Niki Egelhoff, Rachel Evans, Kari Krueger, and Tyler Ayres are presenting on how “Students Use Technology to Spread Kindness to Their Community.” The educators and students worked collaboratively to transform the classroom from teacher- to student-led while developing research based components of their kindness project. Students spread kindness throughout the community by creating posters, books, invitations, a radio commercial, a newspaper article, a website, and cartoons, all of which helped to improve the educational climate at Illini Middle School.

Angie Noble, Melanie Fessler, Ava Burney, and Jaxon Brunaugh are presenting their project on “Exploring the Fifty States with Google Hangouts and Virtual Field Trips.” The students created a Google Form to share with other classrooms across America to gather data about each state. In addition, students worked on improving their communication and questioning skills by hosting Google Hangouts with schools from each state. Each student then created a travel video promoting tourism in different states.

Nick Crnokrak, Shelly Robinson, Hannah Jones, and Hannah Tonsor will be presenting on “How to Avoid a Zombie Appocolypse” as their project. Using the standards as a benchmark, students researched information on the Middle East, documenting its culture and geographical areas. They enhanced their map reading skills and used open class dialogue to react to information derived from QR code events. With each additional piece of information, students are able to avoid zombies that are attacking. Students created presentations and brochures to inform other class members of the culture in which they are immersed and strategies to avoid destruction at the hands of zombies.