¶ Intro / Opening
What happened to your voice there, Mark?
¶ Intro
You just hit puberty right there.
Clip it.
On tonight's episode of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, once again, we try to handle the tariffs conversation and its impact on K-12 technology. Before talking about sticky situation of individual teacher requests for software and hardware, how do you handle it, and what are some strategies you can use in your district? Thanks for listening.
Live from the ntp studios this is the k12 tech talk podcast episode 210 i saw david today chris i had lunch nice david didn't eat with us he gave a spiel and said josh can tell you about what he uses and i've
Heard him say that like 10 times.
Yeah and
David's a talker but he yields to you.
Yeah, which is weird. And I made that joke too. I'm like, I, cause I was given a trouble about, you know, he can only talk for five minutes and he, I said, uh, something about that's funny coming from me. He goes, yeah, I'm going to make you talk. So yeah, he made me talk.
I've seen presentations from David and I got to say, Josh, you have been a better advertiser for NTP than, than just in like you, you'll randomly text us of like, Oh, I just got this alert. And then like your day is ruined.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a great, it's a great way to ruin a day.
David's like, I'm supposed to talk about my stuff, but let's talk about bourbon.
That's exactly, that's exactly the conversation with David. He didn't talk about bourbon today.
He was good at hands. Who enjoys a fine bourbon? He says. Yeah.
And then that's where the conversation goes.
¶ New Security Watch Newsletter
Yeah.
Well, speaking, speaking of NTP, we have this new security watch newsletter on K2 Tech Pro that they help put out every week. So this week's comes out tomorrow, which what's the date? It'll be 4-18 tomorrow. And one of the main or one of the things that's on here that I found interesting was they give some information about something that affected their sock recently. Amateur attackers using AI and instead of being like sophisticated, they're just using like that 7-zip program.
Yeah. to try to do some stuff and to go after some ransomware. Highlighting, they said, the less skilled are now going to get into ransomware because AI helps with that.
Natural progression.
Get on Security Watch on K12 Tech Pro. We do post that on the K12 SysAdmin subreddit as well, just like the public side information.
Yeah, and if you're wanting Sentinel-1 EDR managed by 24-7 SOC, Uh, that's where you need to go. D D R N W R E N at N T P dash ink.com. I told you guys about, I had multiple alerts from the sock. Was it last week or a week before? Did we talk about that? Okay.
Yeah. You freaked out.
Yeah. We had sirens, lights, we went running and I, I don't run.
You, you raised the alarm and then you're like, Oh, it was a teacher on teachers pay teachers.
Yes. And you know what? I told that story at the meeting today and I let up, you know, it was, I got an alert data exfiltration site, yada, yada, yada. And I said, it was a teacher trying to download a file from, and I, you know, kind of raised my hands like the, I wanted the room to make guesses. Yes. Everybody at once goes, teachers pay teachers. I'm like, yes.
There was that years ago, all the Missouri athletic directors had a particular site they would use.
Yes.
And it would deliver a random pop-up that was malicious.
Yes.
So all the ADs would get infected on the same day. Yes.
Do you guys remember WhiteHouse.gov versus WhiteHouse.com? Yes.
I was working at a computer store when that happened. Yeah.
Oh, man. If only we knew that in 2025, WhiteHouse.gov would be so much more explicit and dangerous than WhiteHouse.com.
¶ Google Lawsuit Overview
Yeah. Let's move on. Chris Marv. mark what news you got
All right um i feel like we get another article every day your
Voice there mark
I don't know somebody maybe she said puberty right there um
Clip it no that stays
Some california parents have decided to sue google alleging that it is tracking students uh the reason i thought this was very significant is over the last couple of years i've seen more and more announcements coming out of Google pushing liability and pushing the consent for different apps over to districts. Well, a group of parents, some from California, even Utah and I believe Washington or Oregon, are suing Google saying, no, you're still tracking students.
You have data that has basically been fingerprinted. And allows you guys to sell the data to advertisers or reuse the data to to sell the districts. And it's against federal privacy laws. So, you know, it's there's a whole lot of like unknowns within this whole thing.
But I just thought there was a very significant one because I have at least seen more and more of the quote unquote liability of usage of Google services for students on the age of 13 over the last couple of years being pushed back down to the districts for us to consent to using these things.
Or us to, let me rephrase that. Google is going out of their way to make sure that districts are acknowledging, at least, their responsibility to collect parent consent for Google Apps, third party, outside the core G Suite, Google Workspace environment, which, hell, that deadline was what? Beginning of this month? Beginning of last month?
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah. In the console that you had to accept that?
Yeah.
We had that boilerplate letter that they came up with, that template they came up with. We've had that in our online registration that parents have to do every year, and they have to click, yes, I've read this, and I accept this agreement. Yeah. So that's one easy way to do it.
It's interesting i i do feel like it while google could be an easy target um i think it's the right thing to do is to to just have districts being able to consent and being able to say yes we're rolling these applications out we acknowledge that this is our responsibility or liability but i do agree that there's another side of it where where there's a big giant conglomerate that has all kinds of student data in it we want to make sure that they're protecting it uh even though
the districts are consenting to it.
Well, and I come down along the line of the more transparency, the better. And if you're able, you know, our DPA website is public and that lists the sites that we're using and that we have agreements with. So anybody can hit that and see what we're using. The better the transparent or the more the transparency, the better, I think.
Yeah we are 11 years into one-to-one and we've always required like consent to issue a device consent to give a google account and we talk about the third-party apps yeah and i've wondered if if again that's 11 years but i think a lot of schools maybe i mean like and maybe even in this californian case like were the parents asked um hey can you make your kid a google account uh i don't know do all i well on k12 tech pro there was some conversation this
week about what are the sentences used uh to talk to parents, about these accounts. So yeah, there's some real stuff there. If a school district isn't letting a parent know, here's what we're using, is this okay? There's probably some ground to stand on if that's right or not, whether or not Google is using that data.
Yeah, that's not a lawsuit with Google. That's a conversation with the district. And if Google's doing this, yeah, absolutely, sue their pants off.
um i it we when we originally went one-to-one it the consent from a parent was more along the lines of yes i understand you're handing my kid a 300 device and i am if they damage it i'm responsible that that was more the agreement early on and we just happened to come across that that template from google and we included it it privacy and transparency wasn't the first thought the first thought was liability for the device.
¶ Tariffs and Electronics Update
Well, man, every week we're going to do another tariff article.
Let's go. This article is probably old already. It is.
You know what? It's probably more than 24 hours old, so I apologize that it's already bad and outdated. But last week, Josh, you were talking about your Chromebook quotes.
Yep. I have an update. I have an update.
You had gotten a quote and the supplier rescinded that quote and said it's no longer valid well over the weekend the white house came out and said that uh the tariffs are now exempt from electronics not gaming consoles though that's i was gonna get to that one so consumer devices laptops all those kinds of things coming from china are exempt from the the chinese tariffs uh with the exception of the nintendo switch so that one still we don't know what's going to happen there.
But hopefully, hopefully we'll start to get a little bit of stability. Although midway through the week, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick came out and said, Don't get too comfortable. This is a temporary reprieve. This is only going to be for a couple of months, maybe a month or two. And it will basically be a semiconductor product type tariff that will come back. So who knows what to do? Who knows? If you're wondering, should I make that purchase or not?
Get it done.
Just press the button.
Yeah, just there's nothing else to say.
Okay, so got an email over the weekend when that statement was made, electronics are excluded. I got an email from the manufacturer, the regional rep saying, hey, don't know if you saw this, but we'll talk Monday. First thing Monday morning, I had a call from the manufacturer area representative. Yep, we're going to honor the original quote.
And he did say when the tariffs were still enforced, whatever, you know, 12 hours earlier, they were expecting their price to go up about 10% of what my original quote was, which kind of gives you an idea of how much money or how much they're padding on those quotes anyway. But he said, we're able to honor your original quote. Go ahead. You're free to process the PO. So, Monday night at like 5 o'clock, I'm at work getting the PO processed. My CFO approved it. We got it sent.
Got the reseller, got him on the phone, like shipped those damn things. So, yesterday had a conference call with the White Glove service. They have our devices. I'm getting my devices at the original cost. You poor suckers that are waiting. I feel bad for you. I really like so many phone calls, so many. Yeah.
Well, because you had that round where you did press the button. Yeah. Like the button didn't work. Yeah.
And we were working with the reseller to buy other... another manufacturer's product on a contract so that we didn't have to go back out to rfp because this was a whole rfp you know month and a half long process um so we were ready to push the second button when we were told okay the first button is working again so um
Yeah well not not k12 tech but so my son chase he wants that nintendo switch that's coming and i do i do too to be honest and we we.
We're gonna make him buy it right
Well i i kind of just told him we might buy two oh my god and i don't i don't really even play i just think like i'm gonna get this thing when it's new and i'm gonna become a video gamer but anyway so i've been talking to him about tariffs because like i was like hey we're gonna buy it like let's and he's gonna buy his own right he's got a job and stuff hey we're gonna buy them oh chase there's tariffs we're not gonna be able to buy them and then i'm like hey chase i
literally called him like he's in his room playing video games with his headset i'm like chase uh they they retracted it we can buy him he's excited and like the next day was like hey man uh video games are are not being excluded and then i tried to tell him because there's been this something about the switches are getting moved to vietnam so they can come in differently at a different tariff rate so who knows man.
So you tried to explain that tariffs are a good thing somehow.
I have not explained any tariffs. I've just explained what's happening. Hey, also random with – I'm trying to think how I can even fit this in. So Chromebookparts.com. They're not even sponsoring this episode. But talking about devices made me think of this. And I'm holding it.
The toolkit?
No. So Shane with Chromebookparts.com, I got a package today, and it's syrup that he made. Shane's from Wisconsin, and I don't know how many Vermont folks we have listening, but he thinks Wisconsin syrup is better than Vermont's. And I haven't tried this yet. And Josh, I do have a second bottle. Sorry, Mark. Josh is close to me. I'm going to give him the second bottle.
I will not eat anything with syrup from outside New England. So you can keep your cheesy Wisconsin cheese syrup right there.
Cheese-based syrup.
Yeah. I'm really excited about it. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty excited about it. So my wife, Stephanie, she thought this came from a listener, and she was expressing concerns to me.
We had that listener that wants to send me bourbon, and I'd drink it.
Uh would would we drink hey mark well well this is good this can should this segue now to this topic.
I yeah we might as well we'll come back to the news in a second but josh this is our surprise survey here this
Wasn't on purpose but let's go.
So before he came on chris shows his syrup and then there was this conversation around like do you eat syrup or eat food products given to you by uh somebody at school a student or something like that and then chris and i went And on a whole tangent, we even had to ask our wives, what do we do? Because they're both working in schools. So our survey listener email for the week is, Josh, do you eat food products brought into school by students or staff members?
If they're store-bought, yeah, no question.
But no homemade products?
I've had staff members bring me homemade cookies. I'll eat those. Yeah, no question.
Okay.
Lunch? Anything? Where's your threshold?
I'm sensing a threshold here. The facts class.
¶ Food in Schools
Oh, hell yeah. I'm eating that. I've done that. The high school, they make pasta. Yeah. I've been in there when they made cinnamon rolls. Hell yeah.
What'd you call it? Facts class?
Facts. Family and consumer science.
Is that just like modern day home ec?
Yeah. Yes.
Or is that a Missouri thing?
I don't know. I don't know if that's a Missouri thing or not. I don't know. F-A-C-S.
So you go for the home ec food, though?
Oh, yeah.
Because it's produced in your food.
It smells really, really good.
I mean, I knew teachers who would not eat anything from the home. But I will say our school, my elementary school where I taught, we had an international night. And families would bring in a dish from their home country. And we had a very, very diverse population. It was my absolute favorite. Yeah. And you'd have food from every country in the world. And it was the best. Because parents would bring in their best dish.
Sure.
It was so, so good. And then there are teachers, like, they would start off like, oh, I don't know, I don't eat food from kids' homes. No. After one night, they're like, this is, I'm not missing out on this one.
Yeah, you know, it's one of those, like, it's hard to get sick from mac and cheese brought from home. You know, like a good mac and cheese, there's not much better. But, like, chicken, that chicken better be cooked.
I mean, yeah, I would encourage you not to eat raw chicken from home. Yeah. from anybody's home.
Sure. Yes.
Yeah.
I don't know. Yeah, I'm getting texts from the producer. Blue Box Mac and Cheese is the best mac and cheese. But, you know, when there's a good homemade where they make the roux and get it, you know, real homemade mac and cheese, that stuff's good.
So your threshold is more of a, like, the moving target. Okay.
There's no rubric here, really.
No, not at all.
It's based upon feeling and gut.
Yep, exactly.
Trevor in my tech office, he brings in some mean cookies that come from his wife. And then Matt in the office, Matt makes his own food, and he makes like some great cookies and some great cheesecake. And I just, I enjoy the banter back and forth. I consume that thing up.
I would think it'd have to be, it'd be difficult to get sick from cookies. Like, I think that's a pretty safe thing.
So I asked when Mark and I were bantering before you jumped on, I asked Stephanie, who is a elementary school nurse. And actually, she's middle school and high school now. Very, I'd say, conservative approach to most things. You know, she's a nurse. She gets on to me because I don't wash my hands well and all the things. So I asked her, like, does she eat the food? Right?
I'm going to say Stephanie probably doesn't. Eat the food.
I typed this out. Here's the quote. You ready?
Oh.
She said, I eat it. I try to not think about it. I just go for it. She said, chicken alfredo. She did it. Baked Alaska. Done.
Baked Alaska's cake and ice cream.
Oh, well. So she's in.
Okay.
Color me surprised.
My wife was kind of the same response. Although I was not allowed to talk about her exact response on the podcast. oh
Really did she
Cuss or something genre no no she had a lot of caveats it was a good 10 minute conversation
It was like if this student then no yeah.
No i know a lot of teachers that that depending on on the family yes
Yeah like i had an aunt uh this is great this is great story i i had an aunt juanita uh great aunt uh but when she came like to easter uh dinner we'd all kind of talk about which dish was aunt Juanita's dish. Cause we might, we might jump over it.
Oh yeah.
No, Anyway, I'm going to have me some pancakes tonight, probably.
It's nine o'clock.
It's Easter weekend, bro. God.
Should we wrap up the news here?
Yeah.
Where are we?
News.
We talked a couple of episodes ago about our predictions for the Department of Education. Well, sure enough, Senator Mike Rounds from South Dakota has reintroduced a bill that he actually came to the table with this about a year ago to abolish the Department of Education and reintroducing it. We're starting to see some details of what would happen. And yes, a lot of things will be moving to other departments. We've got the Department of Defense would be taking on certain functions.
Department of the Interior would be taking on functions. Health and Human Services is taking on a number of roles. Interesting, though, the one I wanted to hear about was FERPA. And there's really just an acknowledgement that it would move to another department, but there's not an acknowledgement of what that department would be. But I do see things like the Civil Rights Division would move into the Department of Justice. So I would imagine that you're going to see FERPA.
The proposal will be to move FERPA to the Department of Justice as well. So we're kind of spot on with our predictions, although this is a bill that's been around for a little bit of time. We will see what will happen. The most important question is when. And this bill states one year from the time it is enacted. So, you know, things move very, very rapidly right now in the government. But should this bill make it to the House floor and be passed?
We're talking about a few weeks, maybe a couple of months for it to even be introduced and then a year for the department to actually be dismantled.
Then it would have to travel through the Senate, and then you're just calendar-wise, you're at midterms, and depending on the outcome of midterm elections— priorities could completely change as far as legislature goes.
Yeah, yeah. So you know, lots of things that are up in the air, but this is moving. This is starting to be put into writing and that writing will start to make its way to the House.
I wonder if we'll start seeing states introduce their own things in anticipation for this to happen.
Oh, the number of lawsuits is already stacked up of people counter lawsuits suing the department or the Trump administration for this. So, yeah, this will be a very highly contested thing.
But legal outcomes don't matter, so.
Oof.
Speaking of things that move, Lightspeed Signal, Lightspeed, a proud sponsor of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast. They built Signal. This is a newer product, built it for K-12 IT.
Is that what the Department of Defense was using?
Signal? Probably. Probably. They can monitor device health, help you out with your device model, battery health, storage usage, all that stuff, help you with your device inventory, help you know what devices are being used by non-rostered users, VPN stuff, all that kind of thing. Check out lightspeedsystems.com slash products slash lightspeedsignal, and I'll put that in the podcast description too.
Don't share warplanes and signal, though.
Use WhatsApp for that. Yes.
That way, Facebook gets it.
I like WhatsApp. I'm going to stick around on it. I'm not on Signal.
I like Signal better. All right, Mark. Is that it? What else you got? Anything?
That's all I got for the news. Yep.
All right.
¶ Teacher Requests for Technology
Chris, you had an interesting conversation this week.
Yeah, so what?
With me?
Sure, buddy. This week, I, well, like yesterday, I drank two ghost energy drinks pretty much because I was wiped. And I actually crashed really hard around 5, 6 p.m. Two ghost energy drinks, you shouldn't do it. But here's the why. Um, I'm in the midst of planning for the next school year. Uh, and traditionally I go around to each of my buildings. I have a meeting with each of my building principals and sometimes their assistant principals.
And I pulled our technology plan down and the rotation plan down. And we talk about all things, technology that are on the list. Uh, I've talked to the tech department prior to this, these meetings as well. So we might have some curveball ideas. And I anticipate that the principals are going to have some new things for me as well. So I did all my meetings this week. And it was a lot and it was heavy. And I have my chicken scratch of everything that we're going to do over summer.
But it brought about some curious feedback from the principals or requests that I thought I might hit you guys up with a little bit. So one in particular was with wanting, I think I got probably three questions. Here's the first one. We give teachers laptops. We give paraprofessionals Chromebooks. We give office staff desktops. And there's kind of like a rhyme and a reason on who gets what kind of device.
should we do that still is it okay if I give a para a laptop and everybody else has a Chromebook, I guess I'm kind of asking what you guys have done in the past what do you think is best practice all that kind of vibe because basically I had a principal give me a use case on why this particular, paraprofessional should have different equipment a different device than everyone else in that role in the district Perfect.
Mark, why don't you go first?
I mean, we're in a different position. We were, as a district of our size, I was not able to have these one-on-one conversations with principals. But we would always get requests for specific accommodations or individual types of computers for different people for different reasons. I tried as much as I could to keep the conversation about the program.
So if I had somebody who says, I need a different computer than everybody else because I'm teaching computer science, we would then turn the conversation and say, okay, tell us about the program that you're doing and is it appropriate for that program to have this laptop, not necessarily you as the individual.
If we did get individual requests for computers because of maybe I need a bigger screen or I need more RAM, that kind of stuff, we had an office that would handle employee accommodations, and I would always turn it to that office to say, I cannot give out individual accommodations. It's not appropriate for me to give out any sort of individual requests or accommodations based on needs. This particular office, you're going to have to go to them and they're going to have to evaluate the need.
And then they will direct us if a different device or computer is needed. It was not necessarily us pushing off the decision, but it was more keeping us out of the liability of playing favoritism or giving one person a computer just because they had the ability to ask and the know-all to ask the right person. So, yeah, we just took that decision out of our office.
Do you feel like for the most part, teacher got X device, para got Y device? was it that kind of vibe or was it not.
Yeah yeah we we did teachers would uh our district was a teacher's uh get macbooks uh and then there's sorry uh pairs were on chromebooks uh that did change in the last teacher's contract the union did negotiate the paraprofessional computer for a specific subset of paraprofessionals who were in a program that required an additional computer So, again, that was based on the program that these paras were teaching in, and they were administering assessments that required a different device.
Okay.
But, again, I still had plenty of people come to me and say, well, once in a while I volunteer in this class, therefore I need that computer. I said, I can't. I've got to go by job code. So that's how we handled it.
Josh. Yeah, I would agree with you, Mark. If you're if you're saying teacher gets B device and paras get C device, you have to stick with that unless you have an overwhelming reason not to, you know, doctor's no disability issues, something like that. We do it a little different. Our teachers have both a desktop computer in their classroom, plus we've given them a Chromebook. The adoption rate, the usage rate is hit or miss on the Chromebook.
You know, it's a Chromebook. It's not a full-fledged Windows laptop. You know, so the issues that come with that are still there. We do not give Paras devices. Um, and it's the stance that, you know, the, the pair is responsibility really shouldn't put them on a device. The, the parent, the pair is responsibility is to assist the student not be on a device. Um, now with that said, there are some principles that pull from their one-to-one pile and, and let pairs use a student device.
Um, but from a, from a district perspective, of the district purchasing devices for paras, that doesn't happen in my district.
Yeah, we did not give paras devices for years and years and years and years. And just in recent years, we, at a district level, decisions were made to change that. And that's been this interesting thing because, again, you both have said it. It's about the role. It's about the responsibility. I had a superintendent once that said, like, we had secretaries that wanted laptops. And he said we are not because they wanted to go home and do work.
And he said we are not giving it's not about I don't trust the secretary. The secretary is not deserving of that blah blah blah blah blah. It's about that secretary. has a timeframe at which they work every day and they shouldn't have a device at home to be put into that spot. And it was the same for years and years. The stance on Paris was they shouldn't be asked to make a lesson plan.
They shouldn't be asked to be doing research on a Chromebook because that's beyond the scope of what they're hired to do.
Well, and technically billable hours, like should be, she, they should be getting paid for that time. And places have gotten in trouble for that.
We had that question around uh secretaries and uh nurses they had desktop computers and they wanted to you know some people wanted laptops the problem that we had is that those are positions that have to be staffed at all hours of the day yeah so when a secretary and nurse is out if their laptop is with them then the office is down and the nurse's office is down so that was one of the things that we just had to stick with desktops for those locations so
that the functionality could operate at all times. But I do hear that, you know, the challenge of they wanted to bring the work with them. They wanted to go to PD and take notes on a laptop. They wanted to go to a, you know, take a virtual course from a private office, that kind of stuff. So it's a problem, but I see both sides of it.
And all of those requests to me make sense.
They're great. Those are beautiful requests. Those are great staff.
And Mark, really, to your point of, you know, the nurses having a laptop and those positions, those rooms that they're in, those job duties need to continue to function if that person's out or at a meeting or I have the same kind of feeling about teachers having a laptop as their only device. And my wife's an example of that. If she's not at school or. there's not a device in that room when the sub walks in.
So there's, there's a, then a scramble for another, another device to fill that if they're trying to watch a YouTube video on the projector, you know, something, something along those lines. And I think that's a resource that you have to plan for. If the idea is we're going to cut down our device count by everybody going with a laptop instead of desktop Chromebook, you're still going to have to have those extra devices around for their substitutes or, you know, I don't know.
It's, it's a lot of planning.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Question number two. This one's brought to you by class link, classic.com. They can strengthen your access and cybersecurity, protect student data and privacy, help you with your identity management and more. Check out class link.com. So I had a request, um, and Mark maybe kind of touched on this.
um i had a request for the device so issuing a laptop to a person and they have a lot of movement in and out of classrooms um and they would like a thinner device than what everyone else gets uh what say you i think mark you would say you kick it to that department but what or maybe you you'd nip it earlier but what what say you to you guys about a custom device for a reason of mobility but already having mobility kind of thing no.
If it's not some extenuating circumstance of either, you know, a physical disability or physical limitation, you're getting the same device that everybody else is getting. You're not getting the MacBook Air instead of the MacBook Pro. Sorry.
Yeah, we would get those requests from time to time. Sometimes it was the employee needed an accommodation because of the wait and they needed, you know, they couldn't bring the laptop back and forth. My proposed solution, again, going back to what you said, Chris, I didn't make that decision. That was the accommodations office who would handle that.
But one of the things I proposed as much as I could was, you know, a docking station monitor with a with a plug in for for either a dock, an actual docking station or just a plug in for that employee is a much better approach because then the employee is bringing on bringing the laptop with them and all the files. and we're not worried about some files being on the computer at home and some files being here and there and stuff.
All of our computers, we did try to standardize on the lighter models anyways, but sometimes the accommodation of needing multiple laptops in multiple locations was hard, and that's where we would always push for. A docking station is a much better approach if you needed mobility or you needed a larger screen rather than multiple computers. It was much more cost-effective, and it was honestly a better approach. But again, that was a recommendation I gave to the accommodations office.
I took myself out of that decision.
Josh, have you had the accommodation stuff come up with employees? I can only think of one case that I did.
I think I can, just off the top of my head, one in particular case, and it was for a larger monitor due to someone's vision issues.
Yes, that's what I had, and I struggled with it. Like I struggled. I wasn't, I wasn't, which I wish I had a department and maybe I should just kick that up to my superintendent. Maybe that's the department because I had a hard time wrapping my head around. Again, I don't do this. I don't give extra monitor just because you asked for it, but it was for reasons of eyesight. and it took a little bit for us to unpack. We tried like different resolution.
We tried the built-in accessibility things, but we landed on monitor.
Yeah, same situation.
Do you think, Josh, do you think that you would typically handle it or do you think you would be kicking it to your central office?
The principal brought it to me and it was a situation that, I mean, you're going to lose this particular situation. So we went ahead and did it. Yeah. It's one of those you don't want to burn that political capital saying no just to be told yes when it legitimately is an issue.
I should also add, if you are going to kick that decision to another HR or superintendent, as much as you possibly can, carve out a budget for accommodations so that the decisions are incorporating available resources. If you kick it to your HR department, your superintendent to make a decision, they just say yes, yes, yes, and you're responsible for buying all the laptops and all the monitors, it becomes a point of contention. So just be careful of that. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Last question. This is brought to you by PowerGistics. So on K12 Tech Pro, by the way, if you're on there, Hayden, the new guy, can hook you up with 25% off of all the PowerGistics charging stations you want. That's what they do. I'll put some links. They can help you with your needs assessment, what kind of cart you actually need. And if you jump on Pro, Christine with PowerGistics was on there last week on
the Vitals call that we do on Fridays. and she gave an explanation of their station. So last question I think I have for you, fellas. I had a teacher present use cases on how her classroom could be changed in a great way for education. If she had like an adapter to go with her projector so that she could do some wireless casting and get mobility around the room and play some sounds. That's a one-off random request. Makes tons of sense. I get it.
But again, the flip is that we pretty much do elementary requests, Laptop, projector, smart board, secondary, laptop, projector, that's an Epson interactive. It's standard. We don't do one-off requests. Mark, I think you probably touched on a little bit with that program thing. But what said you guys to those? Makes a ton of sense, but we don't do it for anybody else. It's a classroom improvement.
Big conversation. like it you've got a i would require lots of buy-in like that's not a realistically that's not a a request that should be coming from the teacher that's a request that should be coming from the principal after the teacher justifies it to the principal um and even then if i get that request from the principal to go outside that normal standard something that i'm going to have to buy number
one and two something that my department will have to support that we likely know nothing about, I will absolutely take that conversation to the superintendent and say my side of that and see where things land after that.
Yeah, the support thing's real too, right, that you're touching on.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, that's another, that's something else we have to now know.
Well, great example, we have an internal foundation that does teacher grants every year. And I had a request from a teacher because if it's technology related, it has to come through me before they submit the request or submit their grant application. And she's wanting a wireless document, Kim. I'm like, okay, neat idea. But she found one on Amazon that was like $80. I'm like, well, at first I can tell you that's going to be a piece of crap. It's not going to work. It's got 60 reviews on Amazon.
It's $80 for a wireless document camera. Um, there was, I don't remember what the reason was, but it, there was something horribly wrong with it.
A good rule of thumb. If the cost is the same as the amount of reviews, it's not good. Like if those numbers are close to equal, don't buy it.
It just so happened that there was a post over on pro on K12 tech pro about a wireless doc, a wireless document camera from IPVO. And the guy's like, it works great, but it's expensive as all get out. I'm like, well, hey, you know, it's a grant, whatever. The dang thing's like 800 bucks.
Go with the 80.
Right. So I sent that to her. I'm like, here's one that I have, you know, I've been told works well. Have at it. And, you know, that's the kind of difficult conversation. Yes. I hate, absolutely hate grants for that reason.
This scenario that I'm in, it's one I am legit asking you guys your opinions on it because I'll have to wrestle it some because it makes a ton of sense. It will impact the classroom well. It is a burden on the tech department. It will be something else that we pull out of our tech budget. It's just not an easy yes, and it's not an easy no.
So we've done a lot with wireless display, wireless, what do they call them, projection displays or whatever. They suck. Microsoft had the best one on the market, that Microsoft wireless display adapter. That thing was rock solid, worked beautifully, was cheap, was like $35, 50 bucks, something like that. They killed it. They took it off the damn market. You can only find them on eBay now.
Every other product that we've tried, Airtames, suck. Um, just every other wireless display sucks or is horribly expensive.
Josh, I, I really want you to be honest.
Just can you tell us how you feel?
Yeah. Uh, going back to your original question, Chris, I think this,
What was the original question?
Should I buy the adapter for the teacher?
I, I, I don't know the answer to that one. I will say this is phenomenally harder in a small district because at the bigger district level, I could just play the ugly bureaucrat who just says, I can't afford these adapters for all classrooms. Therefore, I'm not going to do it. You guys are working and dealing with the people all day, every day. They know that they're asking for a one-off and that they're probably going to be the only person in the district that does this.
And they're going to pass you in the hallway every single day and know that you're the one who said yes.
And if they bring cookies in next time, they're probably going to have X lax.
So I really feel for the smaller districts with these types of scenarios because it's so much more personal.
Well, and you could draw the same correlation with like we're having this AI conversation again. Do we buy subscriptions to Magic School at $100 a teacher mark for every teacher that wants it, but not every teacher wants it. So then there's a little bit of an inequity. You're spending this extra $100 in this teacher, in teacher A's room, but not teacher B's room, but teacher B didn't want the product. So... Same idea. We're really close.
Yeah, not to chase the AI stuff too much, but Josh, you and I are both doing AI committees at our school districts right now. So we're talking about Magic School, Gemini, all the things. And that same thing has come up of do we give those products to the teachers that take the training and exclude the rest? And it sounds right, and then it sounds terribly wrong. Yeah. Because we want standards. We want – Yeah, exactly. It's like I want all teachers to use all tools, and that blows that thing up.
So, again, if it's the adapter, if it's a piece of software, whatever it is, yeah, there's some – it's not quick yes and no. It needs to be dug into.
The conversation we were having today was do we bite the bullet and buy a product like Magic School or Brisk for the district? We get a district license. Everybody has it available to them. Do we go ahead and do that? And at the same time, it offers student services as well. Not to pick on Magic School, but I about fell out of my chair when I got their updated quote, $6 a student. And you buy every student so that every teacher gets access. I understand that licensing model.
But Gemini is like $200 a kid still or whatever, right?
Yeah, brisk is cheaper. But that would be like $21,000, $22,000 for us. and not being sure that even a majority of our teachers would use the product with any regularity.
It's the same feeling I get. Again, every elementary room has a smart board and every secondary has these expensive Epson interactives.
Which is- I
Cringe when we see those things not used.
Yeah.
So what did I pull off? I put a smart board in a room for a teacher that doesn't want to use it.
Yep.
And, like, you know, waste of money.
Well, and the
Other— Just so I can say that I had a standard.
We've had problems with teachers wanting to, like, oh, I want to just take my smart board off the wall and give me a TV. Well, that's fine. You know, if that's really what you want, okay, I understand that, as long as you're in that room. But three years from now, when you either decide to change subjects or change grade levels or retire, now your room is the only room in the building without a smart board and with a TV on the wall. Who gets that?
What do we have to say to the person that comes into that room after you leave? And is that smart board still downstairs in the basement or did it get chucked?
Yeah. Yeah. Hardware, you're making a decision for five years, if not longer. Software, you do have at least the benefit of after a year, you can look at usage for the most part.
Sure, sure. Yep.
Yep. And hopefully you have the ability to make a decision. I mean, again, if you're looking at district license, you're just looking at waste more than anything. But if you're doing a per-user license for whether it's a reading app or an AI tool, at least you have the opportunity of scaling down your license based on usage. Whereas hardware, you bought the thing. It's just going to sit in the wall no matter what you do.
Right. And mark our smart boards. Like we bought them while I wasn't there during the 2008-2009 financial crisis when everybody got Obama money. That's when they bought all of our smart boards for our entire district, and we are still rolling those bad boys.
Wow. You have to do the 162-point calibration every day, but it's fine.
No, no, they work. We've replaced those. Those have had problems. We've replaced those.
There's signs that say, do not click update on the software.
Only use the right side of the board smart.
Notebook 14 baby yes requires Java or Flash it's fine
It's fine it's fine okay thanks guys did.
¶ Events and Conferences Announcement
We give you any advice
Yeah let's see follow standards with what devices you pass out but if there's going to be a deviation based upon the program doctor's note uh and a doctor's note uh probably not doing the adapter thing that gets a little hairy but need to give it some deep thought that's about right right sure you're ready let's do it bring it on summer anything else well i'll talk about the events we have coming up so because we should be excited about these. Josh, did you have something?
Yes. I just thought just as a something else, um, VMware licensing. I was talking to somebody today. If you're a VMware standard customer, Broadcom wants to get rid of it in the very near future, apparently. Um, but if we were, we were offered a three-year standard contract. So I went ahead and signed it today because I, I want to keep standard. This district that I was talking to, their VMware standard renewal was $3,600 this year.
What they're trying to replace standard with is the foundation series of VMware. His quote for that, $13,000. He's looking at it from a $3,600 to a $13,000 change in subscription fee to VMware.
No big.
Yeah, they're going to drive everyone to Hyper-V and Proxmox. Thank you.
Crazy. Hey, shout out to this K-12 SysAdmin post called enduser...lol. It's that, you know, the Trinity thing of making your own figurine.
Oh, yeah.
It says enduser. And it's a picture of a person that looks like a teacher and the t-shirt on the person says while you're here. And then it comes with little notes that say, what's a ticket?
and then in the corner it says including can't print pretty funny pretty funny i'll link to that on the podcast description too that's funny hey we have some events coming up um that we're pretty excited about so hayden the new guy with k2 tech pro will be at the mo asbo spring conference at lake of the ozarks april 27th through 29th the three of us are heading to indiana, to hang out with the fine folks there April 30th through May 2nd. We're doing an episode. We're presenting, doing a keynote.
Then Hayden's heading to Nebraska May 1st and 2nd. And then we're heading to Georgia July 8th through 10th. We'll post about those things on the description too. We're excited to hang out with anybody that wants to hang out with us. And that's thanks to Managed Methods and Fortinet, both proud sponsors of the K12 Tech Talk podcast, as well as all the other sponsors that make the thing happen and you guys for asking for us to show up at those events. Josh, you're muted.
I never use the mute button. See what happens? Pay attention because we're speaking during lunch.
Oh, man. At Indiana?
We need confetti cannons or something to keep people's attention.
Syrup from michigan.
Yeah maybe i should just slam some bourbon before we go up there mark me and you yeah i'm
On board all right all right gentlemen
We'll see you next week thanks for listening share us with your friends and your meeting groups uh we'll see you in indiana a couple weeks
We might not be the same You share the same pain that I do.
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 and information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.