live from the somethingcool.com studios this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast I am Josh with me it tonight is Mark and Eric is filling in for Chris say hi Eric hey you so um last week the last two weeks Chris has been on suspension we're not we assume that's still the case this week um maybe Sue will swing by in a little bit and tell us uh what is going on uh but it has been a week guys how you doing it's uh we've got some anniversaries to celebrate tonight and a
few things a few outages and some drama to talk about anything exciting happen in your neck of the woods this week guys no but are we celebrating anniversary well it's not really a celebration of an anniversary it's a recognition recognition Okay celebrate you celebrate same difference Mark okay sorry break out the thesaurus come on man um so yeah this we'll get into this in a little bit but a little teaser I guess for later in the episode this this week marks the three year anniversary when
the world shut down when um it was three three years ago yesterday that my district and the other districts in my County uh created a press release and all announced that we were closing down for three weeks um I'm sure that was pretty much around the state Eric out where you are and around the country Mark where you are um I think everybody kind of did the same thing within a couple days of each other so we'll um we'll talk about that kind of that three-year retrospective
here in a little bit but first uh my week was rather crazy my last 10 days have been rather crazy I have had three major Internet outages uh in the last 10 days and when I say major I mean lasting three hours or more one of them lasted eight hours one of them lasted four hours and it was a fiber cut and this the carrier said that it was due to vandalism all all three outages were due to vandalism and the Rumor on the street was that one of them was due to a disgruntled
employee that was terminated and took it out on the equipment uh at four o'clock in the morning on a Sunday Chris oh was it Chris yeah probably oh maybe interesting so so now one of the things that I've been tasked with recently is coming up with a redundant or backup connection and no I'm not going to e-rate that you e-rate cops out there um do you guys have remark do you you're with the city though so do you guys have a quote-unquote backup connection I mean it's a tough question right I
think there's there's always going to be components that are not fully redundant and then you have some redundancy um I mean you know it it I guess the challenge comes with you know when when you have an outage and you have options the question is if you don't have immediate failover right then at what point do you start to exercise those options and start to cut over traffic to either redundant aura or a separate pathway and and you get super complicated super quick especially if
you try to put in some sort of bgp routing you know at the edge where you're controlling your own bgp routes to where if that auto failover does happen it just kind of magically Works um that's not what we're looking at I honestly I'm looking at I just had a phone call this afternoon with with a major cell Carrier about getting a cradle point and putting it in one of my mdfs and and bringing it back to the firewall as a kind of spillover type connection that way if our fiber connection goes down
it'll it'll just kind of all the critical services will kind of flow over to that other cell service um oh wait wait it doesn't doesn't one of our sponsors have a product for this yeah they do Fortinet actually um they have a forta extender not Florida Explorer Mark um Ford extender that can do the same thing they will uh the Ford extender will take a SIM card and we'll attach to your network and talk to your fortigate firewall and do that sd-wan type communication all magically
um on its own and take care of that for you so if you are interested in the forta extender talk to uh or send an email to fortinetpodcast fortinet.com so uh they can help you do like some sd-win failover uh internet connection stuff oh wait here comes Sue yeah yeah Sue what do you need oh you got a you got a pound cake okay so we're trying to record okay we understand he's still on suspension okay all right thanks Sue so sue dropped off a pound cake for The Green Room
with her best wishes that she understands that our fans Mark your mother included they're worried about Chris he will be back next week so um he will be off suspension yes Sue's lemon iced lemon pound cake yeah she only does those on on high holidays you know like big well tomorrow's St Patrick's Day though tomorrow's St Patrick's Day she could have colored it green um so Josh I have a question about your outage so how localized was it was it a regional outage really good question
kind of in terms of routing and how that they're getting to you yeah so um all three of them were not just us all three of them included major parts of the town that I live in both affecting fiber and coax service which took out large the coax outage took out large portions of the Town um for up one of them was upwards of 12 hours fiber came back quicker um so it wasn't just us they hit a Major Distribution Hub um about I guess 10 miles to our West that um the city that we live in the city
building itself the neighboring City their fire departments and police departments didn't have internet or phone they were doing 9-1-1 Dispatch over uh see over radios from the County dispatch um it was it was a disaster so I was talking with one of our assistant superintendents and they had made the comment that now the city is looking into redundant internet connections as well to prevent something like this from happening and in my in our situation is a little bit
difficult too because we have fiber coming in from one carrier well that one carrier has always been the provider for Fiber service in our district so there are other carriers in our area that offer Fiber service but they don't terminate in the building so one year for e-rate we had a bid out for a new new Fiber service and one of the competitors came back and said yeah we'll we'll drop it in but we need thirty thousand dollars of construction cost up front it's like
well we can't afford that so I know if I go to that carrier now and say look this is going to be redundant connection but I want fiber they're going to say yeah we want 30 grand up front and probably a 10-year 5-year contract so that's one of the other reasons why I'm I'm looking at a cell service is one it's it's mobile so if we ever needed to take it somewhere else if we had a tornado rip through town we could take it down the street and kind of spin up some some basic service if we had to
um so yeah I think I think you're on to something really great in terms of cellular being the future of backups I mean we're talking about burglar alarms right um fire alarms all the things that we'd be switching pots lines over from and now Cellular Connections are able to process a lot more data now you're not going to be up and running like a normal connection but it's there and I think the great thing in your situation of this last week and I'm not saying that
this is great that you all had an outage but that everyone was affected what what is difficult for us as schools is when just we're affected oh sure and it looks really bad um because everybody's looking at us like why why aren't you guys operating so it's it's definitely nice when there's more more to the story um but I also want to mention that I was thinking through this in terms of terminology especially all of us listening uh who might be e-rate applicants is maybe the terminology
should be resiliency I think that's um the term yeah rather than redundancy because e-rate does not like redundant connections um nice nice try Eric that's just a synonym for redundancy well we we do have Eric and I both know at least one person that is um that has a resilient connection that is getting e-rated um personally myself that's still a little gray for me and that's that's yet another reason why that I'm looking at cellular because both of these cellular providers that have that I've
talked to this week one was 40 bucks a month one was 50 bucks a month and when I told my superintendent that she's like seriously 50 bucks a month for 300 Meg service I'm like yeah but it's sell so it's you know it's not like the the resiliency of fiber you know and it's not synchronous it's not up and down it's only going to be about five three to five hundred Meg down and probably 10 to 20 to 30 Meg up so um yeah there was some disbelief in that but it it makes a lot of sense it checks
a lot of boxes I think you have to demonstrate that that if you're bringing in a separate separate line or a secondary line you have to show that that is a necessary yes so like it has to be used it you know it maybe like spillover bandwidth that kind of stuff but I don't think you can install uh a dark line and then e-write it yeah for sure the lawyers just came and visited you didn't they mark um no but you are right you have to demonstrate there is a need in um and
again it's one of those things that it might if you try to file for e-rate for it it might get denied so don't don't hold your breath on that I I definitely wouldn't um yeah that's been an interesting week quickly let's talk about someone that I almost called over this and once I figured out that it was not our fault though I didn't need to call him um I almost called Dominic with extreme networks to say hey we're having this extreme this weird anomaly going on can
you help me out but once we figured out it wasn't localized to our Network I didn't need to call Dominic at extreme networks but if you are in the market for a resilient physical Network or a resilient wireless network did you know they provided the Wi-Fi for the Super Bowl and I have read some reports that it was screaming fast and they have some amazing metrics to talk about how much data they they passed over their access points and over their their connections
at the Super Bowl that was extreme networks providing that Network so email Dominic Mayer his email address is D mayor m-a-y-e-r at extremnetworks.com tell him you heard about extreme networks from this podcast and uh maybe he'll he'll give us something special so yeah give give Dominic an email if you were in the market for extreme networks quite a few mob stadiums yeah provided by them one near Josh and me I believe has an extreme Network in it and a stadium Wi-Fi whenever I get to sit
down with these guys I love to talk about it because it's just fascinating to me how they can make something like that work with 50 60 70 000 people yeah I know um I was told at one time that where the St Louis Blues play they provide the uh infrastructure for all of the AV Network stuff so all of the cameras and all of the big displays and stuff those are supposedly at the time now this was five six seven years ago that was all running on Extreme networks uh physical
switching so I assume that's still the case um did you guys see scissors new uh cyber security recommendations for K-12 I think it came out this week and it's been getting some press on edtech magazine.com I sent it now was this sizza or white house uh one or the other or both maybe I Eric why do you have to ask the hard questions geez Eric um but high and low of it they came out with uh three three main um things you should really focus on one of them being MFA and I know that's Chris's
favorite catchphrase it seems like at the end of every episode um and I think that's kind of become the rally cry for a lot of this stuff I know I follow director Jen easterly on Twitter she's the director of sizza and almost if not weekly every other day she's making a Twitter post or a tweet I guess is what the kids call it um about MFA and how it protects you and it can protect or prevent up to like 98 of hacks so that's that's become a rally cry people have definitely heard about
it or are used to hearing about it um but one of the other ones was obviously patch management which okay you know not everybody's great about patch management and then the final one and this is something we can maybe chat chat a little bit about is having your user base and your users understand that it's not just an I.T problem and I think we're trying to accomplish that at my district with doing these fishing exercises and sharing stories of other districts being attacked
um but I don't I at times I wonder if it's really sinking in what are you what are you guys doing what do you feel that's working to help folks understand that it's not just an I.T problem that it's the responsibility of everybody what what's your two cents on that Eric this one's yours first okay so we just had a cyber audit done and um by who I think um it was not our Consortium okay okay and not not a sponsor okay all right um but it was really good to work back
through all of those pieces and when we got to the um ir and Dr plans the big thing was to involve other stakeholders from leadership and the great thing about doing a cyber audit is that you can then turn that back over to your board and close session and also talk to your superintendent or your leadership to to outline the things that are risks or problems to bring them into the fold in terms of how they need to be involved and also I think you guys have talked
about this on the Pod but the fact that bonds are now becoming dependent upon our your bond ratings can be are looking to become dependent upon your your cyber security insurability all of these things start to weigh heavy on your superintendent's mind and I think that is a big thing for me wanting to push forward with that and then in terms of the IR and Dr plans making sure that everyone is involved because it's not just an I.T problem in terms of if the internet goes down it is
a student safety problem it is a parental communication problem there it just it's all reaching I agree yeah I I think agreeing with those I think I can also add my Approach really has been and this is just this goes for at work and outside of work is really trying to make sure that people understand how real these threats are these are not things that you're seeing on the news this is happening to our friends to our neighbors our family members um and so when an incident does occur
um either locally or nationally I really want to make sure that people understand that this is very real and then I also this is why I you know I was drawn to this podcast the beginning when you started to do the ransomware stuff was I wanted to know how this happened I like telling that story of here's how a school district fell or was hit and how it happened and then tied that back to and this can happen to us for all the same reasons so I really I try to make
things as practical as I possibly can and and realistic without without being that kind of scare tactic kind of person I never want to be that person who's just going to cry wolf because then people stop listening to me um so I you know I do want to walk the line of showing everybody showing the community how real these issues are and how how damaging these things can be without coming across as the guy who cries wolf the whole time and then people let their
guard down and then let the wolf in so it's a it is a balance I think it really comes down to establishing relationships with the people that that that can Elevate that that issue and and Elevate the the need um but making sure that everybody in the organization understands that they play a part in it easier said than done though it's funny we we as techs have the the tendency of shooting too far for people's heads and I think what you bring up Mark is a great point that
we've not not to say to dumb it down but boil it down to the most important things that are most affecting us on a day-to-day basis and that's student data privacy learning and our individual employees privacy I so it's interesting you bring up student data privacy that I was in a pretty good fight right it fights the wrong word but going back and forth with a vendor today about a student data privacy agreement and it's I really think the districts that haven't jumped
on the student data privacy bandwagon yet I think you're going to be behind the eight ball before too long because as more and more States adopt a parent's Bill of Rights and or if it becomes a national um adoption for a parent Bill of Rights nationally I think one of the things that you're going to see in that bill will be a huge focus on student data privacy and if your state is already a member of the a4l Consortium or the student data privacy Consortium you really need to kind of
start dipping your toe into that and understanding what that means and what you need to do to vet resources because after contracts are signed it's a little too late you've lost your carrot in in getting a vendor to sign that student data privacy agreement you know if you can hold that agreement over them and say look we're not signing this contract for service until you sign this student data privacy agreement it's a much easier conversation to have you have a little bit more carrot and stick
in the in that scenario Eric it's interesting you mentioned that you just had a cyber security survey done I I just had one as well about a week and a half ago from our friends at mornet Kathy came out and uh Kathy and I both like to talk way too much so it went on for way too long because Kathy and I talk a lot but it was really good she gave me a great report um she made me mad because I got a 49.75 on the report which is very good and 50 was excellent so I was 0.25 I was
a quarter of a point away from getting excellent and I'm like Kathy you could have thrown me the 0.25 man come on so so is this a scale of 50 no it was a scale it wasn't a hundred it wasn't no no no no it wasn't a hundred uh but it no it was not a scale of 50. no I want to say
it was like maybe 75. I don't know I'd have to go back and look at it but it it had very good data it and theirs was more policy and procedure based you know do you have a policy for this do you have a procedure for this um you know what's your password policy what's your MFA policy that kind of stuff now it was not a deep dive like pin test type engagement by any means um we're gonna do that later so it I think it's it's interesting to get those two different aspects of your posture
because you you know you do need to have the defenses but you also need to have those policies in writing or somewhere documented that this is why we do this um and getting back to your comment about the incident response plans with our internet going down that's one of the first things that I whipped out I had to get our our incident response plan out and get the phone number to call our provider with our our carrier or our circuit ID on it and that this is like the fifth time in the last year
that I've had to get out my incident response plan because it has my circuit ID on it it's like I I did not realize how many times in the past that I've had to go searching for my stupid circuit ID when now I've got it in this document it's so easy it's it's easy to reach and find and we hit a little debrief with the guys in my office afterwards I'm like because I took off on uh Monday I wasn't in the office and the internet was down literally all day Monday and uh my guys text me about halfway
through the day they're like oh we assume you know the internet's down like yes I know the internet's down I've been working on it since like six o'clock this morning so I came in Tuesday morning and I'm like hey guys if uh I couldn't have been gotten a hold of and the internet was down what would you have done and they're kind of him and on and looking around like well way to call around other places and seeing it if they had the internet I'm like yeah okay I said is there is there
a document somewhere that you could have looked at for support numbers to call her like oh yeah that that book and the computer yes the book on the computer room go grab the book on the computer so we stepped through the we we kind of did a hot wash if you will or tabletop exercise of of what had just happened it's like okay if I can't be reached and this happens go grab this book flip to this page it's all right here so it was good it's good to kind of look back at
that and it's just funny that I wasn't in the office and they had to spend the entire day in the office without internet they're like we almost went home I'm like yeah I'm sure you you did almost go home now worst case scenario for all you technicians out there who are going to walk back into to do your work tomorrow and the internet's down at least know what building your internet comes into and know your address of it yeah because exactly that can save you in a lot of
situations because I did it this week and I had no idea what my circuit ID is it is written down somewhere but I got on the phone and uh made them page through it until they found our address so it's possible interesting I think getting getting documentation is the first part of the battle but getting the documentation to the point where somebody else can pick it up and use it yep that's that's the key yep because I know what all these things mean I know who all these
people are and these numbers are right but if my guys pick it up and have no clue what any of it me yeah it's it's just as useless as not having it no that's a great point mark and dry running it you know you walk in on a random Tuesday afternoon and say okay guess what the internet just went went down what are you guys going to do um yeah no I you have to you have to table top it or dry run it this is a shout out to um black hills and those incident response decks those are a lot of fun to
be able to roll through those with your team maybe at a lunch on a Friday or something like that um but Mark I am curious do you guys do cyber audits there from external uh personnel or is that um no that's one of the things that's under wraps I don't I don't provide sort of like uh uh how do I say this I don't say confidential but I don't provide anything that uh on the on the public area but I could definitely say that it's a it's a very high priority of ours it's good yeah
so uh one of our other sponsors provision Data Solutions uh Chris wrote this they can take your department wherever you want to go speaking of wherever you want to go Eric the intern which I Eric I don't know that I like calling you The Intern I think that Chris needs he I don't know why he picked that Eric and Chris you're the one who picked it Eric and Chris will be it at kosin uh next week right yeah so if you if you're listening to this and you're going to Kosen uh make sure
to find Eric and and Chris why aren't you guys coming we have to work somebody has to work Eric yeah I got things to do Eric you cannot take this tone Eric you're only the intern um so okay I thought you just said we were gonna ditch that like no well no I'm gonna use it to our advantage um I'm no longer a peer I I thought it was elevated at your level and now I'm relegated Josh said we were firing the intern tonight is this where that is not yet Sue was coming back to do that
uh my phone's ringing it's Sue um so shoot I forgot what I was oh if you're listening and you're going to Kosen uh take Sly pictures of Eric and Chris we want to catch them doing silly things and tweet them at us K-12 Tech talk pod on Twitter you can shoot us an email too if you don't want to tweet them or you don't have a Twitter's account uh K12 Tech talk gmail.com um you heard what I said I said what else I no I say that because it's actually funny I think in the outside world it's
perceived as Tick Tock because we had our security Symposium last week and the Wi-Fi wasn't working and the hotel set it to K12 Tick Tock oh that's funny it was pretty funny we're not we're not uh in the pocket of the Chinese government though um so let's see what else we have to talk about so we mentioned this earlier um before we do that Eric do you want to quickly tell us about the K-12 Tech Pro website oh absolutely so um first thank you for the the shout out
about kosin a lot of vendors reaching out to us uh people I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there second if you haven't joined us on the community a12techpro.com click the community tab we are building a great Community for you and this is a fully vetted community currently Chris is sitting behind a computer vetting people and that's why well apart from Sue putting him on leave but he is also vetting people diligently right now at this very moment and the
great thing also is if you're a director we've got places for directors in there that's vetted Community within there um it's it's just already taking off within the last week I think we had 140 members last I checked wow and we had States from Washington State to New York we had Pennsylvania California we've got all kinds of people coming in there and just wanted everyone to know that it is a a safer place to talk about the issues in K-12 Tech and you all are a fun
community so it's it's fun to be in that with you all so yeah the Missouri they have it as a water cooler is kind of a real-time chat stream in there the Missouri water cooler is uh rather active and can be kind of snarky at times so if you come in there just know that we all all know each other very well and we all know each other's kind of buttons to push so you might you might find that room rather entertaining if you want to laugh um drop in there and if you see pictures
of Josh everywhere that's everyone just having a good time with Josh yeah they're they're pushing my buttons everyone has changed their profile picture to a picture of me um so yeah k-12techpro.com click the community button and give it a register it might take a what do you think upwards of a day to get vetted in to get an email confirmation email giving you access I don't know it depends on how many energy drinks Chris is no that's true um but the idea behind that is to have
some some information that is behind the door more or less not like other websites or services that are um you can view pretty easily without any sort of uh barrier so it's legitimately vetted by a human so it's not just a process of entering your emails so yeah it's Chris um so we talked about this at the beginning of the episode this is the uh third anniversary of the week the world shut down for covid um we talked about a little bit I saw the the Facebook memory of my district
in the neighboring District sending out a the same Facebook post about shutting down for three weeks because the health department yada yada um and this kind of gets into what we've been wanting to talk about for a couple weeks now we had a listener email about how things have changed since covid for our districts and Mark you this was kind of one of the the projects that you were wanting to talk about as well just how covet has changed instruction both uh
from a technical standpoint and how it's changed I.T departments um from a process and procedure standpoint Eric I think you guys went through some pretty significant changes um due to covet so if you guys want to want to talk about this or introduce this go for it yeah I mean I could I could spend the entire episode talking about like what we went through and uh and all the challenges and it was it was a both a traumatic and um almost heartwarming experience I guess
you could say you you your entire world has been tossed upside down you're you're doing and rolling out initiatives and systems and devices that you would love to have two to three years to plan out and you gotta plan them out and and roll them out in a matter of days um and uh you know within our district we went through uh a heck of a Time getting devices out to students and I was thinking that was going to be the hard part and then it just kept getting harder when it came time to coming back
into the school um so definitely I I mean I have a lot of fond memories a lot of traumatic memories um it was like the best and worst part of my of my time in my career I would never want to go back but at the same time I really enjoyed um thinking through all the different things and all the different ways that we grew and learned as a district so um maybe not everybody has the same fond memories of it and I won't say I wouldn't say that fond is the right way of of describing it but
um it is an interesting time to think yeah a unique time to think back uh to of of closing your District in a hurry uh and then having to come back and all the new things that have happened and all the changes that have happened as a result and all that all that has to combine into your school so very very interesting time period it's it's so hard to think that that was three years ago so I think interesting unique um really captures what it covet era and when you when you
mentioned it had been three years almost to the day I it was like a gut punch I was like holy cow three years in some ways and I don't mean this to sound cliche but in some ways it really feels like a decade ago that that happened because there's just been so much that's happened since then and in other ways I feel like since we're going back to normal so to speak it feels like it never even happened so there's there's a lot there that's just kind of a mixed emotion for me in terms
of of how I feel I'm with you there mark there's a lot of um it's heartwarming is a good word for it and when I was thinking about the the question that Josh posed to me earlier today I was kind of thinking through like what kind of analogy could I write for this and I I walked into my upstairs which is also the playroom in our house and I was thinking through how when my wife and me uh maybe cooking dinner or something the kids come up here and it's they come up here and it's out of pure
necessity that we need to unleash them here and then when we come back 10 minutes later everything is destroyed it is all a mess I promise I'm going somewhere with this okay okay um everything is destroyed but they've had a really great time and I actually come up here and spend some time with them uh but then I spend the next hour and a half cleaning it all up and putting everything back where it goes and that's kind of how I feel about covet there there was a lot of just
every man for himself at every application whatever you need to get through covid and now we're at the moment in time that we're cleaning everything up and it's crazy to think that it happened when it did because had covet happened 20 years earlier 10 years earlier we would not have been at the Crux of this whole thing right as a school technician school Tech but it happened when it did and we were the very people who were holding it all together so it's it's kind of incredible
and now we're also the people who are going back and picking up all of the toys yeah which are the applications that everybody's purchased uh and I say purchase because they were free so everybody got to use whatever they wanted it was a mad grab for devices to make sure everybody was connected and so I mean I we are even going back and being like where is this inventory because we had so much going out just to make it happen and so now things are kind of getting back to normal it's in
cleanup mode yeah one of my I'm kind of like Mark I I have very distinct memories of like what in the hell are we doing I'll never forget we I was so there's a road a city street that runs between two of our buildings or our elementary school and our intermediate building are literally across the street from each other it's a city Street between them I and my technician and a couple helpers were literally in the middle of the street the yellow line that runs down the middle of the street we had
Chromebook carts lined up on that line we had scissors and we were cutting zip ties out of the carts pulling Chargers out of the back of the cart while someone's pulling the Chromebook out of the front of the cart and we had arranged that if you need a Chromebook pull your car up to the front of the building put your student's name on a piece of paper put it in your windshield we will write that name down and throw a Chromebook in your car and you drive away like
I we know like seriously do we I don't know who these kids are well I remember thinking to myself many times that day like what are we doing what will we ever will we ever see these devices back and we we saw I don't think we lost I don't know five six devices through all of that like it I'll never forget that man it just standing in the middle of the street on my hands and knees with a pair of scissors cutting zip ties to get Chromebook Chargers out of carts to
throw them in cars as they drove by yeah wild the logistics of the things that we did and is incredible I I was thinking about how we were able to equip buses with Wi-Fi in rural community send them out with food on them and teachers to places had no internet connection parked in a parking lot at a gas station and kids were literally lined up around the bus with their devices connecting to Wi-Fi getting help from teachers and getting food it unheard of like the things that
we were able to pull off is is incredible and I I think when I look back and the fondness of those memories is that was some of my most creative moments and some of my Department's most creative moments and and I hope that some way we can bring that back and continue to build on that yeah yeah it definitely was um a moment where I think all of us grew in our ability to drink think think on the spot drink at night time um there there was one and I have so many
memories and as you're talking I'm going through all my photos from that time period as well and it's just I have really really fond memories of hanging out at our loading dock uh with all my technicians and and getting to know them on a personal level um and just seeing that these these guys are the only ones that never went home right these are the they are the ones that yeah everybody else had a pandemic where you stayed at home and then and and all of my guys um
on the on our Chromebook team did not go home ever yeah uh and and they never complained they never complained uh because they really you were a part of something um there was one moment though and I and I've told the story to very very few people um because it is so heartbreaking we were at a um a satellite location um Distributing laptops it was a really really cold and rainy day and the parking lot was empty nobody was there um and uh we see two young kids start walking
towards us and they're in shorts and flip-flops and it was not the day to be in shorts and flip-flops and um we're in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood so one of my guys who spoke Spanish went up to them and talked and and then came back and they turned away and walked away as well we're like they don't want a chrome walk what's going on and he says they thought we were giving out food they already have a Chromebook and it was heartbreaking that here we
here we have two kids that like when you were when we were kids like if somebody were to hand us a laptop that would be amazing right and now you've got these two students very very young elementary students who um were alone in the rain uh on a really cold day and they were disappointed that we were handing out laptops they thought we were handing out food well we were they thought we were a food distribution site so um needless to say we did not let them leave uh empty-handed we made sure that
they were taken care of um but it was that was also a really kind of sobering moment that uh there was a lot more um that districts did and we weren't you know technology was a critical part of the rollout but we weren't the only ones and and I think there's a lot of food service workers out there that probably have very similar memories if not more difficult memories than than we do because our food services were yeah I I if I can give a shout out right now just to all the food service workers
and school districts who went to extreme levels to make sure that their kids were fed it's it's amazing what they do to keep our kids with the proper nutrition on a day-to-day basis and they love our kids and I that was evident to me throughout coven all right well that was um this has been a really good episode I think we've got some other plans to talk about covid afterlife or after covid life um coming up but I think this was a really good start to get kind of neck
deep into it all and kind of bring back those those memories from three years ago it's it's we were talking before we started recording it's it's really really hard to believe that it's been three years since all of that went down like that all started um yeah it's it's wild to think so coming up now Chris and I did an interview with a um a teacher that is using visor visor has been with us for a few weeks now uh visor.cloud v i z o r dot Cloud they are Chromebook inventory
and asset management tool you will hear from her and she's going to talk about how they went from using Google Sheets to keep track of their Chromebook inventory and warranties and move to visor cloud and how that has streamlined their process all right so we've been hanging out with visor for the last several weeks uh Dean over at visor and and we said Dean listen we think we know about visor but we really don't know that much so he has brought to us Destiny how's it going destiny
pretty good uh so Destiny works at a school district has one to one um and Destiny has used visor uh so we're gonna unpack for a few minutes here all about visor and Destiny is going to set the record straight so Destiny do you want to talk about yourself a little bit maybe the size of your school and if you have one to one and what that's with that kind of thing yeah um so I am a high school math teacher um I teach at a charter school in Ohio um I have about 600 students we are
grades 7 through 12. um and like I said we're kind of an art-based school so especially recently we've been getting into like digital art and things like that our high school is one to one but our Middle School uses um Chromebook carts still and then we have a bunch of like mac desktops upstairs we have a bunch of iPads for students to do like digital to design on and things um and so advisor is pretty much how we keep track of like all of that okay uh so really it's safe to say it's it's
your inventory application or your gatekeeper for that okay one-to-one wise um how does visor help you kind of track who has what uh tracking down or do you track uh the number of spare devices that checks out that kind of stuff yes so visor has been really helpful in terms of like you know kids are forgetful they leave stuff places and so instead of being like I don't know whose Chromebook this is um or like trying to check in like okay who logged in last maybe it's like a
computer classroom or something um you can kind of just look up the tag number in it we have our own asset tags that you can like input that number advisor and so I'll just look that up really quick and be like oh it's so-and-so's computer um I'll make sure to give it back to them like you know at the end of the day or if they like stop by and ask for their computer or something all right um so what do I assume visor supports the like barcode scanning and stuff like that so how how easy is it to
inventory and like if you wanted to do a math inventory of things how easy is it for you guys really easy I set up all of the Middle School Chromebook cards in about 30 minutes and we have like five or six of those and 30 computers in each awesome okay and it was easy for me to just like barcode scan check them out to whatever Middle School teacher they were gonna like whoever's classroom they were gonna live in and then now if in like an individual student needs to check them out
teacher can just click assign it to a new person be done interesting that you're having the teacher do the teacher do that instead of a librarian so Josh can you go ahead Josh can you make that noise that she made what [Laughter] um I can actually speak to that a little bit one of the reasons we want advisors like I want advisor is because um we don't have a library so I have a librarian and you are talking to the entire genetic Department of the school I work at nice it's just
me and I also teach math full-time oh wow yes so we needed something that kind of helped us spread out a little bit instead of like something like that would be really great for like one Tech Team something that was like great for you know tracking Tech and for our Tech Team me but also something that was easy for like teachers to kind of use as well um just so that way like we can keep things running and they don't have to like go through one person who's also like teaching a class
so how did that help you keep track of repairs and stuff then um so if a device goes out for repair I just like um we'll click like again look up by the asset tag click in repair click what's wrong with it or whatever um and then we have a company that actually like will come in and like pick them up and fix them and bring them back and stuff but that way I can kind of log how many we have out at a time um and so especially when we get around like State Testing and stuff I can kind
of keep track of that and be like okay if we need some extras for State Testing like we don't have any right now like we need to kind of you know yeah talk with our company figure that out interesting so you have a third party repair company that's coming in do they do they have access to visor at all do you let them have access advisor or is that a relationship yeah they have access to visor um just a little bit um in terms of like when we order new Chromebooks from them they
will go ahead and um like throw them like into visor and stuff so they're like pre-loaded and ready to go and all I have to do is check them out to where they need to go that's awesome yeah so compare using visor to using Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets I assume that's what you did before um compare it compare that life of management from before pre-visor and and post visor visor definitely allows you to like like it encompasses more than just like a spreadsheet because like before if like
a Chromebook like you've switched out from a student or something then the teacher would go to the spreadsheet and switch it out and stuff but then um it would also be like if the teacher forgot to or something or they got busy um with visor I can kind of see who last logged in so I can see if like oh this student's actually using this Chromebook now and I'll run that like once a week or so um as well you're able to do we have like a help desk on there and that's how
all of our like technology help desk requests um come through for me which means I can kind of track them by order of priority instead of just having an endless amount of emails or like constantly checking an Excel sheet to see if somebody like typed something in huh so when when you first started using visor how whether the import processed pretty good as far as getting those devices off of whatever sheet you had them on before and getting them into visor how was that
a pretty seamless process yeah so it was a little bit tricky at first just because like I obviously am a math teacher I didn't like go to school for like technology stuff um I just kind of picked it up along the way um so it was a little bit confusing to me just because it's a little more of that back end like technical stuff um and like it's a little bit of a weird system to get used to right off the bat um but once I figured out like the formatting like because you can just
upload a file so I can go from my Google admin which has all of our Chromebooks logged with their serial numbers and everything and then sorry um and then like export that make sure it's in the correct formatting and upload it and it's good to go by probably an hour or two later that's awesome yeah so how is support with visor been from a like a how-to or do you have if you had an issue with the web interface how how has support um support's been wonderful um I've talked with a couple people and
anytime I have an issue um I can send an email in there pretty good about responding and stuff and being like hey this is what you have to do um and they're also really great about being like we can do this for you or we can walk you through how to do it or but yeah someone who's trying to learn more Tech stuff that is so helpful that's interesting Chris you got any other questions I was going to say is there any I mean there there are different products out there I guess that do
things similar to visor um why did you land on visor is there anything that we've missed that makes visors stick out you know in in in in the crowd um I would say I'm I'm not too familiar with maybe the other programs that are out there I would say visor was very budget friendly for us um and choose really wants because we have had to do a lot of technological improvements um over the past little bit um and just like kind of the versatility of like how you can change visor
um like I can kind of customize it to be anything I need um in terms of I can make it so that when a student logs in like that Chromebook is automatically assigned to them and then I can turn that off um so the start of the year I don't have to go through and be like okay who has what Chromebook I just turned that on for a week and then the end of the week turn it off and then like it's already set up for me um there's a lot of different like um you can you know keep track of
repairs on there you can keep track of help desk tickets on there um it's just really versatile um awesome for like you know a school that has you know one Tech person and not a tech department and we can just kind of keep it all right there well I guess speaking of the price uh and we can kind of wrap it up with this uh if you're listening and you want to check out visor you can go to visor and that's a v-i-z-o-r DOT Cloud slash K-12 Tech talk and supposedly and Destiny
maybe you should hit up a visor about this um they're given like up to 20 off if you go through that link so Destiny maybe we can get you a discount on your stuff as well after you do this episode with us we actually go out of this world because I saw them um present at a conference okay okay cool who said you can't get two discounts right that's what I'd be good I'll talk to Dean and be like all right now we get two 20 offs right yeah are they yeah and we I think we need to squash this
rumor too do they give you a visor when you sign up with visor I have not received a visor so if they do I'm gonna be really sad okay he's coming up with all these wonderful marketing ideas for companies and they just don't appreciate them well and even when they did a conferences like they have little tables they have little pins and stuff have little visors that'd be so unique yeah it's unbelievable we're full of good ideas but I don't know but definitely we appreciate you joining
us thanks for your time today absolutely