¶ Intro
On this week's episode of the K12 Tech Talk podcast, we give a sneak peek of some of the cool things happening at ISTE next week, including a new study about the impacts of cell phone fans. While our main topic this week addresses the challenges of staff transitions over the summer, how to handle tech, accounts, and summer vacations.
Live from NTP Studios, this is the K12 Tech Talk podcast. My name is Chris. Josh is out. And with me is the one and the only Mark. Mark, how's it going?
It's good. How are you?
I'm not too bad. We're kind of doing this and we won't unpack this. I won't be long-winded, but Josh isn't here. He's on a vacation-ish doing some MSI sec stuff. You and I scheduled to record this a little bit different than our normal kind of day. I sat down to send you a link so we could get going and then no internet. So we've kind of had a fiasco this morning, typical tech problems.
¶ ISTE Preview
So Mark, you have some news. You want to share what's going on?
Yeah. So surprisingly, you know, it's getting a little bit busy. We've got summer going on, but ISTE is next week. So why don't we start with just a quick plug on ISTE. If you're heading to ISTE in San Antonio, I'm not going to be there. Chris, you're going to be there?
I'm not.
No, it's a hard time of year. We've got all the 4th of July stuff going on, so it's hard to travel.
ISTE is on the list. I've never gotten to go. I want to go. I've heard wonderful things. I don't know. It's never worked out for me, no matter the location or the dates. It's not worked doubt.
Yeah, it's a doozy of a conference. It's a big one. There's a lot more of a focus on instruction. And so you have teachers and instructional leaders as well as tech leaders. So it's a good one. The thing I'm most excited about, and there's always going to be a bunch of different announcements and stuff, but ISTE is raising the bar.
They have their EdTech index, and they have five quality indicators of how a product stacks up with safety, evidence-based inclusivity, usability, and interoperability. They're going to start to make that the ticket to entry for EdTech vendors into the show, the vendor showroom. So in order to be a vendor at the ISTE conference over the next few years, they're going to raise the bar and making sure that your product matches or meets their quality indicators.
Well, I like that.
Yeah. Yeah. And they said that they're the first conference to do this, where they're actually, you know, setting expectations for things like interoperability. You want to be in front of all the school districts? You've got to meet the quality indicators.
If this is true, and I have no reason to think that ISTE won't follow through, I would love to see at the end of it if they put the list, and they probably won't, right, but the list of folks that don't make the cut. Like, can we please publish that list? Let's digest that every year.
I don't think they're going to publish that one.
Like those that get the D+. Can you show me the ones that almost made it, but the interoperability didn't quite hit the mark?
Well, they have summer school to make up those quality indicators. So before we publish them as failures.
They put them into a different area. Yeah. These are the ones that are good to work with. Those guys in that room, you can go talk to them, but they're a little shady.
Proceed at your own risk. Well, to that point, that's kind of what they're doing. They're starting with is they're giving preferential treatment to the folks that meet their indicators.
Hey, speaking of ISTE really quick, there's a CTL, a sponsor of the podcast. They're going to be at ISTE. If you're listening to this, they're in booth 2049. And they do have some new devices there. Do you hope that that just means the second floor or is there really that many vendors? I don't know.
It's a big one. It's a big one.
I'd love to go. Anyway, check them out, ctl.net. They have three updated, like two updated Chromebooks. They're NL73, they're PX-121E, and they have a Chrome box that you can get into as well. So check out CTL for their Chrome devices.
¶ EdTech Rebranding
Well, speaking of other folks that are going to be at the conference, some ed tech companies are changing names. So two companies that you may have heard of or are working with, Quizzes, Q-U-I-Z-Z-E-Z. Is now changing their name to Wayground. So if you're looking for quizzes, it's going to be Wayground now.
I just got hit with that, actually. That's funny. Well, it's true timing.
Yeah, it's news. That's why I call it news.
I just experienced it. We are going through, and I think I mentioned this last week or so, with our AI committee board. That has led to a discussion of a document that has every approved major app and website and WayGround was on there. And I was like that the curriculum director put on. I was like, I've never supported WayGround in my life, but it's quizzes and we do support it.
Yeah. So they're expanding. They're growing and expanding beyond just interactive quizzes. So they've they've rebranded and another company that is rebranding and they're making their their big showcase at. ISTE will be Global Grid for Learning is now called School Day. So they're a data interoperability company, and you'll be able to see them under their new name at ISTE.
So along with all the other players that are out there, I think those are the only two that I could find that are changing names this year.
And man, if booth 2049 is in the indication about how many vendors are going to be there, you ISTE travelers are in for a real treat.
¶ Cell Phone Ban Study Findings
Speaking of ISTE, we're going to continue the trend here. there is going to be a professor from Texas A&M speaking there. She recently released her results of a cell phone ban study over the last year and to see exactly what are the impacts of a cell phone ban. So Bridget Whaley, a West Texas A&M University professor, spent a year in a high school that had just done a bell to bell cell phone ban where students are not even allowed to take it out in between periods.
And what do you think she found?
No cell phones is good.
Yeah. Maybe a little bit more detail there.
I don't know. Hit me with it.
All right. The first thing, she thought that teachers were actually going to be upset about this, which is funny because I don't know a single teacher that is in support of cell phones in schools. Teachers were very, very happy with this. They felt that the number of problems and behavior issues plummeted and the return of the classroom culture came with it. So teachers were very on board and excited about it.
We had... For years, a cell phone policy that we didn't really follow. And I have policies that are there that aren't followed. And I felt like, you know, last two years, the principals and administration did an uptick on, hey, we're going to follow this thing, put phones away. And our teachers were happy. Like, again, I think everybody feels that. Like, if it's a rule, it's a rule. Don't have a fake rule kind of thing.
So I can see that for sure, because I know that it impacted my school when we actually did what we said we were going to do.
Well, that's a perfect segue into her next finding, which was that enforcement was challenging when there wasn't consistency across all teachers. Now, if the teachers didn't enforce it, it impacted everybody's classrooms. So consistency in cell phone ban enforcement across all rooms, across all classrooms was very important to it. The third finding was there's always going to be students who try to circumvent
it. We know that, you know, if you use the yonder pouches, we had a student install a magnet in the back of a toilet in order to have students unlock their cell phones when they went to the bathroom. That's always going to happen. But as long as teachers going back to the last point, as long as teachers are consistent enforcement, the one or two small issues that happen every so often are not huge disruptions.
It's about breaking that culture of students communicating over social media to each other. So when one student jumps on their phone, so be it, right? There's not a big issue with that, which I thought was great because I think a lot of people do get really upset over those small little issues here and there.
But what you found is it's not a big deal. And, The, the bell to bell approach, which I mentioned before, where you put it away at the beginning of the school day and you take it out the end of the school day, there's no in between, no lunch, no, no recess. That removed social media. When schools have the, you can take your phone out between classes, you're still introducing the social media addiction type stuff. You're still introducing, you still have all those same problems.
You may not have the distractions in class, but the social media aspect, the negativity of social media is still there.
And that has to go with the whole, you know, what your head is kicking around doing when you, in 50 minutes, you know you get to do something. So I sat in class, I can't use my phone for 50 minutes, but hey, in 50 minutes when I'm walking in the hall, I can use it. But whatever that headspace stuff is, that has to be real and impactful to the kid consuming a lesson or working hard or whatever. Yeah. So it makes – I think I've even changed my thoughts on that.
I was really for, well, passing time is okay or lunchtime is okay. But you know what? You can do without you. If you can figure out the school safety element where a kid can still reach a parent if needs to, whatever, I think bell to bell makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. And then the last finding, which is, again, you're teasing up all the findings perfectly here, is that this really reduced the social anxiety with students. They didn't have the social pressure. They're less focused on who's on the phone and who's on social media and on Snapchat. And students were more engaged with each other and with the lessons. So I think these are no brainers.
I think we've all known this stuff. It's great to now see that we have higher ed researchers diving into this and giving people factual information that school boards and state agencies can actually take and say, okay, we've got to do something about this. So I'm excited about this. And I'm excited about the bell to bell approach, too.
Yeah. Yeah. Kudos to the first schools that took the big plunge. Yeah. And then, of course, to get data to back it up. And for a sentence like a kid's emotional stuff is better, that means the kid said that. Two, by the way, that means they talk to kids and they survey kids. They had conversations with kids to get to this. Again, you could probably sit with the demographics of all that are impacted from student to teacher to administration to parent.
And everybody would have agreed at the beginning that it's probably a good idea. Yeah. Just no one wanted no one wanted to really enforce the rule and do the legwork to it.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
¶ AI in Education Report
And then finally, Microsoft has released their 2025 AI and education report. So we are now able to see some stats on AI growth and usage from year to year. I'll make this a new trivia. Don't look at the notes, Chris. Gen AI usage in 2023 was at around 45% of schools using Gen AI in their instruction and operations. What do you think it was last year in 2024? 45% the year before?
I'm going to go 72.
86. 86% of school districts are now using AI. Incredible growth. And then diving down, 53% of school leaders are using it daily. And 99% of school leaders have used it at least once this school year. So school leaders are really, really jumping on board with this one. It's a little bit lower with educators. 33% of educators use it weekly. 36% use it daily. So not a huge difference there, but you're seeing that uptick from year over year.
Now they go into what are people actually using this stuff for? Let's see if you can guess some of these things. What is the most common task for students to use Gen AI for?
I don't know what a kid's going to say. I want to just say generating content, like ideas for content.
You're partially right there. Yeah, brainstorming was the number one reason. So getting started on assignment and brainstorming at 37% of students say that that's what they use Gen.AI for.
I also think that could kind of be a kid that's kind of full of it, too.
Well, yeah. I mean, brainstorming is like, do you generate the ideas or just generate the first and last draft?
I teach Sunday school at my church, and I'm like, all right, kids, what are things we should do? And they all say, read the Bible and pray. Yeah, you know the answer you're supposed to say. what are you supposed to use ai for brainstorming yeah you really use it for
Well number two is summarizing information so spark notes sure and number three both with 33 is getting answers so there's the real answer there, educators most common tasks number one at 31 is brainstorming lessons brainstorming lesson ideas because it's kind of similar with students.
Yes next
Is creating lessons and creating ideas and resources and then the third one which i think is the best the absolute best application for ai in the classroom is is simplifying and differentiating topics for students.
Okay i have really tech department wise we we so we're google school and we added uh license gemini just for tech department and man it digging into like my gmail and giving me the quick summaries i just had one that was like i was arguing with the person basically and we're about 30 40 emails in yeah and at the top it was like it was like chris has been complaining so and so said this Chris, that's for clarity. Clarity has still not been delivered.
And like I needed the quick summary. I was jumping on a call, whatever. So I click on email. Okay, here's where we're at. And I felt like Jim and I may be a little biased towards the clarity because I'm doing all the mouthing. You know what I mean? She's helping me. But that's real. Like it helped me like, okay, jump on call, do the quick meeting. Jim and I, what am I supposed to know before I jump on this thing?
That's cool. uh and.
It and it did help me out
I did did you activate or did did the platform activate ai on k12 tech pro yes.
Uh platform did i like the summaries at the top of the things yeah
Yeah yeah yeah that's great no i don't i don't have to interact with anybody anymore i can get all my answers without talking to people yeah well finally in their report what do you think are the biggest concerns they have concerns from school leaders teachers and students starting with school leaders their biggest concern is ethical concerns around human autonomy and automation. Followed by, and this is, I was excited about this, a lack of IT resources and technical readiness.
So school leaders are thinking about that. That's their second biggest concern with AI in the, in the classroom.
That sounds right. Yep.
Teachers, I, I, there's no cheating. Yeah. Cheating is the, and plagiarism is the number one concern followed by students having an over-dependence on AI and then misinformation. Believe it or not, students' concerns exactly the same. In that order. Plagiarism, over-dependence on AI, and misinformation.
Yeah, there's definite... I've completely come around to with really trying to think... If my school district gives...
Gives ai tools to our students we really need to educate the kids on how to use those tools like this is not it's easy i think for text to just be like yeah we're cool with that turn it on but i i don't want a kid what's a brainstorm versus what's plagiarism yeah if that that's a um there's some ethics in there and there's some uh what is right and what is wrong some learning about what is it to get an idea from something versus I literally
took the sentence and built upon it, which AI could have a great idea that you build sentences and you do something with it. Because I know some of our AI policy that we're shaping, an easy fix to a lot of that is, hey, kids, you're going to learn how to cite your source and you're going to do a good job of saying that AI was used with this assignment that you turned in.
And doesn't that fix an awful lot of things and to just say no i owned it was all mine uh again there has to be a lot of back backbone stuff created with with that in schools so cool that the survey identifies that yeah
And unfortunately that's all i have for news i was hoping we would have some supreme court news on the fcc case by now um we're recording this uh in the morning supreme court usually announces around 10 a.m and unfortunately the announcement today was not the fcc case so maybe next week.
News brought to you by power gistics i'm gonna post uh a blog post that they did uh their favorite chromebook damage excuses uh pretty little light-hearted humor stuff in there so power gistics they do some great charging stations check out power gistics where is josh by the way he just so he did msi sec and now he's just traveling around i don't know it's something we have responsibilities here and i don't i get tired when he doesn't do his part is
He taken out of his paycheck.
Yeah because i mean you and i are always doing more than him it's kind of ridiculous but whatever should
We should we consider a pay by episode.
Payment should josh get cut whoa
That's a that's a that's a jump.
I was just kidding. That was a joke, Josh. Enjoy wherever it is you are.
We've all had a week off this month, so I guess that's okay.
That's true. That's true. All right, we have a listener. We have a main topic, I guess, right?
¶ Handling Employee Departures
Which is fitting since Josh is out. But other than Josh, what do you do when employees leave or go on extended vacations during summer? So not in particular tech departments, not in particular, Josh, but just employees in general that are leaving because of retirement, because of whatever, or you just know if they're going to be out for a month or two weeks or three weeks. What do you do? Mark, you kind of made us a little bit of a list to chuck through. I'll let you leave that if you want to.
Yeah. I mean, the great news about working in education is you always get plenty of advance notice when people are leaving and taking on vacations. And no, obviously, we have to deal with a lot of these things we have to deal with after the fact. But when it comes to departing employees and people who are leaving your district or moving, I always recommend, first and foremost, to have a system and a structure to suspend accounts so that it is about the system and not about you.
I would frequently get somebody reached out and said, oh, my last day was yesterday and my account got suspended. Like, why'd you do that? And I'm like, remember, it's the system is doing it automatically. It's based on your last day. So they don't take it personally. They don't think that you're just trying to push them out the district.
So if you can invest in an automated IDM product to suspend employee accounts as they're leaving, it makes it a much more of a black and white transaction than it does. Why'd you do that too early kind of thing?
I even so we automate students. Well, we do not currently automate staff. Well and there's a lot of layers to impact with that with power and building runs and tech department and how communication works but we do have a process now where communication is We spread to curriculum, to tech, to special services director, and we die on the hill of this one particular document that tells us this is when the person starts and this is when the person's done.
And to a fault sometimes. I know sometimes there's some in my department that I feel like they're probably grumbling at me because I'm not turning off an account or turning it on. Even though we heard the scuttle on the street, we don't use the scuttle anymore. It has to be in that spreadsheet.
And even from our person at the admin building that I deal with mostly directly with that, I always feel like she probably grumbles at me some because I'll ask questions about people not on the spreadsheet because we're waiting. Like we're waiting for a date to be put in there and we're going to follow the date. Like you said, take you out of it. This is the process and this is what we do, whether it's automated or streamlined in some way. Yeah.
I went through a huge project to implement an IDM for staff, and we all knew HR data is the worst. It is consistently the worst in most districts or inconsistent. And when we implemented the IDM product, it was painful. Accounts got suspended when the HR data was ugly. yes um we ran into issues where people would start before hr had even entered them into the system or or complete that stuff yes and so their account wasn't ready.
But as
Painful as that was the first months.
Years it did
Lead to improved hr data where hey you you're not getting your account it's a system you've got to go talk to hr and make sure that they update your employee record so.
It's painful we've had we've had you know we have check boxes in there like they pass background check and they do this and this and I don't make stuff until the check boxes are there and there's checks on them and again like it's not great fun conversations because everyone's staring at the tech guy like why won't he make the account but I keep blaming yeah look it's not me like this this is it yeah and do I as a as as as tech
I'm not going to make an account and give access to student data for a person that hasn't passed a background check and no one in the district would say that's a great idea yeah so again it's documented this is what we're doing guys So the flip of that is this suspend. And the big focus, I think, is what you're saying is whatever that last day is. Yep. That's it. It's hard. It's a it's a not when you heard about it.
Exactly.
Let's put a date to it.
Next up, we've talked about this at length in previous episodes is Google takeout exporting type settings from your your domain is looking at what your settings are and reviewing that with your admin. And we used, we have a Google district and a lot of people use Google Takeout. We recommended it for certain tasks. We turned it off for central office because we felt, hey, look, there's not a lot of central office material that you're going to be bringing from one job to the next.
And Google Takeout would also allow you to export a huge amount of student data. I know that that risk still exists with teachers, but we did enable it for school users and allowed teachers to take their materials with them. What do you guys do?
We have Google takeout off, but, you know, any user can go and right click and click download. So we don't, we don't, we don't do any kind of monitoring of that happening or anything. We don't help for right or for wrong. Right. But we don't help any employee with them leaving.
I like that approach.
We kind of I guess we give them the cardboard box and we say thank you for your service to see you. So so like I just had this right. I had to teach. I had a yeah, I had a person moving from our district to another great person did impact the classroom, didn't impact our school district, going to go off and be great at their new job. And they're wanting to take stuff with them.
I didn't help them like they can. I, you know, I say enough to say like, yeah, you could get in the drive and right click on each thing. And I, you know, I'd use the control key and the shift key. And they didn't like any of what I was saying. Like they wouldn't actually transfer ownership because that sucks when you do that to you download it and then you get to upload it. You know, it's not good, but we've just made it like an ugly process on purpose
for right or for wrong. And I understand Google Takeout would be a beautiful way to do it. But that's where we've landed so far.
Third, geolocking your accounts and systems. There's different ways of doing this depending on what you're using as your authentication method. But if you can keep your accounts limited to within the United States, that's a very helpful thing to do. We've talked about this with some of the different features you have in Microsoft as well as Google.
I think it's also a nice thing so that you get to know where other people are going on shiny vacations while you're sitting at home in their school district because they got to call you and say I'm in Barbados.
I literally just had this we have three of our folks that are in Guatemala it's actually for submission work or something it's working with a school down there and they got down there and again this is layered because they're wanting to look at some school resources while they're working this other school that's not my school's problem again that's layered you should really use probably your personal Google account if you want to do
the whole right click and download put it on your personal that you're going to present to the school in Guatemala whatever is the hot take they got down there and they're wanting to check their Gmail or whatever maybe in a right in a not related to the thing way whatever but uh they were taken aback that they got down there and Couldn't do anything.
I'm sorry.
And I had to like go through those steps with them and do some, do some education, which I think all of these things so far, even I think I probably just preached that myself. I've not, I've never shared like spread the word. I don't like, I don't really like prep the person leaving on. I don't do a proactive thing of like, Hey, and if you're thinking about moving docs, this is what you do.
Just like the geolock i i've never educated my people on how we geolock stuff yeah i guess a little bit of shame on me for you know the banter that we have in the tech office like why do they think these idiots say they thought they could go to another country and it you're in the you're in the heart of russia you really think you should get to your school email i
Did have a.
Principal i should educate for sure i
Did have a principal mentioned that she was going on a trip. I said, oh, I'll open it up. So we have an exception process, right? Where you can allow it. I'll make sure that you can get in your email. And she was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Keep it blocked. I need my time.
I will share. And I loved, well, I love that I can tell the story, I think. So I just took a trip with my wife to Mexico for several days. You know, I bring my work laptop just in case something's happening the whole bit. And I had a day where I needed to get on and do some work. So open up laptop. Okay. You know, I'm on this resort's guest wifi. So I'm going to do some VPN, whatever is ETNA, whatever action.
But I couldn't, I can't check my, you know, I can't check my email, like on my phone and stuff or on my laptop. So I gotta, I gotta do my steps to, Get through that. Okay, I need to get into a computer. Okay, we have steps in place that that's not allowed. So I do a lot of make it work for Chris steps, very multilayered. And again, I'm frustrated, but then I'm not frustrated because this is beautiful.
This is exactly what the experience should be like because I'm sitting by a pool in Mexico trying to get on a random computer to fix a thing. It should be really hard. Very nice. Yeah, there should be security in place, of course.
And then a couple of little small things, communicating your tech collection protocols. I can't tell you how many times a teacher would say, oh, I just thought my laptop is mine after I leave the district. I'm like, no, no, you didn't. So as much as you can, make sure teachers know before the summer if they are leaving, what they are to do with their laptop. Because a lot of times you don't know who is leaving until they have left.
So if at least teachers know they're supposed to return it either at the beginning or the end in my district our teachers contract ran through to august 31st or you know the end of the summer so they were required to or or allowed to keep their laptop through the end of the summer, but if you need to do with the beginning summer you should just make teach make sure teachers know what their expectations are for returning stuff yeah.
We have some real uh trickery we have to do sometimes. If you work at the middle school and then you're becoming a high school teacher, your device belongs to the middle school. So there has to be a moment where you turn in one and you get the new. Or there's moments there where you're transferring and the person that's going to replace you at the middle school is starting earlier than what you're moving to high school. And we have limited inventory.
Communication, I think, fixes all of what I just said.
Yeah and not just communication like being whatever hard nose like this date blah blah blah but communication like hey are you available this week to bring this device by and when they say no that you're not losing your mind on them like work it out because it is a big we i'm i'm i'm big into like we want our students and our staff to have ownership in their device especially with their mobile device so like i'm okay with how their heart kind of hurts when they got to turn in
the thing because they're getting a new thing and they're nervous like that means that they had pride or whatever like that they own that device so uh yeah i think don't be a jerk about collection don't be a jerk again that that person that's retiring that's worked for the district for 30 plus years don't make their last days with tech miserable where you're like you have three days and turn your device in tomorrow, uh, communicate well, uh, with them respect you're communicating with.
Yeah, I had so many colleagues that I would consider friends. And sometimes people leave under good circumstances and sometimes it's bad. And I always try to keep that transition as professional as possible. And this is about the transaction. And I think people respected me for it. I never got any slack from people when I was doing that. But I tried to keep it as straightforward. And this is just about I'm doing my job. And people were always respectful of that.
We've we've honestly had two and it's not so much the case i'd say in the last several years but uh where sometimes a teacher would leave one building for another and the tech that they're leaving is absolutely better than the tech that they're going to inherit uh and they want to take stuff and they want to struggle and again it's not about yeah chris's whatever on what device you're getting. This is just, this is policy. This is procedure.
Uh, it is what it is. And, and again, treating the person with, uh, respect and understanding, you can acknowledge that they're going from nice laptop to crappy. I mean, you can have some conversations about that, but, uh, yeah, just being the same, uh, and, and giving a good customer service experience.
Yeah. And the last one is, it's a very unique idea. I got it from another district out West And they have a classroom reset week where what they do is their techs go from building to building and classroom to classroom. And they divide classrooms into two categories. One is just a normal teacher is staying in that room. They'll go in. They'll make sure that everything turns on correctly.
They have interactive boards that are hardwired in. They take the wires and they put them in a nice, nice bundle on the side and hang them by the board and do just a basic kind of clean down of the technologies that's in there. And the second flavor is if they know that the classroom is going to occupy a brand new teacher, they'll do a much more deeper reset. They'll reset all the hardware and software that's in that room.
They'll make sure that the bulb is working on the projector or the screen is in working condition. So they have a checklist and it's a good way for them to work with the principal as well as the principal gives them an update of this teacher's leaving, this person is moving classrooms. So they have a much better idea and they spend a week going through all the classrooms in the district.
When teachers come back in August or July or whenever you come back, they know that they're coming back to a consistent experience. And so you're less likely to get tickets at the end of the school year. But it's great what they've done. I mean, I know a lot of people do this, but what this particular district has done is made a checklist that is a basic clean down of normal classroom and a much more in-depth cleaning. I use cleaning, but kind of refresh for the changing of the guard classrooms.
Cool idea. I have two thoughts.
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Like you're saying, like, hey, let's talk about your room and what's in it. Hey, let's go ahead and turn on the projector, make sure the brightness is still good.
Yeah because yeah we get that a lot where new teacher comes in and they do get new teacher treatment which isn't always you know like sometimes new teachers come they just want to move everything around for no they're just excited um but there's realness to that where old teacher uh never did a support ticket on the projector and how dim it was old teacher never talked about how the smart board's not been working for two years at that particular part of the board. So that is cool.
¶ Upcoming Events and Conferences
Maybe a cool idea to like literally schedule time with your new folks. Just go over the tech in the room. Yeah, I like it.
All right. Well, if you've got any great ideas for the summer, send us an email of what you're doing, anything unique. And if we've got some cool ideas, we can follow up on another episode or do a K2 Tech Pro article.
Mark, you're going to hang out with Missouri folks in a couple weeks at Midwest Tech Talk. I'm excited for you to come down. It's game show themed. Are you going to wear like a game show suit?
What's a game show suit.
Look it up on like amazon like you know like a bright you know like gold the
Fact that you just said look it up on amazon means that you're going to be wearing.
A gold suit doesn't it who knows man who knows anyway midwesttechtalk midwesttechtalk.com it's july 20th 21st and 22nd uh mark will be there i think josh is going to be there i'll be there the k12 tech pro crew will be there Our friends at Lightspeed will be there. They're going to show off their Lightspeed product, Lightspeed Signal, that can show off device network and app issues. I'm actually doing a Lightspeed Signal demo here soon.
Fortinet will be there as well. You can email fortinetpodcast at fortinet.com. But our friend Chris over at Fortinet will be there. And many, many more. We don't do the vetting like ISTE, but we do vet all the vendors there. They have to prove that they are already working with schools and it's actually our attendees that pick who the sponsors will be. So pretty cool, but we got that towards the end of July.
But then in where else we're going to go, we're going to go to Georgia and that's coming up quick. That is July 8th through the 10th. So I emailed them cause we said, okay, It's G-A-M-E-I-S, okay? Yeah. And I've not been there. So I say game-is or gam-is. So I asked them, and the spelling I got in the email was game space I-S-S-S-S. That's game is, you would say. Don't you think?
Okay.
Game is. The game is conference. in Georgia. We're going to hang out with folks there. They've given us like 10, 12 people we're going to interview. That's all three of us. And then we're going to present a session there as well. You can check out K12 Tech Pro for details on that if you click on events. I think that's all I got, Mark. You got anything else?
I got nothing.
All right. Well, send us an email. Tell your friends about us. You can email our professional email address, info at k12techtalkpodcast.com. Or if you want a less secure email address, it's k12techtalk at gmail.com.
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.