we did a couple of years ago when we first got our Droid smartphones. It shows how we use some software called PDANet to tether our phone to our computer, giving the computer an Internet connection.
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