Liberty Middle School Digital Yearbook
By Courtney Causby
8th grade, Liberty Middle School, Morganton, NC
Liberty Middle School NC REAL (Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning) students had an exciting year. Our class of 14 students created a school-based business to help raise money for our school. We produced a digital yearbook to sell at Liberty Middle School. Our class was responsible for all aspects of the business including product planning and design, project management, implementation, marketing, finance, and customer relations. The class created a detailed business plan for the school-based enterprise. We learned so many things in the class including skills in entrepreneurship, teamwork, and collaboration. Our class has been very excited about the project and enjoyed learning while having fun.
The students and teachers in our 9th period class spent many hours and worked very hard to produce a Digital Yearbook to sell. We started out the first few months by creating a Business Plan and time-line for our business. We created a spreadsheet with financial information. Running your own business is not as easy as it looks. After that came the hard part. Mrs. Arlene Childers and Mr. Don Smith split up the camera time so that everyone had the opportunity to take at least a few photos for the project. We took about three hundred forty five photos during the year and placed them into a PowerPoint presentation. We added music it to the presentation and packaged it for a CD. We burned the file onto CDs to sell to students in our school.
Taking pictures of different events throughout the year was a challenge because many of the students in our 9th period were playing sports at the time that we would like to take pictures. If we had a home game then it would work in our favor and we would get the camera to take pictures between playing time. Also, teachers pitched in lots of their free time to take some pictures that we couldn’t. A big thanks goes out to our teachers.
Some of the customer comments that we got were “This was an AWESOME idea that you guys came up with” and “The music is great.” Our Digital Yearbook project was a huge success. I personally thought that it would be a “walk in the park”, but we all learned that running your own business is a lot harder that it seems! You have to go through a lot of steps in the process of creating a business plan and operating a business. Other NC REAL student comments were, “I really liked the hands-on activities” and “The class was a lot of fun”. We learned so many good skills and had lots of fun along the way.