¶ Intro / Opening
On this week's episode of the K12 Tech Talk Podcast, we talk about how to handle the sticky situations when you've got a student who pushes the envelope on appropriate technologies.
¶ Introduction
We discuss the latest updates in educational AI from Microsoft and an interesting post from Reddit involving a bugged out smart board.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K12 Tech Talk Podcast. My name is Josh, a tech director here in Missouri of a medium-sized school district. Been at it for, man, I'm getting ready to start my 12th school year. Here with me is Chris. Chris, you're at a little bit smaller district.
I'm at 2K. Been in K-12 for pushing 20.
Like NBA 2K?
Hollow.
And Mark. Mark is from a, well, he's retired now, but he used to be from an uber-massive district. Hey, Mark. Hey.
Now he mostly deals with sailboats.
Sailboat. Oh, that's right. It's getting to be sailboat, summer school sailboat season.
That's right.
How many in your regatta this year, Mark?
All of them. I will have all the boats in my regatta. How often?
You know what? We haven't talked about this in a while. How often do you sail, Mark?
I used to be so much better. I used to be like a weekly race. And then COVID hit. The team broke up. We never got the band back together.
You know, when we were out there, Chris, He didn't even offer to take us on his sailboat.
No.
Yeah, what's up with that, Mark?
I don't know.
So NTP is our studio sponsor. They provide us the great things in the green room, the bourbon I'm drinking. Chris, you have been dealing with two of our sponsors recently. You've had a pretty big overhaul in your environment. Tell us about NTP and Fortinet.
Yeah, we went NTP. No joke. We talk about NTP. David always says he's got the best pricing on EDR, and he does. We just went with their Sentinel One stuff, the special pricing with that. Did their TVM and core, and I'd love to unpack more and more of that. But the long story short, we have this really cool – and this is barely touching the surface of it, but we have a device in-house now that's looking at all of our traffic.
We're sending them all kinds of logs, and now we have a cool TV in our office that tells us when accounts are getting locked out, that tells us our top source within the school district who's doing what, where it's going to. And it's been interesting because at the same time of this, we left Palo Alto, went to a FortiGate. That was Provision Data Solutions that put that bad boy in, by the way.
And you were Palo customer for quite a while, right?
Years and years. Man, I think like... Probably six, eight years, maybe nine. So have moved to a FortiGate and did FortiAnalyzer with that. Fortinet is a sponsor of the podcast, fortinetpodcast.fortinet.com. But cool, because all this happening at the same time, we're shooting FortiAnalyzer logs over to NTP to the Argus box. And it's not like we couldn't have looked at those logs before.
uh i also had a bunch of logs right uh but it's been really cool uh especially just getting into the first baby steps of this uh so firewall of course locked down um and we're seeing uh traffic that we should be allowing and i'm seeing that really easy uh thanks to ntp and putting some of those pieces uh together so kind of cool dual plug today uh check out ntp all their stuff i'll try to touch base a little bit more as we go with with them and how that stuff's going but they called us already
it's our first days of summer school we had a teacher uh do an account lockout like three times during the school day so ntp reached out because they are an extension of us now uh wanting us to check in with that user and it was just a teacher i reached out which is also cool posture we haven't done before we're like we actually care about the accounts getting locked out you've.
Always cared about the accounts being locked out you just didn't
Know yes so like hey just checking in we want to make sure this is you and not something bad going on uh she was like yeah i just sucked today kind of thing well.
I okay so this wasn't on the agenda sorry to to jump off the reels we're not even five minutes in i'm gonna jump off the reels uh summer school there there is something magical that
Magical between.
The last day of regular school
Oh yeah and.
The excitement the buzz and then there's a work day and then teachers like they're checking out right like they're zooming out of the parking lot you better not stand in their way because they will run you over if you stand between them and summer break but then summer school starts like a day or two later There is some, like I said, something magical that happens in that couple day period, and people forget how to log in.
And they forget all policy, all procedure, all user agreements. It's just nothing matters.
I understand summer break being gone for like two months and like, damn, what was my password? I haven't had to type it for two months. But we're talking three days, maybe.
There's a holiday in there, you know.
There was a holiday. Okay, so if you went hard on the holiday, I'll give you a pass. But my goodness, it's just, I don't know how to explain it.
I always say it's a circus.
The first day, yes, our first day of summer school was today. Have you started summer school, Chris?
Yeah.
Our first day was today. And the first three calls I had this morning at 7.15, I get there at 7 o'clock, 7.15, I'd already had three calls about forgotten passwords. I'm like, seriously, people, you were just here. We just ended session less than a week ago.
It's so bizarre to hear you guys talking about summer school. We're so far away from summer school right now.
Yeah, you guys are like a month out, right?
Our summer school doesn't start for after July, 4th of July.
Wow.
That's insanity.
Well, you've got another month of school, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, no, plenty of time to remember those passwords. But yeah, summer school is bananas. is i the the craziest story that i've ever had from summer school was going into a building now there's always there's a shuffle where you are teaching in a building or classroom that's not your home yep
Yeah and that's always a struggle
It's a it's it is chaotic yes and then there is also we had at least the turmoil of the homeschool versus the summer school team
What do you mean?
Well, like the homeschool wants to protect their turf.
Gotcha. Okay, I thought you meant like homeschooled kids. Sorry.
Oh, no, good point. No, the homeschool administration or staff like wants to protect their building. So it's, you know, in good shape when they come back and at the end of the summer. And the summer school is like, well, we got to be able to teach.
Burn it down.
And so there's always fights over printers and copiers and all that stuff. I swear, I swear, this is a real story. I caught a giant wall that had been built in the hallway from the custodians who did not want summer school folks into one side of the building. And so they built a barrier, a physical barrier, and I tore it down.
Well, sure you did. Yeah. This is your mark.
I have no qualms about doing this. Go ahead. I'm the tech guy. I'll take down your barrier.
Yeah, you're a jerk. You're an IT like coming out of the neighborhood.
And they got mad at me. I was like, you know, the summer school has got to do a fire drill tomorrow and you've built a wall. So we're not going to play this game.
Well, the idea of not teaching in your regular room, we have a number of teachers that teach totally different grade levels during summer school. And we received a call this past year. We did a big push to replace a number of smart boards with interactive panels. And we fielded a couple calls today, this morning, about, hey, my regular room, I still have an old school smart board. And this room I'm in for summer school has an interactive panel.
How do I get something on the screen? It's like, holy crap, we didn't even think about cross-training those teachers that are coming over from across the street. You know, like, that's something that was not on our radar, unfortunately. But we got through it.
What a riot.
All right, Chris, what else? You want to—oh, Mark, let's talk about news. Sorry.
All right, kind of a slow news week. There's a couple of updates on AI and a couple of national stuff that we're watching eagerly.
¶ AI Updates from Microsoft & Day of AI
So let's start with AI first. Microsoft has announced some new tools and some new changes. The biggest change coming this summer is that Microsoft co-pilot chat will be available to students ages 13 and up or 13 to 18. A couple of key differences. There will be some enterprise level data controls, data protection and IT controls for administrators to make sure that their data is secure and the chats are appropriate. Yep.
Three key differences between enterprise or kind of K-12 Microsoft Copilot chat and the normal Copilot chat. Students will not get personalized experiences in Copilot. They're not going to get any.
It's not going to learn from their.
They will not get. I was actually confused about this. And I admit I do not use Copilot chat, but the students will not get shown personalized advertisements. I didn't know that Copilot Chat actually has advertisements.
No, that would be annoying.
Yeah. So they will not get personalized ads. They will still receive some ads, or they may still receive some ads, but they will just not be personalized from their data. And then the third, which I think is always a great one, that their conversations will not be used for model training. So anything that a student puts into the model, into Copilot Chat, will not be then used to further Copilot.
So excellent job. And along with that in their announcement, which we'll put into the show notes, there is a slew of resources and training guides and materials for AI usage in the classroom. So nice job to Microsoft for that.
Yeah, good job. We don't talk about Microsoft in a positive light a lot here, but today they get a gold star.
Just one, though.
Yeah.
Out of five.
Yeah, kill off teams and maybe you'll get another.
Oh, man. I had the worst teams experience the other day. Well, it was with NTP. I jump on the team's call, and that's not my choice. That's what they sent me. Right. And I got to go through it with the browser. It didn't detect my headset. And I'm on the call, and they're doing the whole thing like, Chris, can you hear us? And I'm chatting. I can hear you. Give me just a second. I keep unplugging, replugging that headsets toast, but it's not toast.
It's been working fine for everything else in life. So I go get a different headset, plug it in. That one works for whatever reason. So, so then I'm like, uh, trying to get to the server room, but the, the, the server room's loud. So this crappy headset I'm wearing with browser based teams, as soon as I step foot in the server room, they can't hear me cause they just hear.
So then I ended up jumping. I had like two laptops open and I'm like headsets off because the Teams thing is only working through the internal speaker on my laptop. It was terrible.
For those listening who are concerned that we never praise Microsoft products enough, I just want to point out, we almost made it. We almost.
Yeah, that's my bad.
We almost made it through uh praising microsoft fully positive two of three of us praised microsoft for this one well mine
Was half-hearted i mean i did say if they would kill teams they'd get another gold star
Moving on uh speaking of ai uh two ai groups common sense and day of ai which full disclosure i do work uh with day of ai but this is not at all a sponsored post and this is actually not. All of this is a free resource. I have come out with a toolkit for families, which is great. I feel like schools don't have enough resources for families. And so dayofai.org forward slash families, you can get a toolkit for schools, a toolkit for families, along with videos and resources.
Really, really great. If you're getting questions from families about what is AI, how do I handle this kind of stuff, this toolkit from Common Sense and Day of AI, I think is a great resources for you to check out.
Yeah. And it's good.
Do you have to be a family to use it?
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. You need to be a family.
Yep.
It does have a place. It says schools click here and that's good resources for schools too. Same section.
And then last two sections of the news, we've got a couple of national updates. So the Supreme Court has been a very busy year for K-12 in the Supreme Court.
¶ Supreme Court Decisions
They just came out with a split decision, a four versus four decision on the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. Uh, this is a situation out of Ohio.
Did I get that right? Out of Ohio, where Ohio had denied, uh, a parochial school, a charter, uh, and they, the Supreme Court basically had a split decision, a 4-4, which means that the lower court's decision stands, uh, preventing this parochial school from becoming a charter school and in essence, suddenly getting, uh, federal and state funding, uh, for that.
But that was a pretty monumental decision in the world of kind of K-12 advocacy because you have obviously parochial schools wanting to have access to public funding. But you also have charter schools saying, hey, hold on a second. We did not necessarily want to dip our toes into the parochial world. So a lot of folks on both sides of the fence. The Supreme Court came back very, very fast on that decision. It was less than a month from when they heard the case when they made a decision.
We are still waiting on a decision on the E-Rate case, though. That should be coming any day, which it will be coming in the next month. It has to come before the end of June. But any day now we should be hearing what's going on with E-Rate.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what that happens there. You kind of have another E-rate story, right?
Yeah. And then finally, the other big story coming out of D.C. is Jeffrey Sarks, one of the last or sorry, one of two Democrats on the FCC board has announced his resignation. He'll be stepping down later this month. Quite a monumental shift because people are seeing that now there is a two to one Republican majority. There's a third Republican coming in. And so there is a rule that the board
cannot have more than three members from the same party. So that means that Trump does need to appoint a Democrat or a non-Republican person to the board. There is a lot of uncertainty around the FCC's take on mobile hotspots, on bus Wi-Fi, on a lot of different E-rate programs.
And with one Democrat stepping down, there's a lot of concerns now around, hey, could the FCC take an even firmer stance on decreasing E-rate funding for these kinds of services that were just added in the last few years? We're also still waiting for the Senate to come back on where they stand on this. And the Senate could very well stop hotspots.
All of that being said, I do think, I don't necessarily agree with some of the decisions they were making, but I do think that having the Senate making a decision on E-rate funding strengthens the case that the Senate is still, that Congress is still in charge of E-rate and that it is not the FCC running wild, which was the central argument that E-rate is unconstitutional. So I do think that this does signal that, hey, look, Congress is still in charge.
This demonstrates that this is not a rogue department running wild, and there's no need for the Supreme Court to strike down E-Rate.
One of the other big concerns was Mr. Stark was, I guess, one of the big advocates for the cybersecurity pilot. And the fear is with his his departure, what will happen with the remainder? Because that pilot's like a three year pilot, three or five year pilot. What's going to happen with the remainder of that pilot and dollars unspent? And so it'll be it'll be interesting to see what happens going forward with that, with his departure.
Yeah. Yeah.
I feel like, I mean, it's at the Supreme court. So I, I feel like we've done what we can do. And now we're just in this odd waiting game, uh, of what say you, and then if the bad thing happens, then I think we start crying out again, uh, for help. I was thinking through, Josh, we know in Missouri, there's a lot of superintendents retiring widespread in Missouri.
Yeah, the last several years. Yeah.
And I feel like that has meant for techs that we have a lot of re-educating or whatever that right thing is to let our leadership know how important E-rate is. And if E-rate goes away... There could be some serious infrastructure issues because E-Rate has been the golden ticket to let me get access points, to let me get switches without a whole lot of conversation and explanation.
Well, you figure everybody's been turning over their equipment every five, six years or so on that E-Rate five-year cycle. Yeah. I've gotten new wireless every five or six years. If that goes away, for me, that's a quarter million dollar project. Like, how far out are we going to string that? Or are then we going to turn into we're going to replace 10 access points a year until we end up replacing all 250 access? Like, that's a struggle, too.
It would be a big paradigm shift, huge paradigm shift.
Yeah, this is one of those deep, dark corners of K-12 tech that very few superintendents understand. And I would be surprised if too many superintendents even know what E-rate is, just because it's not something that you're taught in E-rate school or in, sorry, in superintendent school.
It's not something you really know. And so if this is, if the rug is ripped out from underneath us, there's going to be a lot of surprise leaders in K-12 who are wondering, what do you mean we have to find hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars? But I think the real danger for me is, will the next question be, can you just keep the equipment going for a few weeks?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That will become the conversation.
I really worry about that. That's not safe for anybody.
No.
Both in the stability of your network as well as just security updates and cybersecurity perspective.
From an edge perspective, firewalls, yes, I completely agree with that statement. Switching, physical switching anyway, that's less, to me, that's less of a concern because, you know, switching is switching is switching. It hasn't changed a whole lot. Wireless changes with every iteration of 802.11, whatever. But, man, firewall stuff, like, those things get sunsetted from support. And if they do, you're talking, you know, 20, 30 grand or more depending on the size of your infrastructure. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a hard pill. That's a real hard pill.
I'm sure there's some great open source firewalls that we can...
PFSense. I know a number, probably, I know a couple districts running PFSense. Yeah.
Just go back to that.
No way, no way, no way would I do that. I mean, whatever. Chris, before we get into our next, well, let's get into Lightspeed real quick, and then we'll talk about a filtering post over from Pro.
Yeah, Lightspeed, check out their content filter. They have that signal product product that does like device health and all that kind of stuff as well. Quick Lightspeed story. I pushed out the V3 manifest stuff. And I feel like that's been talked about for a very long time. I pushed out that new Lightspeed smart filter, whatever extension today to my school. Went okay. We'll see how tomorrow goes when all the kids return because I did it in full force.
But check out Lightspeed for your content filter and more.
¶ Dealing with Student Misbehavior
All right, so over on Pro, there was an interesting post question made, somebody explaining that he was having problems with students logging in as their friends on Chromebooks, you know, another student, to get around filtering rules. And as the comments came in and the topic was discussed a little bit, it became clearer what was going on. Students weren't getting around, like, base filter rules, and we won't mention the filter because it's not the filter's fault.
They weren't getting around base rules. They were getting around teacher curated rules. So let's say Chris was a teacher and had a set of rules that was blocking YouTube for students during his active period. Students in his class were logging in as their friends who were in another class who didn't have the teacher curated rule applied to them so that they could get to YouTube. And this person was asking, how in the world do you deal with this?
Do you get super draconian and start disabling devices? He was looking through his logs, and he was seeing nearly every device had multiple users recently logged into them because students were getting around those teacher-curated rules like that. What do you guys think? How do you – is this similar to the TikTok trend where somebody needs an example made of? Yep. For it to stop. Like how realistically, I think you have two problems here. You have a technical problem of how do you handle this?
And then you have a disciplinary problem of how do you handle this? What do you guys think?
Do you have my perspective as a tech director or as a teacher?
Both. We'll value your teacher.
Yeah, your heart is split.
Yeah, we know.
Okay.
In your heart, you're a teacher, Mark. We know.
So I would love this kind of situation to like go to a student like, hey, someone got your password. Let's reset your account. And then, you know, you change the password and be like, now we know that anything that happens in your account moving forward, it's your responsibility because you're the only one that has this password. And I would use that as a teachable moment to let the student know that if anybody uses your account, you're the one responsible for it.
I feel like that would work. You taught fourth grade, right?
Fifth. Yeah. Fifth.
Yeah. I feel like that rationale and that would work absolutely in fifth grade.
It's a very age-specific response.
A junior in high school is like, okay, dude. All right, brah. I'm not going to share this bet.
Yeah, good point. I'm out of ideas. I got nothing.
Okay, from your teacher, I'm sorry, from your tech director, CIO hat. Put your CIO hat on.
And I would bring to leadership and say, look, there's not a lot that we from a technical perspective can do. If you want to entertain something like MFA for our students, I am on board with that. Yeah. But at this point, when the students are just logging in with the username and passwords and sharing accounts during the school day, there's not a lot of technical things that I can do.
I mean, I'm just loving it. The ingenuity of kids when, you know, it's amazing. Chris, what do you think?
Yeah, I'm all about that discipline. Bust them.
So you're disabling devices? What are you doing?
I'm just telling the principal, we're going to catch a couple of kids, bust them, tell them to tell their friends.
You suspended them, ISS?
Whatever the principal, if the principal's like, well, which way should we go? We're going to go heavy.
Okay.
And hopefully it gets nipped.
Because really.
I mean, middle school, high school, you make a couple good examples where you give them the book.
But it spreads. But realistically, what's giving them the book?
Like well the tech user because they're breaking it i understand it's.
Against the it's against the aup i understand
And i gotta spend time i'm gonna reset in a lunch pan or i'm resetting i'm resetting all kinds of crap whatever right i'm over you're wasting my time like give it.
Interesting i i understand i understand it's a problem I think it's probably one of those things, Mark, we were texting before the show about, you know, you'd love to get into the discussion of filtering because some people go down that rabbit hole and take it personal when kids are getting around filters. And I'm like, yeah, that's me.
I was talking about you.
Absolutely, it's me. But this problem of students logging in as other students, it's one of those things, you know, we laugh at a lot of problems in our office. Like, it's all you can do. Like, today you start a summer school. We had a couple problems. It's like, okay, all you can do is laugh. We're going to get through it. It's fine. I see this as one of those problems. Like, yeah, it's a problem. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go with, like, that's one that's not my responsibility.
Discipline's not my responsibility. I'm not sure how far I would go with that.
It is hard. I think I can see the teacher side being hard. because I, you know, I'm the guy sitting in the chair watching the screen and I'm like, that teacher needs to get and move around more and watch those screens and this kind of stuff.
Pate would say, use your two feet and your two eyes.
Yes. So, but, but, you know, they could be doing that and they're not seeing that little Johnny's logged in as little Susie until they're actually clicking around and, you know, looking different. Or you have a part or something, some, some kind of screen management thing you can try to do.
Yeah.
Um so it's hard i i so you know i can lean towards like okay that's a tech problem, uh we had and i'm trying to think if i can do we have do you think we have our middle school trolls that are they still listening if they're listening right now i.
Don't know i don't think we're real popular with middle schoolers yeah
We're 20 minutes in there's no possible way that they've made it this far
Okay so and i i won't get into the super technical part of this but We recently had kids that are in a different situation, so they're in a different Google OU that has different settings applied to it. And we were being told that these kids have figured out how to turn off the filter. And I'm like, there's no way, because they have more like an allow list. Like, here's the 20 websites you can go to, and that's it.
Oh, okay.
I'm like, there's literally no way that they're doing this. well there's no way until there is a way uh they sent a video and the kids like i'm not going to get into the weeds in case we do have kids that end up doing but they're they had access that they could turn on and off their wi-fi yes and then they had access to a setting that that that oh like we don't allow kids to access a this particular setting but in that ou it somehow got overlooked,
So they could stop something or do something that wouldn't be normally something that a kid could do. So they realized that they could turn off wifi, get to that setting, not be traced, click this thing, kill it. And then start again. And they were, they were cruising. And like, again, like tech of me, kudos to this kid, right? Like, this is awesome. Is it my fault? Yeah. I'm the one that did that setting and missed it. Do I still expect the teacher to walk around and monitor?
Yeah. Like, and again, like bust that kid. Like, kick him out, do the thing, whatever. Take his Chromebook.
But what's your punishment?
Nothing. People make mistakes.
Okay.
Well, this works out well because our main topic today is going to be what happens in those super extreme conversations leading away from the PowerSchool hacker, the 19-year-old from last week. We're going to talk more in depth about that one. So, Chris, we're going to put you on the hot seat in a little bit. You can't walk away from this one.
You want to talk about eating real quick chris
Oh sure so eaten uh we plugged their uh paths to power uh game and i'll put a link to the podcast description it's a ridiculous game i don't know how it has to do with battery backups and and all their uh product line ridiculously fun yes fun that's what i mean yeah and shout out to k12 sysadmin with this because one of the questions in here against like medieval stuff. There are rumors of how to restore power, prevent overload, and reveal the clue. But which way may be correct?
And one of the answers is to post a question to K12SysAdmin. And they did that as a little shout out to our great community of K12 Tech. So anyways, check out Eaton, this game in particular, eaton.com slash paths to power.
I feel like we need medieval theme music there, mark gotcha
All right.
Main topic. What do you got, Mark?
Actually, before that, I've got your trivia question.
¶ A buggy Smartboard
Oh, trivia. That's right.
I'm excited about this one. This is from Reddit KToolSysAdmin. And there was a posting today where I even told you guys, do not go on Reddit KToolSysAdmin. I need you to be fresh for this one so you don't see this photo. Because it was the main posting of the day today.
And I missed it.
And usually, I don't click on this stuff. But I'm going to show you this photo. I'm going to describe the photo for the listeners in case you haven't seen this. And then I'm going to tell you why this one piqued my interest and why I was like, we need to talk about this. So what you're seeing on your screen is a picture of a smart board. I can't tell how big it looks like a pretty sizable smart board.
Yes.
And there's a lot of dots all over the screen. The dots are kind of in a line ish. There's like, there's a lot of activity. and the left side that looks like there's like a central point where the lines kind of spread out. There's just dots all over.
Like it's picking up touch, right?
Yeah. So the post says, for the last few days, the teacher has discovered small dots, digital dots all over his smart board made by the digital pen input. Never saw the dots appear in real time, but overnight, and he left the room for a long period, or when he left the room for long periods of time, they would appear. this morning this was a whole new level now i was gonna just scroll by this one but the last comment really really piqued my interest he says hint we're in north ohio
North ohio north ohio
I went to my first thought was like does this have something to do with like the train derailment from a few years ago like what is going on here so
The river the lake
I don't know much about North Ohio I apologize if that was insulting
I the first thing that comes to my mind is spiders like there's a big old spider crawling across the screen
The smart board?
Yeah. And that's what's picking up the touch.
Oh. I understand what you... I get that.
Or a varmint of some sort.
Yeah, you see how... In the upper corner, there's all kinds of activity.
Yeah, I think it's something crawling across the screen. A bug or something. What is it, Mark?
From the original poster, it's mid-season. Which I had to look up.
What?
I had to look it up. But it is an insect. And these midges were flying all over through the school. And they look pretty small to me. But apparently this interactive board was sensitive enough that every time a midge would land on the screen, it would make a dot. And if that midge would walk, that's what accounts for all these lines. So if you see any weird dots or lines on your screen, make sure to disable that touch pen when you go home for the night.
Let me look through my text because we had something similar in our elementary a couple weeks ago.
A midge?
Not a midge. We thought it was a rat. But continue talking. If I can find it, I'll show you guys.
I understand.
I got nothing to say. Yeah. fascinating so check out reddit k12 sysadmin we'll put that link in the show notes so you can see that line of what the heck is going on in northern ohio yeah yeah yeah yeah
I don't know if you guys... Hang on.
Was that a midge?
Almost the exact same thing on a smart board. What was that? We don't know.
A midge?
We were figuring a bug of some sort. Yeah.
Yep.
And it was like multi-touch. I don't know if you can see it, but there's different colored pin markings on that picture. So it was multiple bugs. Yeah.
Well, shout out to the interactive whiteboard providers making some pretty darn good boards here if they're sensitive to pick up a midge.
Sensitivity on point.
Yeah. Multi-touch, too.
Multi-colors.
All right, Mark, what you got?
¶ Conversations with Students
Main topic here. So the 19-year-old hacker from Worcester, Massachusetts, who took down power school has got a lot of folks talking. We've all been in that situation where we have a nefarious student. I'm not talking about the student who is using their friend's account to get through the filter. I'm talking about a student who is attempting to cause some sort to damage or anything like that.
We've probably all been through a situation where at least once where you have a student that kind of shakes you a little bit. And besides, you know, escalating the issues to leadership, what are the kinds of stories that you might have or what are the situations you might find yourself in and how you get out of this? How do you handle it?
Chris have.
You had a student
Hacker problem not like we just had kids i mean, not with stealing data no i can think of several times of mostly trying to get around content filter um trying to get the settings that they think are like super cool like i can't believe if I pulled this off settings, but again, one of those, it wasn't impactful of taking data. Um... Mostly like playing Minecraft. When we were kids, we tried to get to porn. The kids these days just try to get to Minecraft.
My God, what are you saying?
When I was a young K-12 tech, most of the hits were kids trying to get the pornography right.
Now we're talking about you.
Yeah, that's not what you said. This is not some confessional from Chris today.
That is not what you said.
Middle school Chris is not speaking at all.
Nearly the same conversation that we had with that SZA representative that time.
Is this getting cut?
We had a kid. Boy, I hadn't been at my district very long at all. I got an email from a kid, said, hey, just so you know, I was able to use a live CD and boot to the live CD and get into the registry and see a bunch of passwords for remote control tools, yada, yada, yada. And we told him to knock it off. And he emailed again a couple of days later.
I love it.
Your response is like, knock it off. Get out of the registry and then just move on. Knock it off.
A couple of days later, he did it again. So we ended up calling him in to the principal's office. I think we had an SRO in the room. Very, very, very serious conversation and gave him the opportunity. Look, if you behave the next couple months, we let him kind of intern in our office his senior year. And that led us to put BIOS power on passwords, not power on passwords, but BIOS passwords on these devices. And like I said, I hadn't been at the district very long.
So now, you know, we're going through and putting BIOS passwords on 300 devices because of this one dang kid in high school. Yeah, we've been in that, like Chris said, not a data exfiltration type issue, but we've been in issues where we've had a kid do stupid things like that. Yeah.
I can think of a handful of situations that kind of, I'd say, shook me to the core, I guess. I don't know if I want to go that extreme, but was a bit alarming of like, well, this is beyond just kind of nefarious stuff. I enjoyed when I would get a call from a school about like, hey, we've got a student who's hacking. And you always know the word hacking is like applied very liberally.
Well, in Massachusetts. But I would love to go to the school, sit down with the kids, have a good hard time conversation about there's ethical hacking and there's hacking for good and hacking for bad. And let's talk about how much money you can make if you're hacking for good. Let's also talk about the risk that if you're hacking for bad, what this can do for your future and stuff.
And the money if you do it for bad.
Yeah.
Did you put on your Mr. Mark hat and get stern?
I never wanted to...
Knock it off.
I certainly didn't want to reward the students for this behavior and let them know, like, hey, I'm proud of what you did. Like, that was always a risk that you don't want the kids to know, like, hey, I've gotten some attention. Because that's what they're trying to do a lot of times. I also didn't want to come down on them and suddenly become an enemy.
I wanted to make sure that the students knew that I was a friend of theirs, that if there was a problem, if they found a hole in the filter or stuff, they could talk to me. And a couple of times, some kids would say, like, oh, here's how I got around the filter.
Chris, don't you?
Which I always appreciated.
Don't you have a bug bounty program?
Yeah. And it's not as popular, and that's probably on me. It's not as popular as it used to be. But for just our high school kids, we would advertise a bug bounty if they would email a particular email address that just went to me. It can be – it's not anonymous, right? But I would say, like, I'm not going to tell your friends.
But you do get invited to the tech office, and I give you some – like a big bag of candy or a gift card to Subway, whatever thing that we can kind of get from local businesses.
And I would have those kids that were the –, quote-unquote hacker kids especially early days of google and chromebooks i remember one particular kid he always would he would he would email me when like a new chrome version came out and what settings were being introduced what changes what features because he would see what we weren't locking down yet and again that's great that was awesome uh so i mean we're all talking about the same thing.
You can be a cool, good hacker and make some sweet money as well. And it could be a great job for you. So I can think of several times. We have that TSI, the tech support intern program, where we have some kids that are those kids that probably go home and download whatever programs to play with, where you just try to have some good conversations with them.
I think there was probably for all three of us, all techs, there's something about hackers or about figuring out settings and the behind the scenes stuff that's the interest yeah yeah yeah that that got us started at the very beginning probably like a little spark of that so we can always like relate to those kids and try to have some good conversations.
I always felt though that is as important as it was to have a conversation with the students if for me it was equally as important to have a conversation with the adults the the teachers and principals and and a lot of times they were calling me because they were they're just nervous. They didn't know how to handle the student, uh, or they're thinking that this is something more than it really is.
And, and most of the time, nine times out of 10, the students just take an advantage of not having supervision.
Oh yeah.
The, the students take an advantage of little gaps or holes. Um, I remember one time where I talked to a student who had got into the student information system, uh, through an adult login. And I was like, so how did you, how would you have done that? And he wouldn't tell me, but I phrased it in a way of like, how would another student do that? And he's like, well, every student knows that so-and-so leaves their username and password on a Post-it note on their computer, right?
Okay, there's not a lot I can do for these students here, but there's a whole lot that I can do with the staff around password security and like, this is why we now have MMFA, that stuff.
For forever ago, So I can think of two different times. We had... One time we had a, it was for the press for our radio stations and it was before there was a lot of great wifi management stuff. So you just gave like this passphrase out to all press and you told them and you told the athletic director it's for their eyes only, but we had like a football game where like one of the radio stations like yells it out to his buddy.
And then it was just widespread. Like all the high school kids are getting on the special media wifi.
and we had something similar again eternity ago but it was at an elementary and somehow there was a passphrase written down on a piece of paper that a previous technician had left at a random desk and somehow this kid that it was a kid in like middle school high school that remembered it from when he was in like fourth grade good degree use it it sat dormant for a couple years or something uh and then all of a sudden we started seeing our stuff get quote unquote hacked and
we knew this i mean it's it's one of us in the department and we know it wasn't one of us in the department so it's it's obviously someone that was there before kind of vibe uh that's probably as close i i would say that was like because that was a real work to fix uh where we wanted to get to the bottom of what kids did it so we could have a conversation uh and again they're not getting uber busted for what they did. But hey, you should have reported that instead kind of thing.
There were three situations where I realized that this is not a conversation between me and the student. This is between me and parents. And so I had a conversation with families on three occasions. And one of them was honestly just because the school didn't understand technically what the student was doing. They were using a Tor browser.
And and most most people in the world don't know what a tour browser is and i had to i had to step in to explain to him like hey i'm very nervous about this this is something that can get somebody into into deep trouble very quickly yeah uh and it was happening at home right obviously we didn't allow the tour browser uh and then the other couple of situations was uh were two students who had um well beyond the average norm of like an inquisitive kid this is not like
your, your average run on the mill. Like I saw password written, so I'm going to use it. This was, this was some scary stuff. And at that point, the conversation is not with a student. The conversation is with the adults, the teachers, the principals, and the parents, especially around, Hey, I need you to understand that as a tech expert, I am very nervous about this student's particular skills. Uh, and if I'm nervous, um, that means that you also need to be nervous. Yeah.
And and I can think of a couple of occasions where I said this is not a risk to the student. This is a risk to you as parents that that this person's activity is going to come back on you if if we're not putting in some immediate scenarios or immediate resolutions right now.
I tried to save the parent card for the last resort, but there are times where the conversation, you know when a student's skills escalate beyond their age level that the conversation is now strictly to the adults that are around that student to either seek some professional help and or put some hard and fast rules and protections in place.
Well, and likely at that point, they really don't know what they're doing. They just know it works. They know it works. So they're going to continue to take advantage of that. They don't know that using Tor browser is going to lead them to some very dark places on the web.
Yeah. I just remembered like a decently good one. This has been 19 years ago. There was a, so this is a couple of school districts. I was actually working for a consulting company.
um school district we're at had a credit recovery program again way back in the day i thought i feel like this is like windows 98 or something the program required there to be like this network share that you could like the kid had to be able to like have edit rights to it um yeah like yeah go ahead do you remember some of that no.
I was just gonna make a comment about a current application that requires
That so you you just hoped that no kid would ever get to this a network share and do anything bad. So it's, and actually talking about summer school, it was summer school. So the first couple of days of summer school, summer school is a drag, credit recovery classes, everything sucks. Some kid figured out how to navigate to that folder and deleted everything in that folder. So it killed, it killed summer school for all these kids.
And then the long story short, and this is where it all amplified. This was back in the days of like tape backups and stuff. And then it was realized that the tape backup hadn't been working also for a couple of days. So all these kids lost all their summer school credit recovery work because of one kid being a punk and deleted all that stuff. And I think it got figured out what kid it was. But again, it was this whole, did he know what he was doing when he did it?
But tech's getting blamed because we give the rights. We're blaming the company because the company made us give rights. It all came down to conversation and communication, that kind of thing. But whatever. Whatever. Speaking of everything else.
I guess the final lesson of all this is communication and personal relationships, either with you and the student, you and the teacher, you and the administration of families.
Yeah, that kid's going to do, he's going to make, that's the bigger picture thing. Kids make, everybody has choices to make in life. So what kind of impact are we having? and he needs a good teacher in his life or a principal or the random awkward tech guy to have a cool conversation that impacts bigger. So by the way, check out Prey, prayproject.com. They are offering a 15% discount on first-year customers.
If you mentioned K12 Tech Pro or K12 Tech Talk, they have some Chromebook pricing stuff as well. I'll put a link in the podcast description to them. They can help you with your device management and even the security side of all of that. So if you don't do that stuff yet, manage your device as well with a program outside of like Google Admin. Check out PreyProject.com.
All right, guys, that was a good episode. Anything else? We got a couple things coming up. We're going to be in Savannah, right, Chris?
We are. When is that?
That's in July 9th through the 11th, I think.
Yes, we will be in Savannah. We are doing a session and we're recording there as well. I'll put a link in the podcast description to that. Yeah, July 8th through the 10th. And then we have Midwest Tech Talk coming up July 21st to the 22nd. Kickoff on the 20th down at Lake of the Ozarks. Hope to see everybody there as well.
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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.