Fourteen years ago, St. Charles Satellite Center in Luling, Louisiana, implemented the New Tech Network model. While dozens of alumni have visited to share their successes in various professional fields, a few have pursued teaching careers at their alma mater to give back to the model that made them.

“I have two former team members that graduated, went to college, established professions and have now been hired to my staff,” said School Administrator Lasca Anderson. “They’ve gone full circle, sharing what they learned in the industry and how the skills they learned in school prepared them for the next level of their career.”

One of these alumni, Hunter Robinson, now teaches Advanced Television and Broadcasting after having a successful career in broadcast news. Robinson shared that the skills he gained at St. Charles allowed him to advance far faster than his college peers.

“Once I finished at the Satellite Center, I created a demo reel of all the projects I had created while in my broadcasting course there. On my first day as a freshman, I went to the campus TV station, handed in my demo reel, and was hired on the spot. I was helping juniors and seniors learn about the trade, as my skills were more developed from my experience at the Satellite Center.”

Anderson mentions that employers consistently cite work ethic, agency, and written and oral communication as skills they actively seek in candidates.

St. Charles staff members believe that Echo, NTN’s proprietary learning management system, is essential because Echo’s digital gradebook assesses the skills that prepare their students for their future. These skills are NTN’s Learning Outcomes, and the Echo gradebook provides students with evidence of their growth across such skills over time.

Robinson’s students use Echo as a tool for their own learning as it provides a platform to develop their agency skills.

“Echo makes it easy to design and organize projects and also for our students to take the initiative to find the answers they’re looking for. We’re at the point with my students where they’ll start to ask a question, and stop themselves to say, ‘I can probably find the answer in Echo, can’t I?’”

Rhitt Growl, Digital Media Facilitator at the Satellite Center, shared how Echo helps students exercise agency over their learning.

“Students can reference their grades at any time within Echo. It helps them take responsibility for the grades they earned when they have access to review them at any time,” Growl states.

In addition to accessing career-ready skills, the staff at the Satellite Center use Echo to centralize documents, data and assessments house everything under one roof. Anderson said she particularly appreciates the connectivity of the Echo platform with Google apps.

“The greatest reward is seeing students succeed,” says Anderson. “Our proudest moments are when students come back to us and share their success story. We have graduates that work for Facebook, Netflix and video game development. We have former students who are engineers and process operators and even business owners. It’s so rewarding to hear how the skills they learned at the Satellite Center helped them get where they are today.”