Episode 162 - Insights from the CoSN 2024 Conference - Part 1

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Shoes. This is K-12 Tech Talk. My name is Chris coming to you live at the COSEN 2024 conference here in beautiful Miami. To my left and to my right are empty seats because Josh and Mark are not yet here. I'm excited to be here. They are on the way. I think they sent me ahead just to make me set up the table, the recording equipment, the headphones, the microphones, the banner, all that good stuff. They bailed on me to make me do all the hard labor, just like always.

But anyway, we're excited to be here, here at COSEN 2024. We're going to be hanging out, hopefully, with listeners and also with some folks that work at COSEN, work with COSEN. I'm excited. Guys, are you excited? Oh, yeah. You're not here yet. Anyway, should be a good time. Looking forward to it. All right. So I have with me, Me, I've talked her into sitting down with me is Susan. Susan, how's it going? It's going great, Chris. How are you? Good. I'm getting settled in.

It's a beautiful day outside, but we've been kind of stuck inside so far today. It's a beautiful day inside. So I've heard a couple of things about you, and you can tell me if this is right or wrong. You are doing a keynote. I am. And you're a great leader. Do you agree with that? Are you humble about that? Depends on who you ask. How about I've been doing it a long time, so I've learned a lot of good lessons. Would you talk about that for a few minutes?

Sure. Where you're from and what you're doing now. Yeah. So I am originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. I started my career in education as a high school English, ELL, and journalism teacher. Okay. And then I always joke and say that I lost my way and found myself in the superintendency. Right. But I started my career in district leadership in Portland Public Schools. Okay. Then I went to Evergreen in Vancouver, then Seattle, and then served as the superintendent in Highline Public Schools.

Okay. For 10 years, Highline is just south of Seattle. and most recently I served as the superintendent for the Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada. And now I am out on my own. Awesome. So I can pick up one thing already. So you used to be a teacher. Yes. So you lived in those trenches. Yes. That typically does make for a good leader that can remember where you came from kind of thing. Would you talk about your keynote today? And I know it does involve leadership, I believe.

Would you just speak to Yeah. So I think all great leaders are always learners. And so as a as whether I was a superintendent or another district leader, when making decisions, I would always try to put myself in the shoes of teachers and staff in schools to really figure out what will the impact of this decision be.

The focus of my talk today is really about, you know, every, every leader matters and it doesn't matter what title you hold, what place you have in the organization, you have an opportunity to lead and impact the lives of kids. And you need to seize that opportunity because our kids are relying on us as the adults to get smarter and better at this work. And we need to do that together.

I think leadership is a team sport and we all get better when we do, when we do the work together versus in isolation. Awesome. Is this your first time at COSEN? Have you been a COSEN member for a long time? I have been to COSEN for several years now, and I love coming here because the focus is not on superintendents. It's on the really smart people who really help our district stay on the cutting edge of what technology can do to benefit the lives of kids and staff alike.

And so I always come away having learned something, and I always enjoy seeing my COSEN people. Yeah, awesome. All right. Well, I hope that you have a great take today and thank you for stopping by. Thank you. Look what the cat drew again. Yep. I'm finally here. Like you got here and then I was talking to you and I was in the middle of a sentence and then you just left and went to a session. Yep. You weren't in the middle of a sentence. Who are we kidding?

What did you just, you just took on some kind of session? I went to a session about after action reports and going through documentation and everything after an incident. And hopefully we'll have one of those gentlemen later on today to come by and record with us. That has already made my head spin a little bit. We often talk about doing a lot of preparation to prevent the event or what we're going to do during the event. Yes. But not so much the after.

And that's why I found it interesting and would like to talk to him. Because the interviews that we've done have all been about events. events very few of them have really touched on or gotten into you know how detailed are your notes and can you go back and look at your notes and and draw a judgment of okay did it take us this long to find this incident because was the tool not working or were my people not trained on how to use the tool now i thought that was a great point and they made some

other really cool points about sharing attack vectors, not just the attack. So it is kind of uncommon for a school to come out and say they've been breached or had an attack, whatever. Their point was schools can do a better job of sharing the constant attacks that they're seeing. And I know you and I share, our schools in our area share pretty well about fishes that are being seen. But what I really haven't seen that often is sharing like firewall pokes or different vectors hitting firewalls.

So that was another interesting point that they made. So, a lot of it revolved around PR because PR and communications is going to be heavily involved in an after action report about sharing content with outside people, media, parents, employees. Yeah, it was a really good session. Cool. Well, we are told that Mark is on a plane. Yes. Maybe in a couple hours we're going to see him. Yeah, we'll probably see him about 2 o'clock and then he'll turn around and go home tomorrow morning.

He just came for dinner. Yeah, because he heard you were paying.

Do you remember last year when Eric... No, I wasn't here last year. I know, but Eric wanted to go see Vance Joy with me. Yes. Eric, the intern. Yes. And then he bought Vance Joy tickets two times. Yes. Because he bought it for the day before. Yes. And I text you last night, my hotel room overlooks the Kaseya Center. And guess who's playing the Kaseya Center tonight? Life is a mystery. Madonna. My wife is all excited. I told her you were getting tickets to Madonna. I don't know.

I don't know. That's like next level. But there is... Like a virgin. We need to sing like we'll practice like a virgin and we'll sing it. When Mark walks up? Yeah, when Mark. Well, no, I mean for the podcast. Yeah. Okay. Talked for the very first time. Okay. But anyway, there is a reason why Eric the intern isn't at this conference because he spent too much money last year. Yeah, that makes sense. And we're in Miami.

And it is beautiful. It is beautiful. I spent some time on South Beach last night with my wife. And that's a great people-watching area if you've never been to South Beach. I like it. All right. We'll check back in later. Thanks. All right. We are here with Richard. Richard, what organization are you with? We found an actual guest. Yeah. It's not just us talking. Yeah. I'm so honored. You're our first one today. Yeah. What organization are you with and what are you doing here at COSEN?

Yeah, so I lead ISTE and ASCD. Oh, okay. And excited to be here at COSEN, mostly to catch up with a bunch of people I haven't seen in a while. And so it's been great to see what's going on here from leaders out in the schools about what they're doing that's awesome, what they're struggling with. It's a great chance to just catch up with everybody. So what's ISTE's relationship with COSEN like? You guys kind of go hand in hand. You're two different organizations that schools

belong to. you have a massive conference, right? So give us a little bit of idea of what that relationship's like and what does ISTE do different than what COSEN does? Sure. So ISTE and COSEN have been collaborators and partners for many years. We are really focused on the learning moment, the instructional side of learning and so of technology. And so how can technology support amazing learning? How can technology really help advance what we know to be really sound around learning practices.

And so that's really the side that we focus on. We're working with teachers and academic leaders on transforming the learning moment. Now, none of that can happen if we don't have effective, working, safe, secure, private infrastructure. And from the device, through the connectivity, at school, at home, all of those issues, we are are highly dependent on that side working, working well, being reliable.

And that's really why it's so critical that COSIN is part of the picture for us, because if the people here that are part of the COSIN world can really make sure that infrastructure is available, it's a prerequisite for any of the work that we're going to do. James Jacobson, MD, PhD Sure, absolutely. If you could talk about, so this is not your first time at COSEN. Correct. What is it about this conference that makes it special, that makes it stick

out? Why do you like being here? You kind of touched on that. You like hanging out with leaders, but is there anything else? I mean, I'll say two things. One is it's a bit like coming to a family reunion. Okay. I love coming back and seeing, you know, friends and family that you don't get to see all the time, but are really doing amazing work. And you don't get to see them because they're so busy doing amazing work.

And so this is a kind of special moment where you actually have a chance to catch up with people who are running 100 miles an hour at warp speed, as the theme of the conference is, right? Running so fast that sometimes you don't have a moment to just catch up. So that's really awesome. The second thing that I would say is it's really critical, even though our team's focus, again, is on the learning experience.

If we don't understand the issues that are really happening in terms of providing the infrastructure, the network, the technology, we can make decisions that are not as informed as they should be. And so it's really important for me to walk away understanding what are the realities, what are the issues that our heads of technology are dealing with so that we can make sure we're supporting that work from the instructional side.

Awesome. What are some of the trends that you're seeing at ISTE in education? I don't know if you've heard of this thing called AI or not, but that might be a big thing. Yeah, I've heard of it. Okay, good, good. Trendy. I actually jokingly say there's a federal regulation that says no group of educators of more than 25 can be gathered for more than 10 minutes without talking about AI. So we adhere to that strictly here and elsewhere. So clearly AI is a trend that we're seeing.

We're actually trying to shift the trend on AI a little bit. A lot of the conversation around AI is very much like, how can we use AI to teach math better? How can we use AI to give feedback faster on student writing? And that's fine. I mean, that's all that's fine. I'm much more interested in what is school's responsibility in preparing young people to thrive in an AI world.

So far less about can it help you divide fractions better, and far more about what does it mean to graduate and work on a team where not all members of your team are human? What does it mean to use AI as a brainstorming partner? Because AI, it turns out, is far better than humans at generating lots of ideas. And humans, it turns out, are far better than AI at discerning what the right ones are, the good ones are, right?

But that's a skill. That's a skill that at the moment we're not really teaching. And so really our push is to say, how do we get ahead of preparing young people? How do we help schools get ahead of preparing young people to be the future learners and leaders in an AI world? old, that to me is far more important than even using it to help with a particular teaching concept.

And it's all about those prompts, right? The more detail you can give the prompt or the more prompts that you can give the AI tool, the better the result will be. And it's about teaching those kids how to prompt that. Sure. Prompt is one piece of it. But remember, there's a whole bunch of types of AI, right? So using a text-generating AI is just one piece. Sure. There's image and video AI. So how are we using images to convey complex ideas to one another?

How are we using, how are we helping kids actually design their own AI? So there's lots of tools now that make it fairly simple to build your own AI bots, right? But if, you know, if we aren't preparing kids on how to do that, then this just becomes magic to them, right? And our, you know, my sort of my mantra here is AI is not magic, right? Magic is mysterious and uncontrollable and AI is neither of those things.

And so we need teachers and leaders who are able to help kids understand what AI really is and what it isn't, and what happens when you feed it different data sets, what it means, when you should be putting faith in their decisions, decisions from AI, when it would be irresponsible not to make a decision, to hand a decision off to AI because of our own bias, right? Those are all of the things that we need to be talking about.

And I would add on top of that, that we have to think about some things like, what does it even mean to be something that we create? Many of us flew on an airplane to get here. Does that mean that we didn't actually come here because the airplane took us and we didn't walk? Is there how much of the tool can we use and still consider it our unique creative work? Those are all the questions that we need to be talking with our students about. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, thanks for hanging out with us. Hope you have a good day. It's great to be here. Thanks for hosting this chat. We'll see you. See you. Thanks. All right, Josh, you walked away for half a second. I saw Don walking by. Eric, the intern, and I hung out with Don Ringelstein. Met him in Austin last COSEN conference. And Don, you are back. You were kind of a new guy, I think, last year, but you are... You have matured since the last time I've seen you. How's it going?

Well, you know, I know more about being on the board of directors and running this conference. So, uh, it's, it's, you know, we do a lot to, to prepare and do those sorts of things. So it's really good to see all, all the people that have turned out. So, you know, we're happy with our attendance this year. Would you remind me again, what, do you work for a school district? I do. I work for, uh, Yorkville school district one 15. It's in the far West suburbs of Chicago.

Okay. And then you've You've been a part of COSEN. You've been a COSEN member for many years. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I've also been on the state chapter of COSEN for a while, too. We founded back in, I want to say it was 2012, and I've been on the board of directors since then, and I'm terming off this year. Okay. Yeah. And then you've been serving on the big board since last year.

Yes, I have. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So in those years that you've been with COSEN, what have you seen change in just the short couple of years that you've been on the, you know, the higher end of the board? Well, you know, it's obviously AI. I mean, that's been a big thing and it's obviously a big part of what we're doing here. And I'm not sure, you know, well, we saw a statistic yesterday at 60% of the schools don't have anything in place for AI right now.

So we've got a lot of work to do, but we helped also have to make sure that we're doing it intentionally. So Kozen's got. AI dashboard more or less than we work with that we provided to the membership to help them wrap their minds around. And so it's, it's a great thing. We launched it at the conference this year and I'm very pleased with it. Good feedback so far on it. Oh yeah. Yeah. And we had some senior, some really, really solid people from the count council of great city schools.

Tom Ryan was involved in who got the lifetime achievement award yesterday. And it's, it's, It's a very good tool for districts that don't have anything going just yet. Interesting. I saw yesterday in that post from Kosen that Tom actually has his doctored. I didn't realize that. I'm going to start calling him Dr. Ryan, like the clear and present danger Dr. Ryan. That's what I picture now when I think of Tom. I'm going to think of Dr.

Ryan from clear and present danger. When I think of Tom, he used to, when he was on the board, he had this kind of like Viking hat. So I always picture Tom wearing that hat. It's, yeah, he's a great guy. All right. What are you looking forward to the most here at the conference this year? So, you know, again, we had a great general session with Susan Enfield yesterday. I'm looking forward to some sessions today. Really, I've been working hard on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So I'm presenting on that tomorrow. Sat in on the women's breakfast yesterday, and I think we've done some great work in COSEN on DEI, and I've served on that subcommittee, and I will continue on that subcommittee next year. But we've, I think, done some great work on that and want to make sure that we continue that, and I continue to want to be a partner in that. Good, and some of the negative connotation with that hopefully can go to the

wayside and not be an issue. Yeah, well, and the way I think it, it's not about wokeness. It's not about being woke or anything like that. It's about, we've got half our population or more are women. It's our duty to make sure that. You know, women are treated with respect. Women are considered for higher positions. And as a man, it's my job to be an ally and really to mentor. The studies show that women do a lot. They rise higher in the workplace. They get paid more when they have male mentors.

So that's something that I'm working on as well. All right. Well, definitely an important topic that I don't think is going anywhere, hopefully anytime soon. But yeah, good to have some work in that space. Absolutely. Well, Don, thanks for sitting down with us. Hopefully we're not keeping you from a session. You can go find Tom and give him some trouble. I will. Yeah, the Viking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great. I want to see a picture of that.

Yeah. I know we've got internal pictures, but I think there might be some that are public facing. Yeah, we need to find those. And we should make it public facing. Well, and I'm thinking about a photo. Don in a Viking helmet, or Tom in a Viking helmet. With Mark on a buffalo? Well, that or on the submarine from Clear and Present Day. Yeah. I mean, that's I like it with Sean Connery. Yeah, I don't hate it. Yeah.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for having me on. Yep. All righty. We do want to take a second to thank our sponsors for letting us come to Coasted and make this trip possible. A4L, their summit is coming up and we get to go to that. That's in D.C. The A4L summit is April 30th through May 2nd. Check out A4L.org to learn more about that.

If you don't know about A4L, they want to support lifelong learning through interoperability, privacy, and security access, basically from preschool, I don't know, all the way to death, retirement, which is before death. So check out A4L, hang out with us at that summit. We also want to thank NTP for being our diamond partner, the K-12 Tech Pro meetups that we're doing across the nation. That is happening because of NTP. We want to thank ClassLink.

They're over here at Coaston. I'm actually wearing a ClassLink lanyard right now. We want to thank Howard. They have this little saying, Howard, we do it. Seth Shockley is the rep out of Missouri that you can hang out with, that you can talk to. And if you're listening across the nation, you can still reach out to Seth. It's sshockley at howard.com. They pride themselves on being a one-stop shop. They can help you with your technology needs, and they can sell you New Line in particular.

New Line Interactive, TSN Digital Signage, HP Poly, all good partners with Howard. Check them them out for pricing. We want to thank Xtreme Networks as well. If you need some Xtreme switching, reach out to dmayor at Xtreme.com for them. And finally, Fortinet. On April 18th, they have a webinar coming up talking about connecting the nation, the FCC's vision for broadband cybersecurity and digital inclusion. I'll put a registration link for that Fortinet webinar in this podcast description.

It's been a great time at COSIN 2024, leading for innovation at Warp Speed. Again, thanks to our sponsors for making this happen. All right, Josh. So, important news, but it's pretty funny. Mark just got here, but instead of us really talking to him at all, we brought in Megan to the hot seat. Yeah, we're letting Megan sit down. Mark, go find yourself some coffee, okay? Megan, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks for having me, guys.

I'm excited to be on here and get to talk about So you came down, you attended yesterday's sessions. You came down early because you are Missouri's representative in COSEN, right? I am the state chair for the state of Missouri. Pretty big deal. So I came down a few days early to represent the metal board, which is Missouri's arm of COSEN, and to do some state chapter stuff and then attend some other stuff as well. All right. That's our live crowd

here. Here. So what your Twitter account yesterday, you were pumped up. X account. Whatever. It's still Twitter. You were pumped up about the session that you were in yesterday. Tell us a little bit about that. So yesterday we had a women in tech breakfast that was hosted by the diversity, equity, inclusion. I'm not sure exactly. It was a great committee with Kosen that hosted that breakfast. Dr. Ivy Nelson was the host. She is from Missouri as well.

And so she just got her doctorate and was talking to us about all of her research that was focused on women in tech. Hmm, interesting. What were some of the key takeaways? I saw that you're gonna take some things back. What were some of those things? She just had some really good information about kind of the struggles that women face in technology in the field in general. Sure. And gave us a really great opportunity to sit down with other women from all across the country and talk about that.

And she also had a lot of great information about how, while as women, we experience issues, but women of color are also experiencing those issues even to a greater extent. And there's still just a lot of work to be done. You know, it makes sense because I've been in tech for over 20 years and guys can be kind of not mean to each other, but have that off-putting personality and say, you know, I can say some mean things to you.

Yeah, you're mean. I know. So I can absolutely see from a woman's perspective where that is not the most welcoming environment to kind of step into and, number one, feel like you have to prove yourself. Right. That you know what you're talking about and that you're able to do these things that we do. So, yeah, it's interesting to kind of how to open that door and be more welcoming and inclusive.

Inclusive well and there's still just a lot of ivy's word for it was microaggressions where sure i i've had this happen in my district that i'm assumed i'm our tech director's assistant oh wow that one of our principals said that and i was like actually no and then i know for women of color they feel like they are representing women they're representing their race and they have this feeling that they have to be perfect sure that they are not allowed to make mistakes

And so there's you're combating that. But then you're also combating the assumptions that I don't know what I'm talking about just because I am a woman or because I have an educational background, not technical background. Right. We give Mark trouble for having an educational background. There's a difference. Like we can bash on you for being a former teacher or whatever. Oh, I would. I would. I would expect that you do. Right. That's still OK.

Like there's going to be an asterisk on this episode and say she was a teacher. That has nothing to do with you being a woman. That is just... Yeah, EdTech stuff is still wide open. Right. Okay. Right? Alright. Write your letters. K12TechTalk at gmail.com. Address them to Chris. I'll take the Microsoft hate. Chris can take the EdTech hate. I make fun of myself because I still don't know ed tech stuff. Just kidding.

So we're in Miami. Yes. Have you done anything fun that you can tell the story of? So I got, quote unquote, adopted by some young girls I met at the pool that were like 25 years old engineers. Oh, wow. And they were just so excited and wanted to talk about women in tech and STEM stuff. Wow. Are they here at the conference? No. No, they're not associated with it at all. But so we went out saturday night and i'm like i am wearing my coolest old lady outfit.

I got on my practical white sneakers i have on jeans i have a cute little top they come downstairs looking fantastic in some go-go boots and mini skirts and tube tops and i go you know what ladies you look awesome i'm just gonna walk in last because we're not getting anywhere with me leading the pack you could have played the card of like your mom along with them And I'm like, yeah, I am sure that's what people thought that I was their mom. So you went clubbing? What did you do? A 25 year old.

So we went we went to a restaurant, a nice sushi restaurant. And then we got me in the club. And then we had a couple of bars and I was like, OK, this is the music's really loud. The drinks were really expensive. Yeah. And this is not my target demographic to get somebody to buy me a drink. I'm going to strike out all night long.

So so where were they from what what were they were they just here on a trip and you found them so they they work with a company and they had met each other through this company and they like to travel and the company has offices in every single state well and so they can just go work remote at their other offices so they just kind of were like oh yeah and we just wanted to work in miami for the week because why not wow i was like that sounds cool i like that all right

I can go work across the campus and sit and watch kindergartners eat lunch. Like a picnic table outside. Help open milk cartons and Lunchables. All right. Well, if you go to the Madonna concert tonight, you'll have to let us know. Madonna's in town. No, that is not. Oh, we were going to. Chris sang. What did you sing earlier? Life is a mystery. Yeah, we're going to. When Mark sits down. I am not singing. We're singing Like a Virgin. I love it. That's very fitting. Wouldn't you call my name?

No. So I think there's a vendor event tonight, but they're not a sponsor, so I won't say who it is. Okay. So there's that. And then just enjoying the day and getting to learn a lot more. Yeah. And hitting South Beach. AI is a thing here. Yeah. I guess maybe people are interested in AI. It's new. It's new. All right, Megan. Well, thanks for sitting down with us. Yeah. Thanks, guys. All right. We'll see you around. Thanks.

Mark is in the house he finally made it you got to eat the microphone mark okay there you go straight from new england that's right how was the eclipse beautiful we watched it on zoom here oh yeah not the same i flew through it you flew through it and then flew through a thunderstorm it was great yeah my anxiety was awesome you you were like you like laid on a blanket i yeah we We found a field way up in northern Vermont. Oh, Vermont. I thought it was Connecticut. Yeah, way up. Way, way, way up.

And then got in the car as fast as possible and sat in traffic for a few hours and got a couple hours of sleep and got on a plane. I'm here. Now, we need to talk about what you just bragged about. Oh, yeah. They changed my flight or my seat. I got upgraded to first class.

Chris is going to get it. They knew who I was. It was a free upgrade, right? I was going to say, Chris is going to get a bill for that. That look on Chris's face was so angry. I was just checking. I was just checking. He was legitimately concerned. Mark, you got here a little bit late. This is the final interview. It's just you. Yeah, thanks for coming, everybody. Okay. Just kidding. We're just getting started. Mark, you've been to Coaston before. Yeah. You've been a Coaston member for

a long time. Yeah. Tell us about it. it's a great organization. There's wonderful people from all walks of life. They come from all around the country. It's definitely a little bit more tech-focused. So if you're a K-12 tech listener, this is probably your bread and butter to come to this kind of conference. There's definitely some instruction, right? It's a mixture of tech and instruction, but kind of leans in comparison. So maybe their conferences leans more towards on the tech side.

Chris and I were talking about that earlier. This is... I feel policy heavy from a tech side of things. There are some tech discussions going on. There was a one-to-one session earlier. But yeah, if you're in tech leadership, this is definitely the conference for you to come to because it's policy procedure. It's trends from advocacy standpoint from both with the Department of Ed and at a federal level down to the state level from the state chapters.

And it's definitely a good place to come to and make connections because Mark walks in the room and like everybody it's like it will be like Madonna tonight at the stage at the Kaseya Center yes we didn't tell you this but since Madonna since Madonna is in town tonight we are doing our best renditions of her hits she's in town yes at the place next to me so that's the joke with Chris he and Eric went to that concert in Austin than Anne's Joy.

So he is buying us eight tickets tonight because he has to buy twice because that's what they did in Austin. He has to keep it fair. I gave Eric my credit card and then he bought concert tickets to the night before. Got it. But all of that to say, it is now your turn to sing a Madonna song. The floor is yours. It helps.

Do you know any Madonna songs? Well, you just took the one that I... Like a Virgin? Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that came to my mind. Like a prayer. Oh, yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah. Good one, Mark. Okay. Go prayer. Anyway, Mark, we're glad that you're here. Thank you. It's good to be here. All right. We'll be back in a second. All right. So with us, we have Will, who I sat in. Will was on, I guess, like a panel discussion this morning about after action reports.

And actually, I took a whole page of notes. You know, on the podcast, we've talked several to several districts, Chris, about incidents that have taken place in districts, you know, everything from ransomware to account takeover, stuff like that. But very rarely have we actually had an in-depth discussion about after action. Oh, I think I've got you muted. Sorry. Go ahead. Right. So it was interesting to sit in the session that you were in, Will, about after action reports and incidents.

And I don't necessarily want you to go into a whole lot of detail about your district or if your district had an incident, but kind of explain what an after action report is. Okay. Okay. After action report, after action review, I just call them AARs, okay? Sure. And basically, we just gather up everybody who was involved in the incident. I made the mention down there, if a janitor was involved, he's in the room, okay? Usually, their supervisors come in there and we walk through what happened.

We acknowledge the good things, but we also acknowledge where we have growth and we really use it as an opportunity. Don't throw away this event to make us better. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I think you even said it was there's no blame going on. But you are if there is a statement of fact that is a negative, it needs to be set. Absolutely. There's not blame associated with it on an individual. But you need to get the facts out in the environment or in the report.

Because if you ignore the facts, you can't correct the fact. OK, if I'm going to tiptoe around an employee or a peer or a community member or a system or a system, then I'm not doing the service to my school district, to myself, to the stakeholders or to the public. Sure. So when you go in and you get ready to kick off an action, a review, what are some of the most important things that schools should be doing during an incident?

Like the thing that kept coming up in discussion today was note taking. What are some of the things that you guys rely on in an after action review that you need to formulate your response or formulate the report? work. Well, note-taking really helps out by focusing on some of the minutiae that might be doing things I've done and stuff like that. That's really should be really focused early on during the event is really kind of shorthand.

Just what am I doing so I can come back and write a report later.

But during the action plan, it's just really to find out what happened, what you did, what the others have done, what's the response and such. What was the other part of your question? and what any other tools or any other information is. During the incident that you need in the after action report or to complete the after action? We don't stop during the action and do formal tools and stuff.

We come back and really, the key is you got to put that after action, at least the first one, if you're going to have multiple ones, if you figure you need more, you want that one really close. I said within a week of at least a partial resolution so that everything's fresh in your mind. Sure. And so that you can capture that in a more formal setting, have people ask questions back and forth.

Because sometimes some things that we don't think are important, another department or another staff member will ask us a question and that just adds to the color of what's happened. The whole picture. Yeah. So from a district's perspective that's never either had an incident or never had to perform a review like this, how do you even get started in the review?

There i mean there's some we there's some spread we have like a little template that basically just set of rules it's basically hey we're coming in here this is what we're doing we're gonna set the table you know we're there is no blame there are statements of fact we'll work together no one's getting fired out of this yeah this thing we're just going to work through it and we're going to learn because that's what we should be doing is learning what's happened and what

we can do to prevent it again and making less of our resources so the the goal is like a almost like a root cause Cause analysis of the incident. Absolutely. So that could point to a system failure. It could point to a misconfiguration. Yes. It could point to an employee doing something malicious. Right, right, right. You have that root cause, but you also may detect needs that are ancillary to the problem that also need to be addressed.

We had one that was, that we had an incident where, I'm trying to be as vague as I can, but we had an administrator who was not in the office, but was somewhere else in the school and they couldn't hear announcements from the office.

And then when we started working through that it's because of the speaker system they were allowing staff members who usually are in that room to ask for that speaker to be turned down so that during that after action review they said well you know what i'm going to walk through my building and i want a sound level of every single sure every single room so that i know and then they put in place you know what we're going to control sound levels here in the office oh because they because even

though that wasn't the primary right it came out and they're better for them so i think that's an important point too you know chris we've been focused on cyber incidents for our interviews that we've done i will you're saying and it makes complete sense and i don't know why i didn't think of it before but these reviews can be for any any sort of incident any any any incident that you think elevates to the point where you can learn from it absolutely and usually

our threshold is a a multi-departmental incident. So if you bring in more than one or two departments into it, why not talk about it? Interesting. So even from a workflow standpoint, if it's touching more than one department. I love it. I can think I've been focused in on my incident response plan. Yeah. You know, my last step is like running the backups. Right. And like giving each other high fives.

Well, there needs to be a couple more steps. Right. And even to put in the incident response plan about note-taking, about, you know, recognizing what's going on while it's happening to actually document that you're going to do that so that you can do some great follow-up after to learn and glean from it so it doesn't happen again.

One of the conferences I was at made a point that the notes that you're taking will likely be requested by your attorneys anyway and by any sort of incident recovery team that's coming in because they're going to want to know the changes you've made since the incident to kind of roll back and see what things have been addressed already. What's changed in the environment since this took place? So, yeah. And honestly, let's draw this out too.

In IT governance, we are very slow on an uptake to build out our procedures and our policies and stuff like that. Those notes become a study guide or a crib sheet or something that you can now use as a seed to build those documents if you don't have them. I was just thinking, you know, because when it actually plays out and you have step one one through 10. And when it played out, it could have been that you went to step three and you didn't really need step two.

Like if you talk about that, you could clean up your plan and have a better course of action later and be faster. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And I've not really, we were talking before, after he went, he like literally showed up and then he went through your session. I was just sitting here by myself, but he came back with good stuff. Right.

Cause again, I think we do a whole lot of focus on the incident and even the, before the incident but this is kind of new conversation i know for me on the after the incident right yeah yeah don't throw away that data don't throw away that experience don't yeah and but a lot of times we are just looking so far ahead we don't want to go look back and learn and that's and that and then sometimes that's a struggle because you feel like that's not efficient

but yeah and i think for some people it's a struggle because that's pointing out a deficiency somewhere. Right. And I'll be the first to admit, I take comments about my network and my infrastructure very personally. And in an after action review, it's likely going to be uncomfortable. Just plain and simple. If you're doing an after action review, it's because something bad happened. Correct. And you need to get to the bottom of it. And there might be uncomfortable

things come to light. And that's okay. That's okay. Something else that you guys mentioned this morning was around information sharing and how sometimes that can be difficult due to lawyers and, you know, because everybody loves lawyers. But something you guys said that I haven't heard said before was, yes, we should be able able to share incident information like this.

If I'm hit with a phishing attack or a ransomware incident, I should be able to share that information with Chris. But more importantly, we need to be sharing the current attack vectors that we're seeing. If my firewall is getting nailed with external VPN requests with bad credential stuffing attack, I should be sharing that as much as I should be sharing or want to share a ransomware incident information. You know, that I hadn't heard that said before in a group like that until this

morning. And I thought that was that was pretty cool. Well, yeah, let's let's gather our peers. Let's know who has what. And and yeah. And if I'm sitting here on a Palo Alto and you're also a Palo Alto and I'm seeing this traffic and you know what? We share the same vendor. Most likely our configurations may be very close. Sure. OK. And so, yeah. Why wouldn't I give you a heads up? Yeah. Yeah, it's the same as a neighborhood watch. If you really don't think about it. Exactly. You know what?

That's a really good slogan. The neighborhood watch for K-12 tech. We're going to take that from you. You know what? I got to tell you right now. Let's cut this guy off. Will, you're out of here. If you've stolen it from me, it's been stolen twice. Okay. All right, Will. Well, we thank you for your time. We hope you're enjoying it here at COSEN. And hopefully you'll get some downtime. All right. Thank you very much for your time, Will.

The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh, Chris, and Mark, and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations that we're affiliated with. The material information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.