A Virtual Watershed Film Festival Presented by Shorecrest Preparatory School Students

Students at Shorecrest Preparatory School were recently presented with a unique challenge — to produce a short video about the Tampa Bay watershed. Despite some background noise and limited class time, they created excellent work. You can view the results and learn a few interesting facts about our local ecosystem below!

by Kathryn Jeakle

A lesson on watersheds and water quality opens the door for learning about our local Tampa Bay watershed. With an overarching goal of developing educated coastal citizens, eighth grade students at Shorecrest were exposed to often underestimated and little understood facts about the Tampa Bay watershed. After completing our lesson, students were given an alternative assessment challenge to create an informational video that would teach others about their local watershed, why it is important, and how we can keep it healthy. Students were allowed to bring a One-Pager (a one page document, handwritten with any content they wanted to use to create their video) to use to complete the video. Video partners were randomly assigned and partners given limited time (90 min.) to complete their video during school. Due to the fact that students were required to complete their work during the school day you may hear background noises such as lockers closing or kids walking down the hall. To involve the greater community, each student was asked to share their video with a parent or guardian for feedback. The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.

Videos are linked in the image captions below.