Today marks the last day of Microsoft's Innovative Education Forum, the annual event that recognizes educators who incorporate technology in the classroom in unique ways.

Participants have been presenting their learning projects to a panel of judges over the last couple of days over on Microsoft's Redmond campus. The judges will select 10 of those projects to represent the U.S. at the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum to be held this November 6-11 in Washington D.C.

Of the 100 presenters at the forum, 12 are from Washington state. Projects range from using Microsoft OneNote in a science classroom to creating video announcements that promote diversity and discourage bullying. (Check out the full list of projects here.)

I talked with a few of the educators from Washington to see how they are using technology to helps kids learn.

Students in Michelle Zimmerman's class taught younger kids reading skills while filming with a webcam.

Michelle Zimmerman is a seventh and eighth grade teacher at the Amazing Grace Christian School in Seattle. Zimmerman, who is working toward her doctorate in human development and cognition, developed a project called "From the face in the webcam to the face of humanity: Pre-teen researchers influencing little lives."

The project was designed to teach students how to use technology for good: Zimmerman's students were all partnered with a preschool child and charged with teaching their "little buddies" literacy skills on a computer. The students -- all sixth and seventh graders -- used Internet tools and webcams to gather data and track the learning process of their little buddies.

"They had the webcams rolling during the whole time," she said. "So I could see the type of interaction, how the pre-schoolers responded and I thought there was something a lot bigger to this than just what it looks like playing around with the computer."

Zimmerman said that, through the process of documenting the teaching process and watching it later, gave her students a way to see themselves from another perspective.

"When you have (the session) recorded, you can see what you are doing, what your little buddy is doing and you can just focus on teaching," she said. "Then later they could analyze their teaching method…it really brought about this reflective process and helped develop perspective too."

It's also incredibly important to give kids an experience of a positive way to use technology, she said.

"Technology is a tool that amplifies whatever we are as humans, so if it's something positive, it can amplify for a positive and if it's something that is negative, then that technology has a chance to, for example, take the phsyical bullying that happened in classrooms before technology was available and amplifies it several more times."

Most educators I spoke with said that using technology in the classroom also gets kids excited about learning -- and it can be especially powerful for kids who are not typically very engaged in the classroom.

Carrie Calonzo and Rebecca Winbauer, both third grade teachers at Glenridge Elementary School in Renton, also found this to be true.

Third graders in Carrie Calonzo and Rebecca Winbauer's project used Microsoft Photo Story to document their problem-solving skills.

The duo combined math with Microsoft's Photo Story program in a project called "Third Graders + Math Problems = Problem Solving Experts." Students were required to solve math problems, then explain their problem solving using Photo Story or the collaborative learning software SMART Notebook. Classmates then filmed each child presenting using a Flip camera.

Winbauer said incorporating the technology not only helped her students develop their problem-solving skills, but also generated excitement in the classroom.

"It was pretty powerful," she said. "Had there not been the technology component, it would have been 'Oh this is just another math story problem we have to solve.'"

Calonzo agreed: "A lot of (the students) like math, but even for those who struggle with it, technology is a really big hook for them -- they want to get their hands on the laptop, and they want to learn how to do these different things, so we really had them hooked."