Projects

Let’s Make Movies
Let’s Make Movies (LMM) is digital film-making summer camp held at the historic Tampa Theater in downtown Tampa. Participants (students between the ages of 9 and 16) create stop-motion animation and live-action short films in small collaborative groups over the course of each one-week session and present their creations on Friday of each week in a film festival format. The CLC has the goals of documenting the use of literacy skills among participants engaged in creating digital media and studying the interaction between students and counselors in new literacy settings.
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Learning Gate After School Program
The Learning Gate After School program is a filmmaking club that is modeled after the Let's Make Movies (LMM). The after school program is run by one of the teachers from the LMM camp and takes place one day per week. In addition to helping children develop creative digital media skills, the teacher is working with our research team to modify the LMM camp into a structure that can be adapted to any school. Currently, the camp is in its first semester. We plan to document the curriculum for the camp and provide clear lesson plans for teachers to use in their own classrooms. In addition, the research component includes a case analysis of what to do and what not to do. This semester, we will continue to highlight these important operational considerations.
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Going Green
The purpose of this project was to develop sixth graders’ composing skills and preservice teachers’ instructional skills as they worked together to create movies with a message. The 64 sixth graders of Learning Gate School and 33 preservice teachers in the Elementary Education program at the University of South Florida participated in the project. Over a period of four weeks the sixth graders traveled to USF to work with the preservice teachers in small groups. The preservice teachers and sixth graders learnedÊ the qualities of good films and how movies are developed and created. The movie making process focused on developing the students composing skills and visual literacy skills.
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St. Lawrence Oral History
This project took place at a Catholic PreK-8 school during spring 2006. Several grade-levels of teachers volunteered their classes to participate. Each week, two faculty instructors taught their respective undergraduate methods courses back-to-back at the parish site, giving the preservice-teacher participants six hours to work with elementary students and receive course instruction. The oral history project for the parish was initiated to provide an opportunity for our preservice teachers to practice the reading and writing methods that they were being taught. The oral history component was also intended to make the teaching sessions meaningful for the students and teachers in the parish school.
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Learning to be Reporters
The University Area Community Center was the site for two related projects that occurred over two consecutive summers. Both projects brought undergraduates to the Center to guide small, multi-grade groups of elementary students in their productions of media products. In the first summer, students and undergraduates collaborated on video newcasts. The second summer, the project created an electronic newspaper. In both projects, undergraduates took two connected methods courses (teaching writing and classroom diagnosis of reading). Within the productions, undergrads teamed across the two courses to learn reading and writing methods.
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