Episode 162.5 - Insights from the CoSN 2024 Conference - Part 2

This is K-12 Tech Talk, the podcast by K-12 Techs for K-12 Techs. Real conversations, real arguments, and real banter on trending K-12 technology topics and issues. Well, we're moving a little slower today. Why? Why? Well, you were like an hour late. I had some issues. It's all that food we ate last night. We went to Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen per Josh's recommendation. I did not recommend it because I took it. The next episode will have 10 sponsors

on it just to pick up the tab on that thing. But it was good. It was some of the best food you've had, right? Yeah, the beef wellington. Who knew? Oh, I knew. And that thing at the end, what was that? Sticky toffee pudding. Who knew? I knew. Josh knew. I knew. Josh knew. Yeah, just look at me. And the waitress at the beginning, Mark and I got like an appetizer, like a first course. Okay, you two had the prefix meal, which came with an appetizer, and it was seared sea scallops. And you opted out.

You were like, no, I don't want the first course. I've done it before, and I was so stuffed I couldn't move. Yeah. And the waiter comes up, and he's like, I'm bringing additional plates because you guys are going to share.

That was stupid wasn't it mark and chris and i are like why would you force us to share our appetizer with josh who opted out yeah of the appetizer and you did you shared one i got yeah and there were pure pressure there were five right five or six so then we asked for plates that when josh gets his meal yeah we'd like plates to take some of his so yep like coast Wilson's been a great experience short of that particular moment. Oh, hush up. Dinner was great short of that moment.

Josh is a foodie. If you don't know that, we learned it last night that Josh knows good food and he knows where to take us and he knows what to order. If I make a recommendation, take it. Yeah. Especially for food. I second that. And abandoning Microsoft. Oh, geez. Oh, yeah, man. Here we go. You did have, we had one gentleman come over and banter with you about not, he's like, I like you guys. Sometimes I don't agree with Josh.

Yeah, and he didn't really get into what... I thought it was the whole Microsoft thing, and he said it wasn't. So I don't remember what it was that he didn't agree with me about.

I think I remember the episode where we talked about how we help people and you were like, I don't do things that require more work on myself or something. I don't remember saying that. I think generally in life, outside of food recommendations, I disagree with Josh. You're wrong. Well, I mean, if you look back at our New Hampshire trip, I tried to get you to drink whiskey and that did not turn out well. No. No. And to clarify, because I didn't like it, not because...

No, not because you got hammered or schnockered or whatever your favorite phrase is. Schnockered. Schnockered. It's my favorite phrase. No. Well, anyways, Cosen. Cosen's been good. Met a lot of people. Everybody knows Mark. Mark walks in the room and, Mark. It's like cheers. I really enjoyed the puppies. That was probably my favorite part. That's the first time I've seen cuddle puppies or I don't know what you want to call them. Puppies at a conference. Yeah.

It's cool. The other thing. It's a good idea, too. It's a great idea. This area over here to our right. Yesterday, I noticed there was professional photography stuff set up. And I figured it was a competing podcast trying to be extra. And it's not. It's CDW. And they're offering free headshots to people. You can go in there and have headshots made. That's fantastic. Yeah. Good idea. Super idea. That's a really good idea. We don't get that in our industry very often.

Right like no one's like i gotta get a headshot of the school tech and every year i'm a tech teacher i have to get my picture done for school photos like central office calls and says go upstairs and get your picture taken oh wow yeah every year i get asked for that moment to happen and i've avoided so i'm 10 years at my school district without a picture taken and i've kind of just made it my thing like a hundred years from now when

they're looking back at the great technology program that existed in my tenure no pictures of me well they'll have the statue. Right right right i just won't be in the yearbook we talked to diane earlier the current board chair and she mentioned that kosa neck 2025 is in seattle so if you are on the western side of the state and you didn't make it to miami because the trip is quite long next year it's going to be closer to you. Smells like teen spirit.

Yeah. Fish market. All kinds of cool stuff. Terrible football teams. Beachers. Cheese people. Terrible. You know we just lost our Seattle listenership due to that statement. Sorry. All right then. No. Yeah. Seattle will be interesting. That'd be cool. Love you guys. Listeners? Is that how we're ending this? No I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you too.

Really serious right now i want to i want to look at you guys and make the channel make make eye contact with me no no no okay if it's if it's awkward for the listeners it's a hundred times more awkward here in person thankfully no one's walking look hi look at me.

All right so yeah if you are on the fence about going to coast and i highly recommend it it's uh great networking you there are districts large and small here shoot aws is here google's here you name it manage methods is right across the street from us here clever and class link in the same room i think i think every company that we probably deal with or that you guys deal with they're in the room it's pretty cool yeah yeah it's interesting well parent squares here you

know they just recently bought remind i saw acer yeah managed methods sitting across from us That's what I just said. I just said. Extra plug. All right. Anything else, guys? It's been real. Take me to Miami. Is that Will Smith? It's been fun. Was it welcome to Miami or take me to Miami? I don't know. I was more focused on Madonna. Getting jiggy with it? I got nothing. All right. Well, let's wrap her up. Love you guys.

All right. We are here with Josh Holstad from Oyster River Cooperative School District. We have had him on the podcast before. We ran into him once again and said, hey, have a seat. Let's talk to your privacy level. Josh, we were just talking about secure by design. We're going to ask Josh some questions. Yeah, I was going to say, you're going to have to differentiate between the two of us, man. Come on. So secure by design. We've heard this phrase quite a lot.

We have seen it in news articles and headlines. But can you break down what is secure by design actually mean? Yeah, so there's a couple pieces to it, as I understand it from CISA. You have the secure by design. And so actually building out software and vulnerability programs, vulnerability disclosures, things like that, as well as building out certain features that currently right now we tend to pay for like single sign on MFA.

I don't know if rostering would fall in there but you know that varies by app I suppose but that's under the secure by default part of secure by design so yeah it's. It sounds like a great thing. I'm curious to see how vendors respond to it. You know, I recently talked with someone from SZA and asked, you know, is there something we can do to promote it? Like when we talk to vendors, should we be asking them, hey, are you following the SecureBy design?

I don't know if it's a principle or a framework. I guess it's more of a pledge at this point.

So like what what can we do to kind of get vendors to take it seriously from our perspective and not not charge us subscription fees to get to the secure features right like yes google well let's so let's break it up and microsoft well no we can't hate on microsoft josh i guess it's something about the people named josh he's still no microsoft i am a all microsoft district oh and And you hate on Microsoft. Well, you know. Do you like Teams? I do.

Never mind. But I use it all the time. So I don't have to install the client every single time. Yeah, I just use the web client. That's probably my... I will say the web client's better. Go ahead, Mark. Get a real quick... This is falling off the rails. It's fine. It goes quick. We're in Miami. It doesn't matter.

All right. So secure by design. The first part of it is vendors are delivering a product that is secure outside of the box, meaning that the the default configurations if a if a school district does nothing they're at least safe from small to moderate security vulnerabilities or attacks yeah what we're also doing is trying to push the envelope and saying it's not just about making sure the product is secure out of the box it's that the vendor is not adding paid components

that make the product even safe right and so you have google they buried a lot of their security features in the paid tiers microsoft does the same i've heard people say that you're really not safe until you're at a three or above.

The tiers and then even you know as we're surrounded by a lot of different vendors who may charge a rostering fee they may charge an authentication fee to set those things up that the the goal is you got to remove those barriers from a school district who's not going to opt out of these right opponents so where do you see the industry today and do you see this starting to make inroads with some of the vendors that you work with or

would like to yeah i i don't I don't see it a lot with the vendors. I mean, I think we're starting to see more like talking about like the child nutrition software we work with. They didn't have a way to do MFA. Like there was no, no option. So pushing back on them saying that, you know, this is a requirement for us as a district, you know, we're starting to see some changes.

So I think a lot of it is, I don't know if the federal government saying, Hey, this is a good idea is going to have the traction that us collectively as you know, the, the users and kind of reiterating this and, and saying, these are the things that we can't live without out of the box. And it is interesting. I tried to strike up conversations with different vendors.

I did talk to Microsoft at K-12-6 and he gave some interesting comments about, well, you know, all those two-factor pushes, you know, that's processing. That's consuming data cycles, there's costs. You know, there's a lot of companies that make a lot of money off of corporate customers that have K-12. And selfishly, I feel like, you know, they could cut us a break a little bit. But yeah, I think overall, we have to really push the vendors and say, we need this.

And I think that's going to get some more traction. Loss of revenue more than a federal agency saying, you know, we really think you should do this. The only way, their bottom line is the way to of make them do it you know i've had some success with some of the the rostering solutions like we use class link and i've had a couple ed tech vendors that were really being a pain about.

Rostering and single sign-on saying well we don't offer that below 10 000 students and wow i think we know the the average district in the united states is much smaller than that so So, you know, even part, even working with like a class link and saying, Hey, we're not, we bought your product to help with this process, but the vendors won't even let us do this. Wow. So, you know, using, using some of those vendors to help us out is good too.

And I think we're seeing more and more, more of the rostering vendors adding security features to their products. And, and so hopefully that helps too. So to, to close this, I think we need to clarify something. thing. Josh mentions SZA. Yep. And I think every time we talk about SZA, people are confused and think that we're talking about the rapper, the artist, the musical artist.

He's not. He's talking SZA, C-I-S-A, the federal government, because Josh was invited to the White House, so he has an in there. So don't get confused. We're not talking about SZA with the recording contract. I appreciate the clarification. Josh, I hope you enjoy. The sun is now out again. My My wife just texted and said she is back at the beach. So I hope you get to go to South Beach and maybe enjoy the beach for a few hours.

Yeah, we'll see. All right. Sounds good. Thanks for joining us, Josh. Yeah, thanks.

We're here with Shari Arakasi, the former LAUSD CIO, now working with LA County and board member of COSEN. All right. So you had a big fundraiser on Monday, right? Or was it yesterday, last night? Last night, yes. Yes. And tell us a little bit about the fundraiser and the auction. Yes. So usually every year during the conference, starting about a week before the conference, COSEN has a silent auction.

So there are a lot of arts and crafts and vacation plans that participants can can bid on and i think they're going to announce the winners pretty soon so that provides fun is it but monday evening there's an event kind of a paid additional paid event where you know there's entertainment there's music and sometimes competition between the chapters so it's kind of a fun activity but But it's an opportunity to network as usual and just talk and have a good time and enjoy.

And all of that goes towards the fundraising efforts goes towards COSEN to keep membership prices low. Well, you also penned the AI readiness checklist with COSEN, the Council of Greatest Schools and the great Dr. Ryan. Yes, Dr. Ryan. Absolutely. So this was a result of one of the conferences where we had, as you recall, we had a panel of AI experts from Google and AWS and Microsoft and Dell.

And it was kind of interesting that somehow we tricked them into sitting at the same panel together at the same time. But it turned out that they're all friends and they talk to each other informally all the time. But in kind of a formal setting, they don't, you know, they don't admit that they are like really buddies with each other. But anyway, so one of the things that came up was, you know, the term of technical debt.

You know, that are these districts really ready to be able to take advantage of Gen AI, especially Gen AI? And, you know, we're all, you know, we're all looking at each other as we were sitting at the audience, you know, kind of like, hey, there's some idea is flashing, light bulb is coming up. So we talked to Anne-Marie Lehrer from AWS, who, you know, she really knows our business because she used to be the CIO at Rochester Public Schools.

So she really knows. She's been in our shoes, you know, dealing with challenges, especially urban school districts. So we talked to her and she said, oh, that's a great idea. So she ran it through her organization and within like a couple of days, she got approval to, to pay for the basically cost of travel and just, rule on board a two day workshop in New York city. And we brought in. CIOs from three different districts, San Antonio, Denver, and Fresno.

Ryan and I were there, and then they brought their Gen AI team that works on education. And we spent two days just brain dumping and brainstorming on Gen AI. What are the challenges? And we came up with six different domains. It's management, operations, data, infrastructure, security, and risk. risk. And then within those domains, there are a series of questions. And it's all focused on awareness and understanding about that readiness that needs to exist in an organization.

And then that got curated, cleaned up, and COSEN and CGCS, Council of Great City Schools, jointly published that about six months ago, late fall. And the amazing thing was the turnaround. It was amazing. The AWS brought a really expert facilitator to help us with that, and she really helped with curating the data.

So we have been publicizing that, and a lot of the nonprofits, thanks to Keith Kruger from Cosen and his connections, a lot of the other nonprofits that are involved in AI have been endorsing the checklist. And then it was so successful that AWS actually converted, created a version for higher ed. Wow. They created a version to workshop with their edtech companies that host their systems on AWS. And then it's also been translated to other languages with AWS.

That's cool. Yeah. Anyways, I'm giving you the long story. You can edit that. But anyways, the follow-on to that was, well, now let's take that checklist and turn it into a maturity checklist. So a lot of contribution from Dr. Ryan, we work collaboratively in developing a maturity tool. So basically those questions in the checklist have been turned into a kind of a three level, each domain, subdomain and elements. And each element has three maturity levels.

And within each maturity level, we identify, OK, if you meet these criteria, you're in this level. level, and then this is the evidence you need to have to prove that you're at this level. So it's a three level maturity level. I think Keith Kruger is going to be publicly announcing that tomorrow, I think, for today. And then we're doing four pilots. I think it's going to turn into five.

We're doing a half day workshop with four school districts to kind of experience how how that maturity tool can work with the districts and then expand it into a service that COSEN can provide to other member districts and the council. It's a joint effort. So we'll be at Chicago, Clark County, Nevada. Fresno, Unified, and then Peninsula over at Washington.

So kind of a range of, you know, large, medium, and small. And then based on that, we'll fine tune our tool. And then we're hoping that we can also secure funding to turn that tool into a web app where districts can go in, log in, you know, keep track and then even expand it into building a roadmap based on the results of the assessment. It's a maturity assessment kind of a tool and then develop a roadmap and then track their progress.

That's all about, you know, just, you know, and, you know, one last thing about that is that the request to participate in the workshop came from the, through the superintendent. Because we are trying to elevate this, it's like security and cybersecurity, elevate this to the enterprise and make sure that the superintendent is committed and then the cabinet participates. So that it doesn't become all lay on the shoulder of the CI.

Well, and everybody's informed because the whole ecosystem is informed. Well, Shariar, we appreciate your time with us. Thanks for being long-winded. No, it's fine. Hopefully, you have some time to go hit some sessions and go pump. Absolutely. Thank you very much and I encourage everyone to come to the future conferences. This is really great. We have a great turnout out and good people are on here. Great place to network. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Sharia.

Alright, so I have with me Melissa and Jim, and I'm going to let them introduce the organization that they're with and the content they've created, and I just kind of totally geeked out over what they've handed me. So, which of you wants to take the lead on this? I'm Jim Siegel. I'm a senior technologist with the Future of Privacy Forum. We're a global privacy think tank, and I work on the youth and education team, and we're here talking Great document that Melissa and I put together.

It's a student data privacy and ethics scenarios handbook for school leaders. It walks through everything. 11 different common privacy and ethics scenarios that school administrators might deal with. It talks through the learning objectives and the scenarios and provides ethical guidance and talk throughs. So it's a resource that was developed for grad programs, but it also has a lot of uses in school professional development. Okay. So kind of set some guardrails around different scenarios.

Melissa, what was one of your favorite or one of the scenarios that you worked the most on in this, that the outcome or the guardrails might shock a district. I know before we started recording, we were talking about SRO access to security camera systems. What do you think? I love them all. Don't make me choose. It's like choosing between my children.

I do think that working with law enforcement and that line between the SRO and when the SRO is a a school official versus an SRO in your law enforcement unit capacity, and especially gets a little convoluted when they're also maybe employees of the local police department as well.

And so they may serve in one of three capacities for you within your organization and how that line is drawn and how you manage the transfer of information and what is and is not allowed to be shared between these separate functions of that individual. And it's kind of like being in a split personality where I'm playing three different people.

I'll also say we've kind of done the circuit tour and starting with conferences on taking these and showing schools how they can use them in their, you know, leadership meetings as tabletop activities to engage in the discussion of these, you know, very critical ethical lines of and how we're handling situations in schools. One that we just did in Massachusetts was on online threat monitoring. Oh. And what do you need to consider when you're looking at an online threat monitoring tool?

Or if you already have one in your district, what conversations should you be having around those guardrails? When can you share information with police? When can your vendor share information with police? What should you be sharing with your vendor? How you should be responding to threats coming from that monitoring system and protecting the privacy of our students and the actual impacts of those decisions you're making as you're investigating

and looking into online threat monitoring. online threat monitoring. You know, there's lots of great ones. I like the working with researchers as well. Surveys are a hot topic. Well, and not just surveys under PPRA, but like what is a researcher in your district? And do you consider research and studies as being part of the FERPA studies exception, which it's not. The studies exception is on our behalf of the school.

And how does that apply to a lot of the work that's sneaking into our schools that we we may not consider. Like your teachers who are doing graduate work and conducting, you know, research for their thesis in their classroom. And how, how is that being handled.

Considerations are you looking at when researchers are approaching your district and you're not necessarily doing a study that meets the study's exception? Jim, do you have a favorite? I think Melissa and I have three very much the same, particularly the research one, but I think there are a number of other really good ones thinking about dealing with data when a teacher might be using a personal device for a school business.

And one of the more challenging ones is a privacy law law that we hardly ever talk about, but it's one of the most significant, the National School Lunch Act, and challenges when using that data for very useful purposes, but areas where that data was never intended to be used for and not permitted to be used for. Okay, so if listeners want to get their hands on this document, you've got some bound copies here at COSIM, but those are in short supply. Where can they go to find the document?

They can go to studentprivacycompass.org, and it's linked right down at the bottom of the page. Okay. And the bound document is a nice, beautiful document here, but the advantage of the digital document is that we've packed this through with tons of hyperlinks to references so you'll be able to get a deeper dive into the very detailed list of what is allowed with the National School Lunch Act or references for when using the study fix.

Okay. And this appears to be a living document that you guys might be coming out with more scenarios in the future. So I assume that would go in that digital document. Well, guys, we appreciate your time and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, Mark, you brought with you a friend. He's my friend. I didn't bring him. Oh, I didn't bring him. I thought I'd crash this party because I do know Mark, and somebody's got to tell the truth.

We were just unpacking. So Tom is with us right now, and we were unpacking last Coasting Conference. It was me. It was Eric, the intern. You came and hung out with us.

We recorded you, and I guess you didn't know that we were actually going to to use the footage because you went on a mark rant maybe yeah you did maybe i didn't know, maybe i just wanted the excuse he knew he knew mark never really you know he's he's still the new guy on the podcast it's been a hot minute since he's been on here but he never really does a lot of requesting of us but with your footage he wanted to hear it before we aired it and i thought

that was interesting i'm surprised he didn't have a rebuttal because he you know he He did kind of get me, and we've got a lot of different groups that meet weekly or monthly, and we have conversations, job alike kind of a thing. So Mark's a leader in the large district CIOs and, oh, award-winning leader. So he's got an opinion about a lot of things. See, this changes now that I'm here. Josh, maybe you should take this interview. Well, I was going to say, I've been to his district.

So he's a leader in a lot of things, but I do know the truth. So at that podcast, I was trying to give the other side. I mean, the truth to be known. I like that a lot. Well, you know, I had done a rebuttal after that, but unfortunately, we're trying to keep our PG ratings. We couldn't air it. Yeah. That is one of the rules in our group. We don't want your district phone number here. This is not a work.

Related activity. Tom, I know that you don't like talking about yourself, but would you talk about yourself for those listeners that might not know who you are? What do you do? What are you involved in? What brings you to COSO?

So I was with the Albuquerque Public Schools as their chief information officer for 31 years and do a lot of work with the council of great city schools, around, they have what they call a peer review, coming into a district and spending four days with a team of CIOs looking at leadership, operations, organization, and what's the through line, and then providing recommendations for improvement.

But the best part of that is the interaction of the team that's going there to see, you go to a conference, you see all the bright, shiny, polished stuff. But when you come in and do these reviews, you get to see, and you find out that, you know, I'm not as big a mess as I thought it was. Everybody's struggling with these issues. And I've had an opportunity through COSA and to go to New Zealand and Seoul, South Korea and Norway and Finland. And it's amazing.

We're all having the same issues of connectivity and privacy and cybersecurity. We sometimes get a little parochial in our perspective. But whether you're a big school or small district, whatever country you're in, we're still dealing with the same challenges. As an AI, there's a challenge now that we're all becoming impacted by.

We talked actually in the last episode about the difference between big districts and small districts. And one of the comments I said is we're all dealing with the exact same problems. Slightly different, right? That more at the district, big district level, you're dealing with policies and boards and all those kinds of things. But small districts and big districts, the technical problems, the funding problems, everything is all the same. Yeah. And we are all faced with the same challenges.

It's the resources that are available. You're in a large urban district or a large district. You're going to have a lot of specialty, but your ability to communicate to the teacher, to the principal. I mean, there are so many layers in that organization. You have to really focus on creating policies, document resources, trying to keep all of your texts on the same page on what we support and and what we don't or how.

Yeah. In a small district, because I also did five years at Santa Fe Public Schools, which was one-tenth the size of Albuquerque, I found that it's the same. They don't have as much need for some of the documentation because it's the same hat. I just change a hat on my head to do the next thing. I'm doing cybersecurity, and then also I'm doing some data management, do some server maintenance. I'm doing all of those things, but I don't have the specialty people to help.

So I need extra resources from a group like COSEN to be able to provide those because I may have been promoted up to running the organization. I've got a team of three or four, but I still have a vast number. So having those resources and knowing about them helped me in my smaller district. The large district has this communication and trying to keep the expertise at a level that they need to be able to combat because they're going to be a big target, as Mark knows, for attacks.

And you've got a lot of users clicking on the wrong things. Yeah. Yeah. Would you speak to, so Kosen talked about this AI reporter assessment that I know that you did a lot of the work with. Would you speak to that? Tell us what that is, where you can get it, what are you going to read about when you get that thing? You know, very interesting. We brought a group of people at the CIO, Council Great City School session, and we had this panel on AI, and we were talking about it.

From that, at the end of the conference, what do we need to do? Well, we need to bring a task force. This is an enterprise thing. It can't be an IT thing. Most of the CIOs at that time saying, this has nothing to do with me. But most of the superintendents were, this is all about you. So we put together a cohort of CIOs, and we met up in New York. AWS sponsored that.

And we came up with what are the things that we need to do. And we already know that ISTE and Code.org and others are doing the AI for the classroom. In fact, most of the district's AI comes from their digital coaches that are building resources for them.

So we put this checklist, and it's a big comprehensive thing. No one person, in fact, that's the feedback, but this is overwhelming. Well, it's because it's got legal... Procurement and governance and trying to cover all of the base data, data, privacy, data, security, all of that's in there. Then we found out that yes or no is just not the next step. And it, the conversation has changed from this awareness piece to today.

Which is a year from when I think chat GPT originally came onto the scene. And it has just changes every day and new applications. So we did a maturity matrix. You can go to www.cosin.org. Just put AI or AI maturity in the search bar, and you'll come up to the research. There's an assessment where you can do a self-assessment of your district. And then there's the rubric, and that gives four levels. We don't know anything about it or we haven't done it. We talk about it.

And I got a lot of districts that talk about it and think that's a plan. Well, that's a hope.

It's not a plan. A plan is a plan. plan level two is that you're you've got something written it may not be completely it's not enforced perhaps or you don't have enough resources you don't have data but but you've got a plan you've got some agreement on that and then the third level is you now not only have the plan you can, have it sustainable you've got data to prove that it works and this gives you the reason why that's important i can do initial self-assessment my current

state i want to get to these things and and I can see what that looks like at a level two. I don't have to get all the way to the level three. And then I can build a roadmap, what steps I'm gonna take to get here. And it kind of narrows that scope a little bit. Now, you've done a lot in Albuquerque, then you retired, but I feel like that was the start of your career, or your second career.

I'm a dropout, a retiree dropout. A retiree dropout, because then you, during COVID, you picked up some side gig as the temporary CIO in Santa Fe, and you have done an enormous amount of work supporting the other school districts around the world, actually. So tell us what happened yesterday where COSIN recognized you for this tremendous career and the amazing work that you've done for the industry.

Be humble about it, but tell us. So, you know, at the end of my meetings, you know, just efficiency. So I just say, okay, we're done. Get out. That's the end of the meeting. So they gave me this lifetime achievement, which I think was get out. I mean, end of the career. Are you going to die soon, Tom? Yeah. We're done listening to you. I'm giving you this award. Can you go away?

But I have, when I started, there was, you're a large district and you're just really isolated. I think that's the same thing for smaller districts. I'm playing whack-a-mole trying to deal with us. And I needed to build a network. So POSEN and the Council of Greater City Schools provided me a network with people that are facing the same exact problems that I have. And so I found, and I find today, CIOs are so busy. They don't have, they can do all the, all of this.

They could network, they could call, they could contact different organizations. They don't have the time to research. So somebody needs to help connect people. And I learned so much from those reviews. Like I said, seeing other districts, what they do well, what not. The next thing was I could contact people specifically. You're doing something, Mark, around cybersecurity. Can you give me either the person that you need to talk to or can I have a conversation?

And then that grew into maybe let's get three or four people together. And so that network, all it needed was somebody to connect people. I mean, you don't have to bring anything other than a willingness to connect people. And now I have a little bit more time. So my second career or third career or whatever that is, is being able to research the things that the CIOs need and then be able to offer that, which they can't do on their own just because of time, not because of any other.

Yeah. All right, last question, Tom, and without explanation after, in one word, describe Mark in a nutshell. What? I thought we moved on from this. Mark in a nutshell? I think nutshell is the word. Thanks, Tom. We'll cut that out. 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 DC.

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 COSEN. 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 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 COSEN 2024, leading for innovation at Warp Speed. Again, thanks to our sponsors for making this happen.

All right, we are here with the man of the hour. The man, the myth, the legend. Keith Kruger. Huh? That was quite the introduction, I think, Mark. How are you and how's the conference going so far? Great, still standing. We're halfway through, right? Well, we're getting there. Okay. Tell us what are the major themes of the conference this week? What are some of the highlights? If you were unable to attend the conference, what are you missing?

Well, the theme is around innovation at warp speed. speed. And that's just, you know, how the world is changing so fast with things like generative AI and cyber attacks and trying to protect data. So, and, you know, we, we just made a big announcement yesterday. We've partnered with the council of the great city schools. Last fall, we did a gen AI readiness assessment, which was a very version 1.0 binary. Yes, no questions in six domains to help district leaders think about generative AI.

So what we've now done is on top of that kind of rubric, we've built a maturity tool. So it helps you with your team across multiple departments assess sort of where you are today, but more importantly, where do you want to go? So it will tell you a maturity level if you're just starting or if you're emerging or if you're You're at a real mature stage. We got to meet, we got to interview Shariar and Tom as well. So they gave us a little bit more in depth about that.

The people who know what, as opposed to me, the pretty face for radio. Supposedly AI is a thing and it's going to be around. I've heard that. I've heard about it. I think it's coming. Well, so you've got an AI, it looks like an innovation lab. Playground. We call it playground because we want to get back to being like kids. I like it.

There's puppies around here. There's puppies too. and there was a puppy playground that was i i got in cuddle we we weren't sure if it would be right to have something called the cuddle corner so we call it the puppy cuddle it works i i got here i dropped my bag off and immediately went to the puppy corner and got a lot of dog owners are perhaps going home with something more than what the usual tchotchke i i've heard a couple of the puppies have been adopted they

are very popular which is not more popular than than we are. So what else, what else in the world of cybersecurity or some of the topics or, You know, cybersecurity, we released, we previewed our national survey, which for the last seven years, the number one priority has been cybersecurity. And drumroll, cybersecurity is still number one. Although I have to say, generative AI is beating down its neck.

Yeah. But, you know, with being the number one targeted sector, it's right at the top of the list. And one of the things that we are also doing, we're trying to learn from the higher ed community. And EDUCAUSE, which is our sister organization or brother organization, for six years they've had called HECVAT. It's the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Tool.

It's a set of standardized questions that if you want to sell from a vendor perspective to a university or college, there are standardized questions and everyone expects that you as a vendor will fill out. So we have just, with EDUCAUSE's permission, created the K-12 CVAT. It's great. So, you know, it's crazy. It's not good for the vendors. They get all kinds of similar questions, but not the same questions and not always the best format.

And school districts try to figure out what are the right questions to assess your, you know, what the risk assessment is. So we're trying to really standardize that. And is that a questionnaire that is customized or unique to each school district or is a vendor? No, they fill it out once.

That's great. And the vendor is responsible for keeping it up to date and for making it available. But we will promote the companies that have filled out their vendor assessment. And we will, from this point on, be encouraging school districts that in every RFP, ask for the CVAT, the K-12 CVAT. I really need that. We're in the same process of, you know, refining all of our questions. And it feels like every time you talk to a vendor, they've got to start from

scratch. So if there's a standard, exactly. And is it mainly cybersecurity? It's cybersecurity and privacy. It is that. But, you know, down the road, we may who knows, there may be, you know, AI questions and things like that. What other themes or any topics or any surprises this week? So our new... Cats. Are cats coming? Next year. Next year. But, you know, it'll be during a happy hour.

And the other new things, when we were releasing our data, we got some new data around student wellness and technology solutions. We're seeing a lot of, like, the vast majority of school districts are looking at things things that track student wellness and safety and things like that. I can see that. We've talked a lot about it on the podcast about how to handle cell phone policies and filtering rules and social media. So it's definitely something that's impacting all of our work.

So any work that you guys can do to help you, fantastic and much appreciated. Great.

And we're hopefully going to start doing more things around, you know, in the K-12 environment, we've talked a lot, a lot about sustainability, but it's really been about financial sustainability. And so we think that's critical and have worked on total cost of ownership and value of investment for a long time. But there's also environmental sustainability. So other sectors and other places in the world are much more, through procurement, encouraging vendors to tell how much energy do you use?

How long will the device last? What happens to the device when it's gone? How does it come packaged? And many of the companies that we all purchase from have big commitments to environmental sustainability, but they don't hear much demand side from the K-12 environment. So we think there's lots to learn, for instance, from the European, particularly the Nordic countries. So we don't have to start with a blank stage. stage, we can learn and start seeing how we be a good.

Important citizen as school districts about saving energy and hopefully saving money along the way. That's great.

Well, we don't want to keep you from lunch. Chris, do you have any? I was going to say, thanks for having us. We're kind of like, I don't know, we kind of stick out like sore thumbs here, but you have cleared the way for us to have a table. So we're excited that you had us back. Excellent. Great to be here. Have a great day. Thank you. All right. We are here Here with Diane Dersh, we're on the last day of COSEN, wrapping things up with all the attendees.

And we were lucky she walked by to sit down. Diane, tell us. I think I almost like tackled her when she was like walking by here. Tell us, give us an idea your role with COSEN and what we can look, what listeners can look forward to if they come to a COSEN conference. Okay. Well, you know, this is the second year of me as chair. I jokingly say, but not really joking. I just figured it out the first year, right? And now I've got to leave pretty soon, as I've named a chair elect in Marlow Gattis.

But, you know, I always look forward to conference because it's like a family reunion. Seeing our community come together, I think we really missed each other during COVID. Yeah. And so it took us a while to get back again. But all the hugs, all the new faces that we're seeing, or people who were here last year who are coming back again, that tells us something, right? Sure. And there is a community. I always say in COSEN, we try to build a community around technology and technology issues.

I mean, we've got great resources, which you've heard from others. But it's really the people who design it, who implement it, who bring back their failures and their victories. In conferences like this. And that's what makes us all better. Yeah. Hearing real world stories from other people in the trenches helps us out to make sure that we all understand we're all experiencing similar things.

We're all fighting the same fight. And yeah, it's good to hear that from peers and cohorts and across the board, small school, big school.

We're seeing similar things. So COSEN 2025 is going to be in Seattle. That's exciting. So we're in Miami now. We're We're going to go to the other side of the country. Any hints on what the theme might be for 2025 or anything like that yet? You can't share? No, but, you know, I'll bet that our team is working on it already. Right. You know, but again, it's always something to look forward to. And it does matter what part of the country we're in. And, you know, will we get different people?

Will we get a lot of the same people? it gives us an opportunity to be more inclusive regionally. And so I look forward to that always. But, you know, it is the people and however we can get together, wherever we can get together and with Zoom and everything else, you know, on the off times, we still are together. So it does work out well. But I am excited already, looking forward to Seattle. All right. Well, we appreciate your time. You're a busy lady this morning.

Thank you for having us and good luck on your last day here. Well, thank you so much. Thanks, Diane. Thanks. The views and opinions expressed on the K12 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.