Drones in the ELA Classroom

The Objectives:

When I was featured on Vikki Davis' amazing podcast "Ten Minute Teacher," I was asked how any of this relates to ELA objectives.   My response was which objectives does it NOT related to because it would be a shorter list.  I was not kidding.  Here's annotated list.

Station Rotation--BlendED in Action:

This was a down and dirty station rotation (as is popular in the #BlendED learning community). Because our classes are only 43 minutes long, I opted to have the groups draw lots for which station they would complete that day.  We had a total of five stations, but only four days for the unit, so one group did not get to do the flyers.  When we have our next robot unit, that group will be first for flyers. 

Groups were student formed without my guidance.  There was only one class where I had to intervene and make group decisions (because they wanted to have seven in a group and the stations work better with a max of five).  

The Plans:

This link has a quick summary of all the stations and their functions.

The Deployment:

This is the first unit where I employed my newly purchased NearPod GOLD to deliver instructions (Shoutout to all my peeps at the Bellevue Public Schools Foundation @BPSFNE who purchased the software for us). Since it was station rotation, the students would come in, draw lots to see which station they were doing, and then launch @Schoology to get the codes to the @NearPod (s) to complete what I called "Flight School."  
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As you can see here, every station had a flight school @NearPod attached to it.  All students had to complete the flight school before they were allowed to grab their drones and head to their location.
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You can see the big 2 written under the SpheroRaptor unit!  
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The "Guidelines:"

Just a quick homage to Pirates of the Caribbean, because the students really took the initiative when some of the bots misbehaved and they had to find a creative way to use their time.  Here's links to all the instructions for each station:

Flyers
SpheroRaptors
Ozobots
Dash Maze
Hidden Jumper Maze

Standing on the shoulders of GIANTS:

The SpheroRaptor station was based off of this lesson from Sphero.edu.
​The Ozobot Olympics was brought to you by Sandova Hankov @Ozobot.edu.
Huge shoutout to these amazingly supportive education companies and humans--I could not have done this unit without the help of:
@NearPod, @Schoology, @Tynker, @SwiftPlayground, @Blockly, @Parrot, @Apple, @SchaeferDoug, @MrsJCarlson, @AmandaMonk, @AnnFeldmann1, @NicoleFoxBPS, @TeachLoomis, @choglund87, @ramoore92, @BPSFNE, @BellevueSchools, @Lfwarriors, @lambertclass, @Dunlapbps, @CoolCatTeacher and the ever inspiring #ipadacademy