Student Nomination Story

Ms. Laura Brown teaches several different engineering classes at Pioneer Technology and Arts Academy in Greenville, Texas. My daughter has been enrolled as a virtual learner throughout the 2020-2021 school year, and one of her virtual classes is taught by Laura Brown, called Introduction to Engineering Design. Ms. Brown has changed my life as a parent this year by demonstrating how a teacher can effectively communicate through online communication, such as google classroom. When my child attended the physical school the last four years, many times as a parent, I had no idea what the daily or weekly lesson plans were for each class, so my child often did not complete the correct assignments, because she would forget what she was told to do at school. However, this year with virtual school in the Introduction to Engineering Design class, Ms. Brown is able to effectively communicate the objectives of each lesson she has designed for the students to work on and complete for the week. In this way, my online student can read through the information of what is expected for her to learn for the week, and she can decide how and when to complete the assignment based on the quality information that Ms. Brown has provided. This has helped tremendously in diminishing the confusion my daughter would normally have if she only had verbal information from being in a classroom that she would often forget once she got home. Ms. Brown often posts online videos where she also verbally explains the written information for those virtual students that need extra clarification. My daughter has been introduced to a wide range of topics and learning in Ms. Brown's engineering class this year. Some of those topics include: 3-D online modeling of shapes and objects in a program called "OnShape", research about engineering triumphs and disasters through the years in order to learn more about the ethics involved in the engineering design process, as well as learning fundamental coding activities and learning how online data is used by others. The variety of lessons my student has learned in Ms. Brown's class has expanded her worldview of how engineering can be used in our society to improve it!

Chloe Potter

At the beginning of the year, you couldn't really tell if your teacher is going to be good or bad due to the nature of the first week of still trying to figure out how to do things and what the procedure of the classroom is. I am online this year due to COVID-19 and the beginning of the year was even more difficult because of trying to figure out how to do the online stuff, what to do your classwork on, and how we should communicate. Mrs. Brown at the beginning of the year was absolutely a life-saver. She helped me understand how to work Google Classroom and even helped me communicate with all of my other teachers. Whenever I had a question, she was always quick to respond and answer in a way that I could understand what she was talking about. When the school started giving out real assignments, she always gave us a video walking us through how to do it, even when it was fairly simple. I want to be an engineer when I grow up or something in that field of expertise, but I don't know what type of engineer I want to be. Mrs. Brown has been very helpful with letting me have a knowledge of general engineering while also allowing me to research specialized sections of engineering, as well. Recently there was a pretty bad snowstorm that hit Texas causing the power to keep going in and out. I didn't know what was going on with school. Were we out? did we have assignments? Am I supposed to be doing attendance? I had emailed a couple of teachers asking about what was going on, but the one teacher who answered and offered an explanation, was Mrs. Brown. She let me know what was going on and even let the other teachers know about some of the student's questions, which they later addressed. I don't really know what else to say and I know that there are probably hundreds of teachers being nominated, but all I have to say is that Mrs. Brown is a wonderful teacher and I wish there were more like her.

Natalie Jameson

To see more exceptional teacher nominees, visit The Honor Roll.