Vicki's Tech Hub

 Robots automatically create buy-in with students because they are fun and relevant, and allow creativity in learning and expressing learning. This week, I am showing you a 5th-grade order pair activity my students completed with Dash robots.  Students started by reviewing vocabulary for graphing ordered pairs on a coordinate plane. Then, they completed an activity that allowed them to use ordered pairs to create an image on a graph. After this, students partnered up and created simple images. Partners were then paired with another partnership and voted on which image to write down the ordered pairs. The ordered pairs were swapped with another group and groups had to use the ordered pairs to create an unknown image. Additionally, students needed to create an apparatus to hold a marker and attach it to the Dash robot to draw the image as the robot traveled around it. Here are some pictures of the stages of the project. Photo Credits: Vicki's Tech Hub Photo Credits: Vicki's Tech...

(Feitelberg, n.d.)  Digital storytelling is a fantastic way for students to express their voices in a modern, engaging way. Many of my students already know how to create videos - it is the TikTok age after all! What I'm teaching them is to cultivate their voice for a purpose. Students were creating a public service announcement (PSA) video for a topic of their choice. One of the things I noticed when we started this project was that students didn't know how to write for context AND sound like real people. Here are some tips I gave them: When writing for context: create descriptions for the video engage their audience by adding links to resources  include and clearly explain statistics, facts, or other hard-to-understand information  draw on their understanding of traditional writing (essays, paragraphs, captions, etc.) discuss what they learned and the challenges they had when learning and creating the video How to sound like a real person: write as if they were havin...

 I was recently in a second-grade classroom working with the teacher and students to create a foundational understanding of using the compass rose. Later in the day, these same students saw me in another part of their school and excitedly told their teacher "I just saw the teacher who makes learning fun!" I laughed when the teacher told me that story, but it shows that students want to learn more when they have fun learning! Here's how I created that culture in their classroom. First, I thought about what tool would make this learning stick and what was the best tech tool to achieve the level of learning necessary to use a compass rose. That's where the Sphero Bolt robots come in. Bolt robots connect to the SpheroEDU app. In the app, the heading function looks like an unmarked compass rose! Primary students initially recognize the heading tool as a compass rose. I used that recognition to my advantage! (Photo Credits: Vicki's Tech Hub) I created an activity in w...