An Ephraim Middle School teacher received a prestigious award through the 2022 Utah Coalition for Educational Technology (UCET) recently.
Jeanne Brady, college and career awareness (CCA) teacher at Ephraim Middle School, was recognized at the school board meeting last week for receiving the 2022 innovative teacher award from UCET. The innovative teacher award recognizes teachers for facilitating student learning through innovative teaching practices using technology.
“I thought that the email I received was spam,” Brady said. “I took all the steps I had been instructed to do in order to prove that it was not spam.”
Brady has had several accomplishments while working for the school district and has been on their list several times as a nominee. One of her major accomplishments is creating e-books for her classes that include embedded videos.
The e-books allow her students to learn at their own pace and understand the material more thoroughly.
To date, she has created three e-books. She told the school board that her first one took her over 100 hours to create.
She likes to add other short videos to her Google Classroom on her students’ iPads.
“Students don’t want a lesson or a video that is hours long,” she said. “I break lessons down into 30 seconds to a minute-long [clips] and this seems to help them so much.”
Assistant Superintendent Trevor Powell said that technology is ever-changing and the things Brady does for her students are very valuable.
Brady said that it helps to work for a district that puts technology at the forefront of learning.
Brady started her teaching career in Dugway. She found her way to South Sanpete School District at Ephraim Middle School in 1999 and has been there ever since.
She loves teaching and especially middle school students. Brady has used iPads to their fullest. She teaches CCA, family and consumer science (FACS), and art.
She is willing to try new things and if she gets stuck, she reaches out so that her classroom can be a place where students feel successful. Hands-on teaching of FACS classes is difficult in a COVID/remote learning world, and yet she makes it work and is successful.
