The Story Behind the Quick Printing Entrepreneurship

This high school has an off-set printing business that the students run. When the school acquired a new digital copier, the students asked questions about how they could use the equipment to expand their business. One student suggested setting up an after-school graphic design business using the machine since customers for the off-set printing had been asking if jobs could be done digitally. The faculty, along with the staff of the Link Employment And Responsibility Now (LEARN) Program, wrote a grant to secure the start-up funds for the Quick Printing Entrepreneurship.

The students developed a needs survey to find out if there would be a market for their product. Both the teacher and the students had to learn how to operate the digital copier, and use various illustrator programs. They did some research on desktop publishing and the production of professional publications. Each student created a competitive pricing database for the brochure and routed it into an information spreadsheet.

The students quickly realized that they needed a brochure to advertise their services, so they began collecting and analyzing comparable adult models of service industry brochures as models for the one they would design. They also conducted a printing needs survey, which was sent to potential clients, i.e. other schools.

Each student wrote a mini-proposal of his/her ideas for the brochure and gave an oral presentation to the class. They then voted on which elements of each they liked best, and nominated one of their peers to present their entrepreneurship idea to the Board of Education’s Advisory Council for Occupational Education. The student used a multi-media (text and images) presentation to explain the plan for an entrepreneurship.

In order to get a handle on workload priorities, the students created a billing form, a job ticket order, a job estimate sheet, and a chart pin-pointing orders in progress.

Students negotiated for work tasks and received a stipend from the start-up funds to support them initially. Throughout the process, the students received feedback and advice from the Advisory Council for Occupational Education and from their clients.

The quality of the finished products was evident since the clients ordered hundreds of copies of the products. In addition, the students received many letters thanking them for their work. Sixteen new students entered the program at the beginning of the new school year. Business is booming.

The written work produced as part of Applied Learning projects commonly contains some errors. Documentation of these projects includes notes, journal entries and plans that students produced as working documents for their personal use. These kinds of documents were not prepared with the expectation of eventual publication and they have not been revised for inclusion in this book.

It is expected that finished work produced as part of an Applied Learning project will contain virtually error free writing.

What the work shows
c Information Tools and Techniques: The student uses word-processing software to produce a multi-page document; that is, the student:

This tri-fold brochure designed by the students to advertise the printing business, makes use of a variety of features of word-processing software. The students used columns to organize the information, listing and numbering the information in some parts of the brochure while choosing, appropriately, to paragraph other information. They used a variety of fonts and white space to organize the information into visually discreet groups depending on the content. They also imported graphics and used a variety of backgrounds to make the brochure visually interesting.

b Learning and Self-management Tools and Techniques: The student reviews his or her own progress in completing work activities and adjusts priorities as needed to meet deadlines; that is, the student:

The job sheets provide evidence of the students’ efforts to manage their work. The students developed these sheets on their own initiative after encountering difficulty in managing jobs in progress.

e Information Tools and Techniques: The student creates, edits, and analyzes a spreadsheet of information that displays data in tabular, numeric format and includes multiple graphs; that is, the student:

The students created spreadsheets to conduct a margin analysis of the costs of conducting their printing business. They used the features of the software to sort, arrange, and display data to suit their purpose of analyzing costs. The final display uses a graph to provide a simple and very clear illustration of the results of their analysis.