SAMANTHA BRIX PHOTO | Students at Little Flower won an award for an environmental website they created.

Students at the Little Flower School in Wading River earned a gold award for a website they created for the International Schools CyberFair, a program in which students across the globe conduct research and publish their findings on the web.

Twelve Little Flower students, ages 12 to 16, won the second highest award in the competition’s environmental awareness category. More than 2.5 million students from 115 countries participated in the competition, which focuses on community action.

The Little Flower student website, “Saving Green,” focuses on recycling and includes statistics from their research, images and embedded videos.

Students used cell phones to take still photographs, flip cameras to record interviews and video conferencing equipment to gather information from sources.

The project allowed students to flex their research, writing, and technology muscles, said Janet Slote, a middle school special education teacher who led the project.

“We wanted to get the kids involved in things other than the normal day-to-day stuff,” she said, “and we wanted to do something for the community.”

Part of the website encourages community residents to  recycle electronics, create art projects from plastic materials and think of creative ways to reuse materials.

Students learned that the Kent Animal Shelter in Calverton needed old newspapers for the animals’ bedding, so as part of their project they collected newspapers delivered to the school weekly and donated them to the shelter.

A grant from the Eastern Suffolk BOCES Model School Program provided web training for the teachers involved and for much of the equipment used for the project, Ms. Slote said.

samantha@northshoresun.com

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