DOWAGIAC — The transition from attending elementary school to entering the world of middle school can be a stressful situation for some students. Students from Dowagiac Middle School are hoping to help ease the transition with a published eBook they created, titled “How to Be Successful at Dowagiac Middle School.”

The eBook was an assigned project in Meredith Marr’s elective, semester long class, media literacy. The 26-student class made up of seventh and eighth graders spent a portion of class time brainstorming ideas for their eBook and selected their topic with the idea of wanting to help other students.

“The students had fun working on this as they were able to take from their personal experiences at Dowagiac Middle School,” Marrs said. “[Students wanted] to try to help others not make similar mistakes or stress about things that most kids coming to a new school would stress about.”

Marrs, who has been a teacher at Dowagiac Middle School for 18 years, designed the media literacy class. She has since made it a priority to attend technology conferences such as the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning and the Lake Michigan Technology Conference to educate herself on new technology. She enjoys sharing what she learns from conferences in the classroom and with other staff.

The idea for the eBook came from one of those conferences.

“I attended a session by Rushton Hurley called, ‘Getting Creative with Chromebooks,’” Marrs said. “Mr. Hurley was talking about a program called Book Creator and how students can basically make a book about almost anything in a short amount of time.”

After being tasked by Hurley to brainstorm with a conference neighbor about ways to use the Book Creator app, Marrs came up with the idea to have her students in media literacy create an eBook for incoming students.

Media literacy will begin its third year this fall and aims to teach students about digital citizenship, online safety, how to analyze various forms of media, public speaking and creating projects through different forms of media.

“The purpose of the class is to give our students tools that they will need to be successful in the 21st Century classroom and job force,” Marrs said. “Every year, I add new projects and alter existing ones based on what current technology programs are available.”

To begin the process of creating an eBook, each student was taught how to use the Book Creator program and was given an outline of the expectations of the project. After brainstorming, students created and designed their own individual pages, which included many different pages outlining an array of topics: sports at Dowagiac, joining band class, tips to avoid referrals, internet safety and being in honors clubs at DMS. One student’s page titled, “No talking when the teacher is talking,” by Tim Seals, used popular internet memes to attract a younger audience. Pages were embedded with photos, citations to additional sources and paragraphs of information.

Once a student’s individual pages were finished, as a group, the class collaboratively edited the pages.

Marrs published the eBook and reached out to principal Sean Wightman and assistant principal Nicky Hulett and suggested they post the eBook to Dowagiac Middle School’s social media pages and the district’s website for incoming students to use as a resource.

The project, start to finish, took Marr’s class a week to complete.

“Students hear tips and advice all the time from adults in their life, but how great that students in our own building can help others by giving them advice,” Marrs said.

Interested readers and incoming DMS students can read the eBook on the Dowagiac Middle School’s Facebook page.