¶ Intro / Opening
For the purpose of this section, electronic personal communication device includes, but is not limited to the following.
¶ Intro
Oh.
Cell phones. Paging devices. Beepers.
I haven't heard that. I haven't heard that word in a long time.
On tonight's episode of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, we talk about how some states are taking cell phone bans to the next level. Give an update on another E-Ray case in the Supreme Court. and discuss liability when district technology is used for anything but district business. Thanks for listening.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, episode 203. I am Josh. With me tonight is Chris.
Good evening.
And Mark. Hello. How are you guys doing? Mark, you had some traveling. You finally back home?
Yeah. I've been on the road a lot in the last couple weeks.
On the road again.
Traveling, man.
I've been traveling again next week for Chris.
Hello. Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium. Mark's going to be in the house.
Very excited.
Talking about data.
Data.
And it's governance. That's right.
It's the fun stuff.
Hot topic. Hot takes and hot topics.
It'll be fun. I'm excited to get back out to the central part of the country.
And you have not been to Columbia,
Missouri I have not been to Columbia, Missouri Have I driven through there? No, I have not been there No.
Because you probably cut down at Kingdom City Okay,
So no You're staying at Stony Creek It's going to have like deer on the wall Oh Right, is it deer? Are there elk?
It's probably deer
So I went from LA last week With like Hollywood stars and Beverly Hills Which by the way If the star tours Those like vans that drive around Beverly Hills and show you where the celebrities are. If that's on your bucket list, take it off. Worst use of my time ever. Anyways, I got off halfway through. It was so bad. Then I did the big city.
Really?
Oh, yeah. Oh, I jumped off. Then I did New York City this week, and then I'm going to the heartland Missouri next week.
Like a politician. You could run for national office, Mark, with all this traveling.
Nah, I'm passing on national office right now.
It's Jurassic Park themed. at the Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium. I'm pretty excited about it. I may or may not have purchased the giant blow-up dinosaur that you can wear.
Oh, I don't doubt that at all. How old were you when Jurassic Park came out?
That's a great question. Was that elementary school? Probably.
Probably, because I was middle school-ish.
Probably.
93. Yeah, I would have been like... That's like fourth grade.
I was a...
Rashman? um i met a listener today uh he wanted he wanted to know between episode 100 and 200 were we more excited and impressed with tanya as a guest or jack as a guest jack
Reciter yeah well at the time i didn't know who jack reciter was so that's an easy answer for me.
Huh josh
How about you.
Jack i i was i was more i don't know not starstruck not impressed but just i i that was a more interesting conversation i think when
He's a i mean we didn't even see his face like he had like the anonymous
Yeah he had Yeah,
I would agree with that, too. Jack was pretty cool.
Yeah, that was neat.
Tanya was great.
Yes, she was. And I still hope to meet her at the lake sometime.
I feel like that's like, that's going to be accomplished.
I've had a couple of people be like, so why did you have the gym lady on?
Did you say, did you watch the show?
No no that was why people were confused oh okay why i thought it was about k-12 technology i was like i know i know if you listen to some of the episodes we talked about it it's a thing she's needs money i don't know yeah.
All right well speaking of things why don't we uh jump into the news but first chris can hit a sponsor yeah
Check out class link at classlink.com they can help you with your SSO, with your rostering, and more, check out ClassLink.
We have some E-rate news.
¶ E-Rate Win in the Supreme Court
Yeah.
It's not the E-rate news that we talked about last week.
After the downer closer of an episode last week, we have some good news here.
Listen, you got to be prepared. So if you remember, we've talked about the E-rate cases over the last few months. There's multiple E-rate cases in the Supreme Court's hands right now. And this one is the Wisconsin Bell case. And if you remember correctly, the Wisconsin bail case is about the whistleblower false claims act. Long story short, there's a thing called the false claims act where if somebody is defrauding the government, then any private citizen can take a lawsuit against that company.
And there are some folks who said, hey, E-rate are federal funds. If a telecom company defrauds E-rate, then I, as a private citizen, can sue or take them to court over that. There's a lot of back and forth. And so the Wisconsin Claims Act or the Wisconsin Bell case in Supreme Court was ruled last Friday, and it does classify E-rate as federal dollars. And so now if a telecom company were to defraud a school district or library.
Any private company or any private citizen can now take that company to court under the False Claims Act. So, good news for the protection and sanctity of the E-rate, but it gets you kind of thinking, well, this is the Supreme Court really teasing up that E-rate is federal dollars. And that could be a little contradictory to the next case, which is, is the E-rate unconstitutional?
And so we are going to see exactly if these two cases are related or if there was any hints of how this one leads into the next one in the next few months.
Yeah, I this one I wasn't on my radar as much as the USF being unconstitutional, but I still was kind of surprised. And not only was it a favorable decision, it was a unanimous decision. So I think that bodes rather well as well. That was, I think, pretty surprising.
I feel I feel good like they took I don't how how's the order at which they take the e-rate cases how's that play out I
Don't know I don't know how they pick which one they take first
Like I feel good that this it makes you feel good like oh they this is paving the way and now they've invested I I guess I like that they invested so I can want to assume that the justices didn't know all about the the e-rate program going into this maybe maybe they've handled a bunch of e-rate cases i have no idea yeah uh so they've learned more about e-rate and how it works and what it is through this case yeah to set the stage of knowledge and
wisdom and better discernment for the bigger case that matters to us the most but
Again i don't i don't think it's as much about e-rate itself as the case law on the funds of that fund e-rate it's regardless of if e-rate does good things They don't care. That's not the point of this. The point is, is the funding one federal dollars like this case, or is it tax? So yeah, it'll be interesting to see it all play out. What else you got, Mark?
¶ Impacts of DOGE on CISA
Well, speaking of the protection of cybersecurity and funds and everything, the next kind of topic, and this is not necessarily a single issue or article, but more just kind of general what's going on in the news right now. We've got Doge that has been moving around different federal agencies. And it appears they have...
Is that the cryptocurrency?
Yes.
That and the Department of Government Efficiency. And the reason why I'm afraid to drive around in a Tesla right now. But anyways.
You have a Tesla?
No. His wife does.
Yeah. That's my neighbor's car. There's a lot of focus right now on where Doge is and where they're going. And it appears that they're starting to hit.
And who the administrator is.
And who the administrator is. And it appears that they're hitting up SZA right now. And so there's a lot of hubbub around what's going to be the future of SZA. And we've talked a lot about the resources that CISA has provided to K-12 and how important they are to our work. There's some good news if you look at how the Trump administration kind of played up CISA.
They've signaled during the campaign that they would like to see CISA focus more on critical infrastructure and protection of infrastructure, which is exactly what K-12 is looking for. And so you may see some changes coming to CISA around disinformation or election interference, because that's obviously a big part of CISA's work. So we're hoping that some of the cuts don't hit the K-12 side.
But if they do, we'd really like to make sure that the work that CISA has done for the K-12 world is protected as much as possible. So we'll see how that plays out in the next few weeks.
I think K-12 will continue to be part of the critical infrastructure, and the focus is protecting critical infrastructure, although the move a couple weeks ago to remove EII-SAC or the election infrastructure protection funding – rather odd. So it'll be interesting to see going forward how that alignment of priorities shakes out with SLTTs and which ones are going to give priority over others, or if it'll just be the whole group as a whole.
And then I saw today that they named a new executive assistant director. Is that right?
Yeah. Her name is Karen Evans. She actually comes from the Department of Energy. So I actually think that's a positive thing, right? She's coming from the Department of Energy. If you're not familiar with the work that CISA has done around protecting the energy industry, I think Karen Evans is going to be the one to say, hey, hold on a second. We've got to make sure that CISA is looking out for the critical infrastructure.
It goes back to that original kind of campaign promise of critical infrastructure.
And she was CISO at the Department of Energy, right?
Yes. she was also the CIO for Homeland Security so she's I mean she knows how important this stuff is so I'm hopeful that we'll see the important stuff protected and.
It's not her first time in a federal agency rodeo either it's not
Never.
Mind Josh you did a post on KTOL Tech Pro and it was actually about Department of Ed and the AI guidance being taken down but I think it speaks into this about the guidance that we're used to getting from CISA that might be changing or that we used to, we're used to getting it in the Department of Ed, if that's changing.
I mean, you posted about that. Some guidance got taken down and it, it went back to the many years ago or what's still always been is relying on others that are in the trenches along with you to help each other.
That, that post I found over on LinkedIn summed it up really well. I thought that, you know, really the Department of Ed didn't set curriculum, didn't set stuff like that to the local districts. They curated studies and they curated reports. And it's one of the reasons why that was good is because, you know, K-12 tech leaders, our heads are down. We're in the trenches. We're constantly busy.
We don't have time to survey the folks around us, the folks in the state, the folks in a regional state area. It was the Department of Education's responsibility to kind of do that for us. And we could say, OK, this is best practice or this is the study that they published. These are the statistics behind it. We can we can take actionable information from that. And we don't have to waste our time doing that study ourselves.
And that was like the great example of that is that AI guidance document that the Department of Edda had out that it's been wiped off the face of their website. Right. It's unfortunate, and I think what you're going to see is you're going to see schools or districts need to rely on other entities now, be that pro, be that K-12-6, whoever. There are going to have to be other entities that pick up that slack for issuing guidance, best practices, that kind of thing.
Yeah i think both of these is that and i i don't know that we even have to say this but if you're first time listening we don't get into the heavy political trenches of opinion or whatever we try to stay in the middle yeah so this is just i think factually if government moves to go smaller we're gonna have to figure out as a sk12 how to sustain ourselves and have access to good resources So an article like this or these news events happening, we need to figure out
and think through, what if E-rate goes away? What if CISA and MSI SEC funding changes or whatever? What if DOE guidance that we used to pull down all the time isn't there anymore? Those are important things to think about.
Yeah, yeah.
¶ Beeper Bans!
All right, next up on the docket, February 18th, last Tuesday, the LAUSD, the Los Angeles Unified School District, their cell phone ban finally went into effect.
Is that why you were in LA?
I was. I was expecting to make sure that there were no cell phones in use. No, so I wanted to add, we've talked about this before, but I wanted to go a little step further. The ban, they did leave it to local control. So they didn't say, here's how it's going to be put into effect. But they basically just say, as a district policy, you can't have a cell phone during school hours. Before or after is fine, but not during. But they left it up to schools as to how they're going to implement.
Either they use something like Yonder or just tell students, put it in your backpack. But something I thought was interesting, and I haven't heard this in other places, the ban also included smartwatches and earbuds.
Yes.
Which makes sense. Yeah, for sure. But it's not something you hear about as very often.
The Missouri one, if you're in Missouri, Senate Bill 68, I was reading through that today. It even references pagers.
I mean, we can make a Missouri joke here, right?
Yeah. It goes as far to ban them not only during the instruction, you know, start a day to end a day, but on field trips as well. Can you imagine trying to police that on a field trip?
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
Poor students in Missouri, you're not going to be able to use your pagers anymore, and you've got to focus on that alpha smart that's sitting right in front of you.
And poor teachers. You know, it comes down to enforcement, and all you're doing, it's not the state legislator that's going to be at the school saying, put your damn cell phone away. It's going to be the teachers in that fight.
The trip to Six Flags, and everybody has to pack their Chromebook with them for communication's sake. everyone stay in groups of three one of you must have your chromebook we're
Gonna be buying chromebooks with sell cards in them now
Well following their in their coattails or foot what i don't know what to go let me see if.
I can find
It uh illinois uh illinois their covenant did you.
Almost say almost
You guys are making fun of me because, back story here, the three of us were on a webinar for the state of Illinois. And I said, Illinois.
Yeah.
And the two of you stopped me to make fun of me.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, you have to.
Illinois, New York, Missouri are all following. It looks like they're going to be doing statewide bans. So, yeah, that's where we are on that one.
I'm trying to find the text of this real quick to read it to you guys it
Was somehow i fumbled upon you know in in in august of 23 that's when mousseries law about oh not driving and you know text and all that yeah yeah uh i just had someone this week say that they've never seen me like look up at them like after repeated times of waving at me while i'm driving well
Your car is driving
Yeah, I just, and I'm always, and I don't really text. I like, I mean, I remote into computers and. Oh, okay. I'm like doing real stuff.
Okay. Go ahead.
If you get pulled over and they're like, were you texting while driving? You can say, no, I was remoted into a server from my phone while driving. There's nothing on the law that says I can't do that.
That's a better story. For the purpose of this section, electronic personal communication device includes, but is not limited to the following.
Oh.
Cell phones. Paging devices. This next one. You're going to love this next one. Beepers.
I haven't heard that. I haven't heard that word in a long time.
Mobile telephones that offer advanced computing and internet accessibility.
Okay. Playing for the future.
Digital media players, which I'm assuming is a portable DVD player.
Does that mean I can't use my Microsoft Zune?
Yes. Oh.
I had one of those too, Mark. Portable game consoles. So don't bring your Steam Deck.
Okay.
See, this is where they're shooting themselves in the foot. Tablets, notebooks, or laptop computers. Really?
Six-flex trip. Like, what are we even doing?
How are you doing this? How are you banning this during the instructional hours if you're banning tablets, notebooks, and laptop computers? Digital cameras, digital video or audio recorders.
Hold on. Yes, you said that quick, and I was just thinking about field trips.
No, this is, yeah. smart watches and devices that can connect and transmit data through Bluetooth technology yep and I should have read up
Going back to my six flags scenario that's like doing the whole thing like hey guys meet here at the flagpole at 3pm yeah and you're just banking on all the kids to show up
Let's see such policy Yeah.
Listen, not to be outdone and allow Missouri to get all the credit for innovative laws banning beepers. Beepers. Maine is one of multiple states, but Maine is a representative who's introduced a law to require cursive to be taught in schools. Yeah.
I mean.
Let's bring that back.
Let's bring cursive back.
93, Jurassic Park, cursive.
Yep.
And beepers. Meet at the flagpole at 330.
I think I had a beeper in 93, actually.
Let's go back.
Yeah.
¶ Google’s MFA Changes
All right. And now, okay, we'll go. This is very timely because the last article on our news docket is that Google is making a pretty significant change to their MFA.
Oh, yeah. This is like, we just went back. Now we're hitting the pedal to the floor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now you don't have your beeper. you don't have your cell phone um.
Get my code to my beeper
Google will be uh moving to get rid of sms as a multi-factor two-factor authentication method right so they're gonna be getting rid of that if you have watched the news at all in the last six months you know that our telecom systems are completely shot and rippled with with issues so i'm not surprised uh that that we have our first kind of major provider saying we got to get off of sms mfa yeah great yeah um but yeah for those of us who
have all rolled out mfa and and primarily using sms as the protocol it's time to start all over again it's.
I'm really excited about it with my cooks and custodians
Yes there's not a bus drivers easy easy your bus drivers were easy complete ultimate sarcasm oh okay i'm gonna say There's not a week that goes by we don't have an employee from either transportation, food service, or maintenance in our office. Like, I can't get logged in. Okay. And we have employees in those departments that don't have smartphones. Like, they don't want a smartphone. They've got a flip phone, cricket, whatever, because some of them are older.
Yeah.
I don't know.
See, I thought this was, when I first read the article, I was like, okay, this is actually pretty smart. Google is introducing a QR code based system that users will scan. So I was thinking, oh, it's like a clever badge and the custodians could just wear the QR code around their.
No, it's the other way.
No, it's the other way. The QR code's on the screen and you got to use your cell phone to scan the badge.
Which I assume then that it has to be from a phone that you have that your Google account is defined on. Does that make sense? Okay.
So you're going to have to have your...
I'm going to start in my head.
You currently don't have to use the push notifications. It doesn't have to be Gmail. So you don't have to put Gmail on your phone. You could be signed into Google. But yes, you're going to have to have your Google account on the phone.
Put the Gmail app on your phone. Or just get the DM Authenticator app and be done with it.
Users will see a QR code on the screen. They'll take a picture. or they'll show it yeah yeah and the phone will send the sms to
Google and this is gonna blow the mind of all the people on the internet that are like don't scan qr codes yeah you know like that's
A whole new phishing thing we're in like yeah send in the pages of
The qr codes send me send me a fake qr code to make me scan it and then put in my password and yep yep
Or it or we can start giving out. It says Google recommends pass keys.
Well, you don't give out a pass key. That's an electronic thing.
What's my course of action for my bus drivers?
Do they have smartphones or they got beepers? That's the problem. They're making the assumption that everyone has a smartphone. You can't make that assumption.
We're just going to print out the backup codes.
Yeah yeah i still want to get the code on my motorola pager now
They didn't give timeline right we don't know timeline that's good
I don't think it said timeline no no
No we don't i think i mean if you if you looked at some of the progress that google's made and in office 365 in onboarding people to using mfa it's gotten a lot better it's got a lot of more, self-service uh so if you set up a a new account um you're you're taken through the steps to set up mfa so i think this will be a whole lot more hands-off from our perspective than the first time we rolled out mfa but yeah uh it's gonna
be something that is to communicate and we're gonna we're gonna have to receive the complaints it's.
Change like it right yeah All right, Chris, hit our next sponsor. Is it a pager, a beeper sponsor?
Kind of, but a lot better. Check out SaferWatch app that you might not be able to use if this law passes, but SaferWatchApp.com. They can help you with your key safety features for your school district, anonymous tip reporting, threat reporting, incident management, drill tracking, threat assessment. They can do your mobile panic alert system, mass notification, reunification, safety check-in, and more. It's all packaged in their Slick app.
I think in like two weeks-ish, we're going to do an interview with a SaferWatch customer to unpack how it's working in their school district a little bit more. So check out SaferWatchApp.com.
All right. On to our main topic. We actually have a listener email this week.
¶ Data Breach Liability Discussion
Chris, you want to intro?
Yeah, this came in pretty cool from listener Jim. He was preparing for a presentation on data security and came across something that he hasn't heard discussed on here. And that's this personal data, a user kept on a school device, including their home folder on a server. So school district employee does personal work. It's on server.
It's on computer over the years. And we've experienced this, I think he's found prepared tax statements, divorce proceedings, credit card and bank statements and more. So the question is this. If his district suffers a data breach, are we responsible for the data loss of those things that are like unrelated to school business? Is that different from those that we currently have in place?
you know at what point we've talked about this a little bit should we be abandoning that data getting rid of it how long should we keep that data what say you guys
This is a that's good I could see it go both ways really yes I can we've seen stuff like that stuff that should absolutely not be on school drives 100% we've seen it and we've had to have of that difficult conversation, and it turned out one of the people, well, I don't have a personal email account. Oh, my God. We'll help you do that. Like, we'll get you a Gmail account. Jeez. Are we asking, like, where does the liability lie? Is that what we're asking?
Yeah, I think a fun question is a high school counselor that does... sells Avon on the side and has a bunch of credit card information on her computer. Uh, that computer gets hacked and all that credit card stuff gets stolen. Um, who's responsible for letting people know, like, does the school have a stake in that?
Do people still sell Avon? I guess I'm talking to the state that's outlawing beepers.
But Avon is huge in Missouri.
Or the, even, even stick to the, uh, like the divorce stuff or the tax stuff.
Yeah.
Teacher has her tax stuff, social security numbers of her kids and whatever on her computer. Computer gets hacked. Yeah. That stuff's leaked. And that's not your student's social, you know.
Well, and I think the important thing here is it's data that is on a device not due to the normal operation of the district. And I think that's kind of, Maybe that would be kind of where it lies. It's I don't know. I could see it go both ways. Honestly, I can see the argument for the district would have no liability to protect that lady's kids social security numbers if they didn't go to the school. But I could also see, yes, they do have a liability in it.
I don't know. What do you think, Chris?
I've i've had a teacher with the argument of they did all their personal stuff with our account because we're the most secure environment that they have access to huh and that i feel like thank you i still wish you wouldn't sell your avon there is a school supplied email account she's
Using a school beeper too
Yeah she's beeping it up that's how she walks the order outside gives that good lotion I don't know it's a weird spot do you report that you're gonna send a letter home That Avon orders for the past five years got leaked?
Yeah. I mean, could you, could you, like, you might, you might, that could be a really difficult conversation. Why are we getting this breach notice from the school, Jimmy? Well, I was buying Amazon from Miss Smith or Avon from Miss Smith. Yeah.
Mark, hold your answer. Mark's answer is brought to you by Visor. That's V-I-Z-O-R, a great tool for managing your district's devices and help desk tickets. They have a new customer in our neck of the woods, Stratford in Missouri. They've been using Visor for a while. They think it's fantastic. They say it is, quote, super efficient, and it's really helped out their help desk. They said it's, quote, a complete 180 change.
So the Visor did a case study with them. We'll put a link in the podcast description to them. you can check out visor at visor.cloud slash k12 tech talk mark
Before you got the right answer mark what were you thinking
I think it was aligned with what you were you were discussing josh that.
You could see both sides of the argument
I could see i could definitely see both sides of the argument i've i mean i definitely have people who um use their work email for personal purposes um, I was just on a conference call before we started with somebody who works in my previous district. And while I'm in the waiting room, I was like, I recognize that message. I'm in a district Zoom call. So, yeah, I think there's a reasonable assumption that people do use their work technology for personal usage.
I spoke with a data privacy lawyer on this one. Oh. The very first thing to say is we're not lawyers, and this is not official legal advice, and we are not to give you legal advice, and you need to speak with your lawyer.
You take all the fun out of it. I do.
I do. No, I'm going to give you an answer. And the reason, though, is that, unfortunately, depending on what country and what state you're on, things are really, really different.
We have beepers. Our state has beepers. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It may apply to beepers. it may apply to smartphones or something like that. But anyways, there hasn't been a significant court case on this, but I'm going to read you the most relevant court case, and I'm going to emphasize a particular statement in here.
Josh, did you do homework like this?
No. He's gunning for a tip. Are tips still taxed right now? He's wanting a tax-free tip is what he's wanting.
I will give you my Venmo or my Beeper account.
You know i'm thinking about this beepers were just early text messaging that's all it was except it wasn't back and forth until the what was it the sidekick phone that you could flip it around like beepers were just one-way text messaging okay
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center was sued after a cyber attack led to employee data being compromised and used to file a whole bunch of fake tax returns.
Okay.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the information that was leaked and used to file fake tax returns was required to be collected as a condition of their employment. Therefore, UPMC, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was liable for all damages.
Sure.
Key phrase in that yes the data that was required to be collected as a condition of their employment yes okay the advice that i received was in the event that an employee uploads personal information to a company device or cloud storage or any sort of company system under their own free will yeah it would be difficult if not unlikely for a court to find the employer liable for that data as long as that data was not required for the employee's job responsibilities.
So in the example that Chris mentioned, the Avon documentation and tax return, that has nothing to do with the school district. The school district was not providing your computer or your cloud storage, your Google Drive for that Avon business. It would be very hard for a court to take a case up against the school district for liability. There are some questions to consider though, but I'm going to let you respond first.
Okay, so completely agree. However, I think there's a little bit of space for an argument if during discovery that it's deemed that the district wasn't taking reasonable security, and you guys can't see me doing finger quotes, but if it could be proven that the district didn't take reasonable precautions to protect the data, regardless of who owned the data and who uploaded it you i feel like you could
argue that there was there would be some liability there regardless of where the data came from
Chris yeah i and we're almost digging in to a whole other topic probably but like if the tech department was aware I think it could be could get different quickly if the tech department was aware that they had that data and didn't and they didn't remove it. Yeah, I think you could even have a little bit of banter about why did you keep that? If it's if it's a person that left, why did you that the whole power school thing for 15 years? We keep the data for 20 years, whatever.
At what point does the district have some responsibility that we should have been cleaning up data? Like, why did we keep the teacher's divorce paperwork for five years or 10 years after they left?
Yeah.
I think there's some curious questions to that that you could banter about.
Now, there's a few questions or a few things to consider, which helps to make this a little clearer. So if you're in this position and you're like, great, I'm not liable, there's three things to consider. The first is, does the company, or in this case, the school district, when you give out a laptop to a teacher or issue them their Google account, do you explicitly state the purpose of this technology?
In other words, do you say, here's your Google Drive, this is for you to keep track of your lessons. That obviously helps to narrow down the focus. And so if somebody uses it for outside of that explicitly stated purpose that's on there, that could be perceived as not a responsibility to the district.
And you would need to be able to prove that that statement was made.
Well, the other one, going along the same lines, does the company policy prohibit the usage of company technology for personal files. That makes it even clearer that you are actually going against a company policy by using it. And then the third is if it's a no to both of those, another thing is, does the company actively promote or discourage this behavior?
So in other words, let's say that you'd explicitly say you can't use your technology for your tax returns or this is what it's for, but you were aware that it was happening, did you do anything or did you take any steps to discourage that? So if somebody comes to, or if you are made aware that a teacher is storing their personal files in their drive, it's in your best interest. It's in your district's best interest to remind that teacher that that's not the purpose of those tools.
Or just delete the file.
Delete the file, whatever. But you are taking steps to remind the employee of the purpose for that technology. So that was kind of the general advice. The comparison, which I thought was a beautiful comparison, and this is a scenario that comes up so much in schools. avon what no believe it or not was not avon or cutco knives or whatever you guys still do out in missouri we do.
Cutco too cutco is huge in missouri it is it really is what's
The truck that pulls up and sells the tools to
Snap on
Snap yeah what's.
His name that we have we have a friend or a former co-worker that left k-12 tech to go sell snap-on tools all right mark what's your
Beautiful the beautiful comparison bruce yes if a teacher takes a student home in their personal car and they get into a car accident oh god the student is injured yeah.
It's yeah that's bad
It's it's obviously bad but it's does the district prohibit that behavior or did they tell the teacher to do it did they encourage the teacher to take the student home or did the teacher do that against district policy they did on their own free will that's hard generally i i think people teachers would understand that they're personally liable if they do that on their own you could you could apply that same logic to a teacher uploading personal data to their technology district technology,
So, listener Jim, talk to your lawyer.
Yeah, get out of here, Jim. Don't email again.
But it was a really quick thing you could do. Check your policies. If you have an opportunity to refine your district's policy, maybe you can just put a line in there that says, this is what the purpose of our technology is for, or here's what not to use it for.
Or just start deleting all the divorce decrees that you find.
Fitting Managed Methods is a proud sponsor for the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, and they can plug into your Microsoft and into your Google, and they can see if you got credit card numbers floating around and social security numbers and passwords and different things for your staff or your students, and they can automate some of the decisions that you want to make based upon that, too. I have another application that I use.
I try to. Sometimes I suck, but it scans like three computers a moth and gives a dollar amount of what that computer might be worth if it were physically stolen. And it's looking for pie information and stuff. And sometimes we are very disappointed in the findings. All those Avon orders. i did have i did have a uh a school secretary selling avon through her school email that's a true story i
Told you yeah story that cone knives and aim and avon come to missouri all right
And she was offended when we talked about not doing that yep wow it's fine did she have a pink cadillac no she didn't get that far I stopped it before the pink cadillac that's
Unfortunate she had to move to pagers and beepers
While you guys are talking, I'm putting on my Avon Zoom filters here.
You are. I just know you have orange lipstick.
I was wondering what was happening.
That's a nice look, Mark.
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to click this button that says apply to all future meetings and just spice up the next week.
That is spicy. Yep, I got to pick guys. I'll be sharing that. I'm X. No worries about this audio only podcast.
Yeah that whoo mark all right
All right we're stopping this here.
¶ Upcoming Events in K-12 Tech
Uh all right so if you uh that was episode 203 hit us oh you got another one
Yeah well i just want to talk about we got some events coming up so next week we got midwest tech talk security symposium uh mark will be there fortinet a proud sponsor the k12 tech talk podcast will be there uh they're actually doing our uh thursday afternoon workshops a forti gate deep dive on best practices with our friend chris over there uh and then in what's next we got the massachusetts conference coming up right mark you're gonna maybe show up there a little bit yep meta allah and
then we'll be heading to cosen seattle at the end of march uh should be a good time there as well hope to see you guys there
In indiana in may
Oh yes and then we actually random we're sending hayden the new guy to the mo asbo conference at lake of the ozarks in the middle of april you can tell your superintendents to check out k2 tech pro down there and then april 30th through may 2nd all three of us will be in indiana at the cto clinic we're doing an episode we're doing the keynote we're presenting as well. That should be a great time.
All right. Well, if you were in high school in the 90s and had a pager like I did, shoot us an email, k12techtalk at gmail.com. Let me know that I'm not the only oldie in the crowd. Yeah, Chris, I guess by the time you guys got to high school, pagers weren't a thing.
No, we had like the phone in the bag.
Yeah.
My dad had a pager.
Did he? Yeah. Yeah.
That was about it. Like my dad's cool pager.
No. No?
No, no pager.
All right.
And we had nighttime minutes.
Oh, yeah. That was, yeah. Night, yeah.
Weekend minutes.
Yep. Had to go sit in the car at nine o'clock at night and talk to your friends. Yep.
Yep.
All right, guys. Thanks for reminiscing with me, making me feel old. We will see you next week. Thanks for listening.
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 and information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.