We’ve awarded our final EdTech grant of 2020 to Mary Bonnetty, an elementary teacher from Honolulu, Hawaii! Mary teaches at the Queen Ka’ahumanu Elementary School and has made a huge impact on the school's STEM offerings. Even as learning has gone remote, she's continued to provide these opportunities for students. She's even explore drone education and found that it's very effective in engaging students!


Mary teaches a lot of STEM and technology lessons and sees educational drones as tools to help create multidisciplinary experiences. With help from this grant money, she’ll be able to take her lessons to new heights—literally! As we enter a new year, we’re excited to provide Mary and her students with some new Tello EDU drones. We can’t wait to see how they use them as they transcend online and mainstream learning.


tello edu drone with launch pads and propellor accessories


Using the drones we provide, Mary will create a stronger connection between technology, STEM concepts, and social-emotional learning. Since the Tello EDU drones are programmable, she’s also planning to focus on helping students develop additional coding skills and put their problem-based learning approaches to the test as well. Having done a lot of research on the connection between technology and SEL (with drones specifically), Mary believes bringing this technology into mainstream learning environments is worthwhile. She plans to use it to create more authentic experiences for students and boost their academic and social development.


Leaders of the Hawaii Dept. of Education have outlined a ‘Sense of Excellence’ as it pertains to student development. Mary believes using drones in STEM projects with her students will contribute to them getting much closer to this goal. She also wants to help students learn more about the various landscapes found all around Hawaii. These include Manoa Falls, The Dwellings, and Kalo—something they can potentially learn as they get more skilled at piloting. For social-emotional connections, she plans on incorporating how the Hawaiian people emphasize the relationship between nature and people as they explore it more deeply from above.


Beyond that, Mary wants to promote student collaboration—something she believes will skyrocket as they begin learning with drone technology. By working together and establishing these connections, she believes her students will build stronger social-emotional foundations, begin fostering growth mindsets, and think more critically when it comes to problem solving and decision making. With all the possibilities drones create, this is definitely a great way to unite these elements of 21st century learning.


To that end, Mary plans on using the Tello EDU Small Classroom Kit to help students highlight geospatial thinking. She'll also pair it with the QKS Virtual Reality Technology and Minecraft Education Field Trip Simulations Project. We’re also going to include access to the DroneBlocks platform so Mary and her students can learn about programming the Tello EDU with this professional development content!

block program created for the tello edu drone


Mary has a lot of expectations for this project and for good reason. Besides helping her students develop new coding skills, she also wants to maximize the drone technology and help them see how to use it to create authentic media projects. Part of the plan includes using drones for photography and video capture. She also plans on students recording short videos of each other discussing what they learned as part of the project. Since there's so many uses of drone technology, incorporating coding, photography, piloting, and videography all help maximize the Tello EDU! Mary will also capture data of her own, most notably how the technology drives critical thinking and problem solving in her students when solving real-world challenges.


We extend our congratulations for Mary on her selection as our final grant recipient of 2020 and thank her for the thoughtful application and all the amazing work she does with her students. If you could benefit from additional STEAM tools, we encourage you to apply for our grant in the new year. If you have any questions about eligibility, please contact our team and follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more.