January 15, 2026 • 43 mins
Hosts Josh, Chris, and Mark unpack a week of wild headlines and K12 tech policy: viral AI images that complicated a search for wild vervet monkeys in St. Louis, Denver Public Schools’ decision to block ChatGPT for students, and a preview of a Senate hearing on kids and screen time.
They discuss a Texas district fighting state regulators over bell‑to‑bell phone bans, cybersecurity warnings about teen recruitment by criminal hacking groups, and district‑level debates over academic integrity, AI pilots (including Gemini), and practical controls schools need before adopting consumer‑grade LLMs.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
On this week's episode of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, Grok brings AI monkeys to St. Louis
(00:06):
while ChatGPT brings headaches to Denver. We preview the Senate hearing on kids and
screen time while a district down in Texas fights back against bell-to-bell phone policies.
Thanks for listening.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast. This is episode 246.
Nice.
(00:27):
My name is Josh, tech director here in mid-Missouri, which, sidebar, we're 15 seconds in. There
are wild, vervet monkeys on the loose in the city of St. Louis, and I saw that. They've
made national news. Just Google St. Louis wild monkeys on the loose. The city has come
(00:52):
out and said that AI videos and pictures are hindering the search. They can't tell
what's real and what's fake, so they have called off the search for these four vervet
monkeys that escaped a house in north St. Louis city. At some point this week, they
picked up a goat, so there was a goat and four monkeys wandering the streets of St.
(01:14):
Louis wild. I have a theory. Actually, I have two theories. My first theory is that
they are taking up arms to free Tanya out of jail in St. Louis. Shout out Tanya. Chimp
crazy Tanya. Yes, Tanya, our hearts are with you. My second theory is this is an AI-generated
(01:36):
photo gone wrong that someone posted to social media and the news in St. Louis picked it
up and ran with it without verifying it. Like there are no monkeys in a goat? I cannot
confirm. Hang on a second. Anyone has seen. So the police are searching for monkeys in
St. Louis, but they've called off the search because there's too many AI images of monkeys.
(01:57):
Has anybody validated that there were actually monkeys in St. Louis? That's what I'm saying.
Oh my God. This is the world we live in. I don't know if anyone ever saw these four vervet.
Two and a half foot tall, cute, cuddly monkeys. Common monkey. One of the news stations was
(02:20):
interviewing this guy and he's like, yeah, they looked really cute until I saw one. I saw a
picture of one in somebody's car. I'm like, dude, that was that had to be AI. Was there a photo of
the monkeys wearing a bikini? I don't think so. So we know this didn't come from Twitter. Okay.
Yeah. I was having way too much fun. I think I sent you gentlemen, my Sora video last night
(02:46):
that I created of me playing with monkeys and the goat on the arch grounds in St. Louis. Well,
I just posted another video on the Facebook. Maybe I'll have Chris share this on the pod
socials of the reason why the monkeys have hidden so well is because Bigfoot has taken
them under his arm and is showing them all of his hiding places. I wonder what kind of people
(03:12):
like do all the fake AI stuff to mess with people. Mark, do you have any ideas? Like,
like what kind of personality do you think those people have? I wonder who starts the
misinformation. I even posted last night that, you know, I'm the reason why we need more data
centers, because I am Mark. That is inappropriate. Mark. Mark is sharing photos of monkeys wearing
(03:38):
bikinis. Inappropriate Mark. So yeah, Chris, you're here with me. Sorry. Like I said,
jumping off the rails early. Chris is another tech director here in mid Missouri. Hello, Chris.
Hey, what's up? I haven't seen any monkeys. Well, yeah. And then we're goat or well,
you're you're more likely to see a goat. I just want to say we're approaching five
minutes already into the episode. That segment, this opening was brought to you by rise vision,
(04:06):
a proud sponsor of the K 12 tech podcast, they they are your all in one platform for digital
signage, screen sharing and emergency alerts. It's one platform to do all that stuff. I'm gonna post
a couple links about how you can work with their interactive digital signage, do their screen
sharing and how all that can interface for your emergency alerts. Thank you, rise vision for being
(04:30):
a part of this very technical podcast here. I'll tie it all together. I'm ready for this. If you
needed to send out an emergency alert on your digital signs about vervet monkeys outside and
you're on lockdown because there are wild vervet monkeys trying to get in the school, you could do
that with rise vision. Thank you. We needed that, Josh. I know. I'm here. I am here to serve our
(04:54):
sponsors. Chris, you were saying before before we started, you had kind of a rough day.
Hold on before Chris, you unpack that one. There's there's some absolute breaking news from
online. I think we should just jump into right now. The monkeys have been spotted in a classroom
wearing bikinis. I can't while configuring their rise vision interactive. Oh, they are showing some
(05:20):
photos right now rise vision so easy to configure even a monkey in a bikini can do it. That's right.
Okay, Chris, go go right ahead. Anyways, Matt, sysadmin Matt at my school district end of the day
he comes in and just kind of like lays in the chair that's in front of my desk because we were
he lays in it. He was pretty much laying down. I allowed it is fine. Yeah, we are still without a
(05:45):
technician but we have selected a technician and so that's exciting because we need that just as
quick as we can get there. But at one point today, our website was down. I believe 20 less than 30
more than 20 wireless access points were down. A huddle camera was down. Did you just say less than
20 more than 30? Yes, that's the kind of day it was. The the wireless thing ended up being it was
(06:12):
in. I won't get way into the weeds with it. But we had a DHCP one of our scopes decided to to crap
out, which is what brought down so leases were running out on these APS and they were just
dropping having a good old time. That had nothing to do with the website going down that was with
our host that was just happened to be at the exact same time. And then the huddle camera ended up
(06:36):
being related into all of that but huddle in all of its greatness and all that it does for schools
and athletics doesn't let you get into a GUI to like check on anything. You can't know get network
settings or anything with that stupid thing. So no, shout out huddle. We wouldn't we wouldn't let
you sponsor even if you wanted to huddle. If huddle is down, God knows you have to close the
(06:57):
school like it was a big deal today. If the huddle cam is not working, cancel school. That's a very,
very Missouri thing. I cannot say that huddle in New England has the same reputation or the same
the same urgency. Oh, you don't you hate sports? Well, you have the Patriots. We don't have a
football team in St. Louis. No, I'm just I'm just saying from like, when I've visited you guys out
(07:22):
in Missouri, the your sports, stadiums and facilities are at a whole other bar above what
we have out here. Did you see my stadium? I'll have to send you pictures of my stadium. Let me
start by saying the fact that you talk about them as stadiums is already putting you guys well above
New England. Like you say, you say Jim we say I say fieldhouse. Yeah, you say field Josh says
(07:47):
stadium. And we're not even we're just Missouri man. Yeah, I'm 3000 kids. Yeah, yeah. Chris, you
were one time running internet to your like concession stand. And I just had to laugh about
that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I set up a new we have a hidden SS ID that lets us run our concession
(08:08):
infrastructure. Yep. We have like three or four POS stations in our concession stands. Anyway,
thanks for asking. It was a good day. It was a good day. And then you called me and I almost blew
you off. But you had a real you had a legitimate problem that you needed help with. Yeah, Mark, I
called Josh and I never called Josh and I called Josh and he was I think even said what what do you
(08:32):
want? No, I don't. I didn't. I want to talk about infinite campus. Like I I was I was rude, but I
neighboring schools like helping each other. That's a whole new I won't even dig into the weeds
with that either. But yeah, that's a crazy story. Because that's that's still pending. And I don't
want to necessarily misspeak on it. But infinite campus, we have a custom transcript that we paid
(08:56):
for it to be customized and we got it. So now in infinite campus, I'm hoping this gets fixed. Okay.
I don't think it does because I already got some emails back. But we're excited to see it. It's a
new link, like, you know, side menu, infinite campus, you click on like grading, you click on
transcript. And then it asks you to log in again. Within infinite campus, you're already logged in,
(09:19):
but it asks you to log in again, with a different set of credentials. And that there's only one, one
set of those credentials that they want you to share with everyone that needs to get to that.
That's how the email read. And I didn't really want so I called Josh and he's like, No, ours isn't
like that. But I got some confirmation that that's what they're currently expecting.
(09:41):
We were asking my CIS person about it. And I think she actually cussed.
She did. Yeah, Mark, the lovely CIS lady that she's awesome. She asked Josh, like, to confirm
etiquette framework. Yeah, if she could cuss to me with me at me. Yeah. He was like, Yeah, he was
(10:02):
like, absolutely. Anyway, that's kind of an ongoing thing, because I don't know why that's
working that way. And I'm not really into shared accounts with our student data. So we'll see how
that plays. But so infinite campus, if you want to sponsor, we wouldn't have you either.
(10:22):
What's the CEO's name? Shout out Charlie, Charlie. Anyway, just kidding. No, he's joking. Not
really.
Why don't you talk about a few sponsors before we get into the news that we do like,
(10:43):
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tech talk.
And now for the we've already covered the vervet monkey news, man, Mark, what what other what other
news do you have? Mark, I don't know what could measure up.
(11:29):
And that's it, I guess. There's actually a lot going on. So let's start at I like to start with the
federal level. What's going on at the feds? Well, Ted Cruz is announced a gigantic hearing on
Thursday of this week is all about screen time. And it is appears to be kind of a big advertisement
(11:51):
for his kids off social media act, which is a bipartisan bill that Ted Cruz is submitting with
Brian Schatz from Hawaii Democrat from Hawaii. So, you know, I expect that this is going to be
pretty bipartisan. But he has also talked about, you know, we really need to kind of bring this
fight to schools as well. Because and this is where I'm going to read a quote that I know that Josh is
(12:13):
going to just be very furious about the very end. This hearing will also explore how to empower parents
who often struggle to monitor and limit screen time at a time when the US education fueled by federal
subsidies and incentives is providing personal devices to children. Josh, are you giving out personal
devices? Well, okay.
(12:34):
grain of salt here. An uneducated idiot could see a Chromebook as a personal device. I would like
to know what federal dollars are being allocated directly to Chromebooks because we haven't found those
dollars. So I would love some help finding those dollars if Mr. Cruz would like to help us. Oh, he's
(12:56):
100% referring to Essar funding. Oh, get off it. Are you going to watch Mark? Are you going to watch the
hearing? I have it on my calendar. If I can listen to in the background. I will. Yeah, it'll be
interesting. I am I am not discounting the need to push the want to limit screen time, especially at the lower
grade levels elementary through probably fourth, fifth grade. But there is a handoff if and we kind of talked
(13:22):
about this, I think last week with with listener Lawrence's email. If schools are indeed preparing kids for life
after high school, you cannot ignore the technology in use in the real world. I don't know how else to put that. But I
do think there is a heavy medium there, especially at the grade at the lower grade levels. We've talked about this
(13:46):
ad nauseum already. And we're probably gonna be talking about this for quite a lot this year. I agree. I think every
single educator out there is saying that the screen time amount that we currently have going on in schools at home is
just is just too much. It's not healthy. I still think it's going to be a challenge to find that balance. But we do I think we
all agree we need to find that balance. But putting numbers to paper is going to be very, very tricky.
(14:11):
Agree. And you can't legislate what happens in the home either. Like, you know, parents in these groups can come out and say
that there's too much screen time at home as well. Well, that's fine. At some point, the parent has to parent and say, leave
your device in the kitchen while you're going to bed. Like there, you know, there are some boundaries that need to be set by the adult in
the room, too.
(14:32):
I think a lot of parents would say I'm struggling with the inbetweens. Just as schools struggle when kids are in the hallway, when
they're not in a classroom, that's when they're pulling out their cell phone. When kids are on the bus, when they're walking home,
that's when they're struggling. That's the hard part to think is that we're, there tends to be this, well, it's over here, the
problems over there, it's the inbetweens that tend to be the bigger issues for me. But anyways, on that note, another story from Texas. So
(14:59):
Texas passed a screen time law that required schools to ban cell phones, just as many other states did. There is one district, though, that's
passed a policy that allows students to use their cell phones in between classrooms. Well, the Texas Department of Education has
said no, you need to ban them from bell to bell. That school district at their most recent school board meeting this week said, no, this is our
(15:25):
policy, we've decided how it's going to be, we're going to stand up and fight. So now you actually have a school board talk about legal
action against the Texas Department of Education because they feel that their school policy on cell phones is sufficient and matches the
definition from the state. So we'll see if these two go up against each other on a matter as simple as kids using cell phones in the hallway.
(15:46):
So help me here. Was that a state law that said bell to bell or that's just Desi's take on the rule? The Missouri legislation called out bell to bell,
like it was beginning of day to end of day. There was no questioning that. I'd be curious with the Texas legislation if it's that granular or that
(16:09):
detailed. The requirements as laid out by the Texas law is the policy must prohibit student use of personal communication devices, include cell phones,
tablets, smartwatches, etc. on school property during the school day. I would interpret that to be a bell to bell. I would agree. If it's on school
property, I would agree with you. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with this district. All right. One quick cybersecurity update. There is a
(16:35):
security company named Panda Security. Well, they released a white paper about how they are confirming or they have confirmed that criminal hacking groups
like Scattered Spider and Black Cat are actually recruiting and hiring teenagers to work for their criminal organization and carry out parts of or entire
cyber attacks. So they are seeing recruitment efforts in the United States and Canada. Hacking organizations are basically trying to recruit native English
(17:01):
speakers. Seems like these hacking groups are often located overseas. And so they're trying to find people who speak the native language, might be able to
navigate a little bit easier. And so they're approaching teenagers, I would say, between the ages of 16 to 21. Seems like the target age that they're going
for per the article. And they're looking at Telegram, Discord, gaming websites, plain text, smartphone messaging, offering them jobs to join their
(17:28):
criminal organization and help them with cyber attacks. You know, I wonder, I wonder if this is a friendly job offer or if this is like forced coercion. You know what
I mean? Yeah, I tried to look for that particular lens. And I could not tell if this is them having joined the group knowingly or if this was just like it was like you
mentioned, here's a friendly job offer. They did reference there have been some teenagers who have been tried by the FBI who have been caught. I would say that those
(17:56):
are more extreme cases where these are these are teenagers or young adults who know what they're doing. So yeah, I can't tell from the article whether or not this is a
they know what they're doing, or they're just being pulled along.
Well, my concern would be, you know, we this extortion thing was a thing for a while. And it could be rather than asking for money now, okay, well, we're gonna hold this over
(18:21):
your head. And you're gonna do this dirty work for us, or we're gonna release this. And I could see it being that way, too. Like, it's a forced conscription kind of thing.
All right. And finally, Kosen, we're gonna be with Kosen in a couple of months here, but they have released from their advisory board, the three most important hurdles, accelerators and
enablers for 2026. So kind of their their way of predicting what are the main themes for this current year?
(18:47):
I'm an enabler.
Why don't we start with the enablers because I'm surrounded by them. What do you think are going to be the three most important tech enablers to leverage in schools in 2026?
A friendly IT director.
You know, that didn't make the list.
AI.
Yeah, number one.
(19:07):
Oh, sweet.
He's read, he's reading the agenda.
Data and information visualizations, and tools for privacy and safety online. I think all those make sense. I think that's exactly what schools are looking for.
Yep.
Top three most important accelerators. Building the human capacity of leaders is number one. Changing attitudes towards demonstrated learning and then learner agency.
(19:33):
What's what do those mean?
Help me out. Yeah, help the teacher in the room needs to help the nerds in the room. What is two and three?
Changing attitudes towards demonstrating learning. I think this is in reference to artificial intelligence and how we're used to demonstrating learning via I ask you a question and you give me the answer.
And now regurgitation, we need to change how we ask students to demonstrate their learning, knowing that there are tools that can do this for for them.
(20:01):
Mm hmm.
Learner agency just means that the student, the learner is a part of their curriculum. They're a part of their learning process. Rather than just receiving content and receiving instruction, they are dictating what their their learning pathway looks like.
I'm so glad we have a teacher in the room.
Yeah, thank you, Mark.
Oh, thanks, guys.
And then the hurdles, what are the hurdles we got to get over? Well, as always, attracting and retaining educators and I.T. professionals, ensuring cyber safety and cybersecurity.
(20:31):
And then a new one this year is critical media literacy.
So helping students to determine what is real and what is fake.
Stinking monkeys in bikinis, man.
Monkeys in bikinis, not real.
In St. Louis.
Is it?
Well, you know that number one, attracting and retaining educators and I.T. professionals this week.
(20:54):
Again, I heard of another rural small district in Missouri that their I.T. director left for greener pastures at a bigger district in, you know, roughly 30 minutes away.
The original district, the small rural district, is having a difficulty recruiting a qualified candidate to come in and take that position for the dollars that they're willing to offer.
(21:20):
I think this is going to continue to be a large trend.
And it's unfortunate.
I don't know what the answer is.
Yeah. All right.
There's only one other article for the news, but we'll save that one for the main topic, because that is one heck of a conversation.
Chris. Yes.
You want to there a last sponsor for the night?
(21:43):
There's probably a couple more in my pocket.
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All right. So Mark hinted at this being a big topic.
And I think there's going to be lots of little rabbit holes and hopefully discussions that go from week to week.
And I think Mark is already working on lining up a discussion for next week about this.
(22:32):
And he he broke this story last night to Chris and I.
So we'll let him introduce the groundwork for this.
Well, so we have talked about chat GPT.
Josh, you have talked about rolling out AI for your students.
Well, one district, the Denver Public Schools, which is around 90,000 students, the largest district in Colorado, obviously, has came out with a public announcement banning chat GPT for students and saying that they're going to be re-evaluating whether or not they want it open for teachers.
(23:02):
Their reasons, and that's the conversation tonight, is first off, chat GPT is releasing new features, including a group chat where up to 20 people can participate in a single chat lens.
We'll be open.
And Denver is saying, well, we don't quite know if there's going to be any controls for us.
And this feels like a hotbed for bullying.
(23:23):
And we are seeing a lot of cyberbullying, so we're not going to take any chances.
And then chat GPT famously last year said that they're going to start to allow adult material on their website.
And so do you allow a chat GPT or do you allow an AI program into your district that in the consumer version, and I want to be very clear that there's a difference between the consumer and the school district version, there's usually more controls and security.
(23:46):
But in the consumer version, there could be very inappropriate and adult content.
With the whole grok bikini situation going on right now, we've got LLMs.
For me, from from my perspective, feels like some going down the dark side and some staying above water.
What do we do about this?
And in K-12, is Denver just the first of many districts that are going to start blocking chat GPT because of because of some political decisions they've made?
(24:14):
The chat GPT thing with the.
The room, the group room thing, have have we confirmed or has chat open AI come out with a statement that that feature is not going to the education side, do you know, Mark?
So I don't know the answer to that one.
I would assume that the adult material one wouldn't make it to the education side.
(24:38):
But, you know, it's that fine, it's that weird walk of are you going to ban something because of the consumer product?
Yeah, but in the education product, it's good.
You know, I was talking with somebody today, Chris, in our Discord channel about what there's nothing that would really force a staff member to log into the education version of chat GPT versus the consumer version of chat GPT.
(25:06):
So there is a a world or a process or, you know, steps where a faculty member might have access to chat GPT in a personal account that has the adult mode turned on or even well, that you got to be verified.
You got to be a verified adult to have adult mode.
Are we going to see more schools is is Denver going to go down that path of outwardly blocking chat GPT access for staff?
(25:34):
I think. So if you're going that route because of adult mode, do you block Twitter for staff?
Because we all know you can find adult material on Twitter, let alone grok getting editing videos to put people in bikinis like where, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
(25:56):
Are you are you going down that route for all of these other tools that have illicit material on the consumer side?
I've always thought Vimeo is a great example.
Oh, great example of adult content.
And what do you do with it?
And here Vimeo is higher quality videos than YouTube and a lot of sites that are great educational sites have Vimeo embedded into them.
(26:21):
That's always been that rocky conversation about, well, what are we doing with Vimeo?
And a lot of schools get torn up.
Like, I don't think I necessarily do what my neighbor does with with Vimeo.
That's hard.
I think the hard part, though, for me, I'll first start with just practically speaking.
I don't know the difference when I'm in my work versus my personal Google account.
(26:43):
Yeah.
I have to look and check.
And so if you have if the consumer version of chat GPT is as dangerous as allowing somebody to make pornography, but the school version is is censored.
If it's up to the user to just double check their browser, make sure they're in the right version.
There's there's a recipe for disaster, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Somebody writing or saying the wrong thing.
(27:04):
And that's that's not just about pornography.
That is just in general that consumer versions of LLMs have more freedoms than the school versions.
But, you know, we've talked a lot about how chat GPT has rolled out the tools,
and there's not really any discussion about how is the district going to manage this?
(27:24):
And if they're not really going to start from a conversation of districts need to maintain
control over their environment, then I don't feel comfortable or safe using a tool like that.
That's kind of where the discussion landed today was if I if I'm at school and I'm logged into my
school account and I go to Gemini dot Google dot com, it's forcibly signing me into Gemini as my
(27:48):
school account. If I go to chat GPT dot com or, you know, opening it, whatever the URL for
chat GPT is, there is no guarantee that I'm signed into my school GPT account or my personal account.
Like you said, Mark, you are you're going to rely on the staff member to pause and look
(28:10):
before they do anything.
So I'd say first and foremost, for me, the decision point is how easy is it going to be
for a user to accidentally use the wrong version? And could that introduce bad content into our
curriculum or into our environment? The second question is, do I as the district have the
(28:30):
ability to take action if something bad does happen in this environment? And then the third,
which is kind of where I land right now, I don't think I really want to support companies that are
openly making the Internet dangerous and harmful for kids by bringing that tool into our schools.
Yeah. And that's I think that's a big difference between like a Vimeo or social like like Twitter.
(28:55):
Those sites that we debate about are like free sites that we're using. Yeah. Chat GPT like we
are. That is a school district deciding to give a company. Yeah. Subscription money
yearly, annually. They also host adult content. Yeah, that's a that's interesting.
(29:18):
That starts to feel a little bit different than just the debate on do you open up Vimeo
because it's got high quality videos on it. Yeah. Well, I remember years ago, geez,
right after I was hired at my district, I had a pretty sizable argument with a teacher about
(29:38):
enabling Twitter for student access. And I'm like, you don't have to get real crazy with your search
on Twitter to find wildly inappropriate thing. And this was back 2015. This is we're not doing
this. We're not going down that route. So it should districts have that same conversation
(30:01):
for teacher access as well for tools like Twitter, where that is crazy erotica or porn,
whatever you want to call it, is crazy accessible without much effort. I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's hard because I think we are trying to uphold a moral standard in terms of
(30:23):
what we bring into our schools and at least take reasonable efforts and steps to protect
your kids from inappropriate content. That's a very gray area. It's a very gray statement. It
is what it is. When you have a company who is and I'll take Grok, for example, not only allowing you
to make images of people in bikinis of other people, right? And we know that there's been
(30:45):
some pretty serious issues of adults making content of other non-consenting adults in
bikinis and there have been minors. With the head of the company openly mocking this trend,
for me, that's like a big line that says, OK, this isn't about I don't want somebody to
accidentally make inappropriate content. You are intentionally deciding and making the decision
(31:09):
to make a platform and produce a platform that allows for encourages inappropriate material.
That has no place in K-12. Yeah, I was just going to say the unfortunate part about that, too,
is for years districts were pushing teachers to be on Twitter and using that as a communication
method for parents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. CHAC-GBT, on the other hand, I'm going to be very interested
(31:35):
to see how they handle this adult content on their site. I understand they're making tools.
They may not necessarily make it safe and easy for districts, but if they are going to go down
the road that Grok is going down and either allow or encourage inappropriate content,
then there's no way they can expect to have any sort of platform within K-12 education. And I would
(32:00):
encourage everybody to block them. So I I don't even like the 20 person chat room for education
like that. To me, that's got disaster written all over it at the student level. And again,
we don't have confirmation whether or not that's going to be allowed for students.
Surely there's a checkbox, right? Well, you saw the rollout for free GPT for schools.
(32:24):
But this comes down to yeah, this comes down to, you know, companies just dropping platforms and
dropping tools and functionality into classrooms. But, you know, when it comes to 20 people in a
room, it's just like the issues we went through five years ago when we all started using
video conferencing and Zoom bombing took hold. Yeah. Well, you put you put 20 people in a room
(32:46):
with adult content turned on. Oh, yeah. It's more than monkeys in bikinis.
But it just it goes down to like the reason Zoom took off in K-12 was because they were the first
and only platform that gave schools controls over Zoom bombing. Yeah. Or they got a whole room.
(33:10):
Yeah. So if Chachi PT can release these features and give districts control back,
they could do OK. But if they don't release controls and they start mixing in inappropriate
content, bye bye. It's going to be really interesting. It almost feels like we're back
in those 2020 days of fast and furious feature sets being released. Like we we got to have
(33:37):
these features. We got to reach these people that are remote. Yeah. Google meet. The links
are all over the place and they stay active after the teacher leaves. And but we're shooting them
out all over the place and all that clean up that take place afterwards. It feels like we're back
in that innovation cycle of I don't care if it works right. Get it out. And we're we're back
(33:57):
to that cycle of feature sets being released every week before anybody really thinks,
do we should this really be in a school? Should this should this feature really be added to this
tool that is already wildly adopted in a number of schools? You know, yeah, it feels like we're
back there again. And even even with the general public stuff, I feel like, hey, let's make it
(34:21):
where there's 20 users that can collaborate. That's like the whole like let's put a bunch of,
you know, rats in a cage and see what they do. Like if we put in 20, let's see what happens.
And hey, I don't know that this is really ready, but let's go ahead and turn on the adult content
and see what they do with it. It's like early and we're turning and we always we've talked
(34:41):
to this before. Technology tends to new technology. When it comes out, it tends to see the dark side
before it gets to the light because a bunch of that's what techs often do. We do the dark stuff
and then we end up getting jobs in K-12 tech and are good people. But that's what this feels like
(35:02):
is that beginning thing of, yeah, let's just see what all crazy stuff they'll do with it. We'll
fix it as we go. Well, there's the story of VHS and Betamax. Why did VHS win over Betamax?
Well, history of this? Well, I think it's probably the same history of HD DVD versus Blu-ray.
(35:22):
Pornography. Porn. Yeah. Yeah. Porn industry was on Blu-ray, not HD DVD. And that's,
yeah. Porn industry was on the VHS and that's why VHS took hold. I didn't realize that. Yeah.
Yeah. They released exclusively. Sorry. I looked it up. I don't actually have like
pornography industry factoids. Committed to memory. But they said that 80% of all VHS sales
(35:49):
were pornography in the early days of home video. So, yeah.
So maybe. Maybe he's just following the winning model. Yeah. 10 years from now.
As his ex. Yeah. Chet, he's going to kill off Gemini because of porn.
Well, did you see Gemini's big announcement this week? Are there a big win?
(36:12):
Oh, you're going to scare me. What? Oh, yeah. But that wasn't, that was announced back in
November too. I don't understand why this is getting news again now when it was back
at WWDC in November, on November 8th or 4th, whatever it was. They said the same thing there.
I don't remember the details of that. I don't. Yeah. I saw that story yesterday because some
(36:34):
people in the office were talking about it and then we looked it up and it's like, yeah,
they announced that back in November. I don't understand why it's news again.
Hmm. Mark, there was this third point that Denver said about academic integrity,
and I feel like that's a walk back too, that the district has concerns about
just the reliance on AI. And again, that's because this is all new territory for us. But
(36:58):
I thought that's, I think that's interesting that that's a bullet point as well, because
we're either embracing AI and what it's going to do for kids in this new way of learning. You know,
we just read Kosen's things about we're going to, teachers need to teach differently.
Kids need to learn differently now. Yeah. But then Denver appears to be,
well, hold on, maybe we're not ready for that yet. Yeah. Well, Josh, you are ready for that.
(37:22):
And you have started a pilot with Gemini with students.
We have. Just a little bit of background. We've had Notebook LM open all year for our
middle school and high school. I've kind of been pushing a little bit for,
to enable Gemini for a pilot group of high school students. So we did that yesterday,
(37:46):
today, technically, did the whole process of informing parents. We've selected three sections
of our AP U.S. history, as well as a class called Transitions. The teacher in that class
picked like 10 or 15 kids of that class. We have a wide, varying array of students to see what
(38:10):
what helps. And immediately I heard from the teacher in the transition class this morning,
and she said already it's making huge difference for our students that are English language
learners. We've had an influx of kids that speak Chinese and there's a couple other ones that we
don't get a lot of. So it's hard to find materials and translate tools and stuff like that. So
(38:35):
already Gemini is a success for those kids. But look at looking at some of the prompts that kids
are feeding it. And again, we're day one, so not a lot of instruction has taken place on
ethical use, appropriate use, that kind of thing. It's it's what you would expect day one,
you know, image generation, that kind of stuff. And Mark, you and I before the show, we were kind
(38:57):
of talking about that. You know, is that expected? Is that inappropriate? Is that par for the course?
And you had a great point. You said realistically, you're just seeing the typical traffic of what a
high school kid probably types in Google search like this. It's not out of the ordinary. And I
will say I am impressed. I'm happy with the built in guardrails that Gemini has that it will refuse
(39:22):
to answer questions that go too far one way or another. We've seen it happen already that, you
know, I can't. One of the phrases it uses, I won't use stereotypes. It's interesting that those
guardrails are prebuilt and it's hard and fast. And I think I told the story I had my technicians
when I was trying to prove a point about this. I had my technicians using a test student account
(39:48):
and they were trying to get Gemini to go dark with its phrasing and, you know, help give
instructions on self-harm, stuff like that. And it absolutely refused. And my guys got really,
really, really creative on ways on asking, like, write a story about a character who blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. It's interesting the guardrails that are prebuilt into Gemini for
(40:11):
that protection. I just tried to create an image of monkeys in bikinis in St. Louis and it refuses
to do that. So really? Yes. Yeah. I'm in my personal account, too. Thank God for Sora. Yeah.
I did the exact same prompt that I did in Grok just now in Gemini,
my personal account. And nope, it won't do it. That's funny. But anyways, I got some more
(40:35):
pictures of monkeys and bikinis if you're ready to see them. Mark's going to get off here and
tell his wife all about the Vervet monkeys in St. Louis. Well, next week we might be having
some special guests to talk about this one with some more details. So I'm looking forward to next
week. And if you're with OpenAI and you would like to kind of talk about this, is that going
(40:56):
to be available for education accounts? Sam? Mr. Altman, by all means. We know you listen. So
yeah, it'd be great to have Mr. Altman on. Anything else? Anything else good for the cause?
I can talk about where we're going to be going for 2026. Where are we going? Where are you
leading us in 2026, Chris? Well, first and foremost, we want to thank Manage Methods. You
(41:20):
can check out Manage Methods at managemethods.com. They can help you with your student safety with
looking at your drive, your Microsoft environments for what files and what activities going on with
that. A new sponsor for us is IncidentIQ. Check out incidentiq.com. They can help with your support
requests, your assets, your district workflows all into one hub so your tech team can move faster
(41:43):
and classrooms can stay focused on instruction. And then Fortinet, email fortinetpodcast at
fortinet.com. But thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to you guys that listen. We're going to the
Security Symposium, Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium in March. That's down the road. But
here in January, we have the Secure Ed Schools Virtual Conference. I'll put some notes in the
(42:04):
podcast description about that. Mark has a keynote in February in Colorado. I'll put a link to that
in the podcast, too. And then we're going to the K-12 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
the three of us in February as well. So hang out with us on the road if you're at any of those
places that we're going to be at, please. Any other closing thoughts? If not, if you're a
(42:26):
listener and you have a topic or you would like to weigh in on this, this chat GPT. Send us your
pics. No. If you would like to weigh in on this erotica stance with chat GPT or the 20 person room
thing with chat GPT, send us an email. Chris, what's that email info at? K12techtalkpodcast.com.
(42:50):
We would love to get your take on this. We will see you next week.
The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh,
(43:11):
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.
On this week's episode of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, Grok brings AI monkeys to St. Louis
(00:06):
while ChatGPT brings headaches to Denver. We preview the Senate hearing on kids and
screen time while a district down in Texas fights back against bell-to-bell phone policies.
Thanks for listening.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast. This is episode 246.
Nice.
(00:27):
My name is Josh, tech director here in mid-Missouri, which, sidebar, we're 15 seconds in. There
are wild, vervet monkeys on the loose in the city of St. Louis, and I saw that. They've
made national news. Just Google St. Louis wild monkeys on the loose. The city has come
(00:52):
out and said that AI videos and pictures are hindering the search. They can't tell
what's real and what's fake, so they have called off the search for these four vervet
monkeys that escaped a house in north St. Louis city. At some point this week, they
picked up a goat, so there was a goat and four monkeys wandering the streets of St.
(01:14):
Louis wild. I have a theory. Actually, I have two theories. My first theory is that
they are taking up arms to free Tanya out of jail in St. Louis. Shout out Tanya. Chimp
crazy Tanya. Yes, Tanya, our hearts are with you. My second theory is this is an AI-generated
(01:36):
photo gone wrong that someone posted to social media and the news in St. Louis picked it
up and ran with it without verifying it. Like there are no monkeys in a goat? I cannot
confirm. Hang on a second. Anyone has seen. So the police are searching for monkeys in
St. Louis, but they've called off the search because there's too many AI images of monkeys.
(01:57):
Has anybody validated that there were actually monkeys in St. Louis? That's what I'm saying.
Oh my God. This is the world we live in. I don't know if anyone ever saw these four vervet.
Two and a half foot tall, cute, cuddly monkeys. Common monkey. One of the news stations was
(02:20):
interviewing this guy and he's like, yeah, they looked really cute until I saw one. I saw a
picture of one in somebody's car. I'm like, dude, that was that had to be AI. Was there a photo of
the monkeys wearing a bikini? I don't think so. So we know this didn't come from Twitter. Okay.
Yeah. I was having way too much fun. I think I sent you gentlemen, my Sora video last night
(02:46):
that I created of me playing with monkeys and the goat on the arch grounds in St. Louis. Well,
I just posted another video on the Facebook. Maybe I'll have Chris share this on the pod
socials of the reason why the monkeys have hidden so well is because Bigfoot has taken
them under his arm and is showing them all of his hiding places. I wonder what kind of people
(03:12):
like do all the fake AI stuff to mess with people. Mark, do you have any ideas? Like,
like what kind of personality do you think those people have? I wonder who starts the
misinformation. I even posted last night that, you know, I'm the reason why we need more data
centers, because I am Mark. That is inappropriate. Mark. Mark is sharing photos of monkeys wearing
(03:38):
bikinis. Inappropriate Mark. So yeah, Chris, you're here with me. Sorry. Like I said,
jumping off the rails early. Chris is another tech director here in mid Missouri. Hello, Chris.
Hey, what's up? I haven't seen any monkeys. Well, yeah. And then we're goat or well,
you're you're more likely to see a goat. I just want to say we're approaching five
minutes already into the episode. That segment, this opening was brought to you by rise vision,
(04:06):
a proud sponsor of the K 12 tech podcast, they they are your all in one platform for digital
signage, screen sharing and emergency alerts. It's one platform to do all that stuff. I'm gonna post
a couple links about how you can work with their interactive digital signage, do their screen
sharing and how all that can interface for your emergency alerts. Thank you, rise vision for being
(04:30):
a part of this very technical podcast here. I'll tie it all together. I'm ready for this. If you
needed to send out an emergency alert on your digital signs about vervet monkeys outside and
you're on lockdown because there are wild vervet monkeys trying to get in the school, you could do
that with rise vision. Thank you. We needed that, Josh. I know. I'm here. I am here to serve our
(04:54):
sponsors. Chris, you were saying before before we started, you had kind of a rough day.
Hold on before Chris, you unpack that one. There's there's some absolute breaking news from
online. I think we should just jump into right now. The monkeys have been spotted in a classroom
wearing bikinis. I can't while configuring their rise vision interactive. Oh, they are showing some
(05:20):
photos right now rise vision so easy to configure even a monkey in a bikini can do it. That's right.
Okay, Chris, go go right ahead. Anyways, Matt, sysadmin Matt at my school district end of the day
he comes in and just kind of like lays in the chair that's in front of my desk because we were
he lays in it. He was pretty much laying down. I allowed it is fine. Yeah, we are still without a
(05:45):
technician but we have selected a technician and so that's exciting because we need that just as
quick as we can get there. But at one point today, our website was down. I believe 20 less than 30
more than 20 wireless access points were down. A huddle camera was down. Did you just say less than
20 more than 30? Yes, that's the kind of day it was. The the wireless thing ended up being it was
(06:12):
in. I won't get way into the weeds with it. But we had a DHCP one of our scopes decided to to crap
out, which is what brought down so leases were running out on these APS and they were just
dropping having a good old time. That had nothing to do with the website going down that was with
our host that was just happened to be at the exact same time. And then the huddle camera ended up
(06:36):
being related into all of that but huddle in all of its greatness and all that it does for schools
and athletics doesn't let you get into a GUI to like check on anything. You can't know get network
settings or anything with that stupid thing. So no, shout out huddle. We wouldn't we wouldn't let
you sponsor even if you wanted to huddle. If huddle is down, God knows you have to close the
(06:57):
school like it was a big deal today. If the huddle cam is not working, cancel school. That's a very,
very Missouri thing. I cannot say that huddle in New England has the same reputation or the same
the same urgency. Oh, you don't you hate sports? Well, you have the Patriots. We don't have a
football team in St. Louis. No, I'm just I'm just saying from like, when I've visited you guys out
(07:22):
in Missouri, the your sports, stadiums and facilities are at a whole other bar above what
we have out here. Did you see my stadium? I'll have to send you pictures of my stadium. Let me
start by saying the fact that you talk about them as stadiums is already putting you guys well above
New England. Like you say, you say Jim we say I say fieldhouse. Yeah, you say field Josh says
(07:47):
stadium. And we're not even we're just Missouri man. Yeah, I'm 3000 kids. Yeah, yeah. Chris, you
were one time running internet to your like concession stand. And I just had to laugh about
that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I set up a new we have a hidden SS ID that lets us run our concession
(08:08):
infrastructure. Yep. We have like three or four POS stations in our concession stands. Anyway,
thanks for asking. It was a good day. It was a good day. And then you called me and I almost blew
you off. But you had a real you had a legitimate problem that you needed help with. Yeah, Mark, I
called Josh and I never called Josh and I called Josh and he was I think even said what what do you
(08:32):
want? No, I don't. I didn't. I want to talk about infinite campus. Like I I was I was rude, but I
neighboring schools like helping each other. That's a whole new I won't even dig into the weeds
with that either. But yeah, that's a crazy story. Because that's that's still pending. And I don't
want to necessarily misspeak on it. But infinite campus, we have a custom transcript that we paid
(08:56):
for it to be customized and we got it. So now in infinite campus, I'm hoping this gets fixed. Okay.
I don't think it does because I already got some emails back. But we're excited to see it. It's a
new link, like, you know, side menu, infinite campus, you click on like grading, you click on
transcript. And then it asks you to log in again. Within infinite campus, you're already logged in,
(09:19):
but it asks you to log in again, with a different set of credentials. And that there's only one, one
set of those credentials that they want you to share with everyone that needs to get to that.
That's how the email read. And I didn't really want so I called Josh and he's like, No, ours isn't
like that. But I got some confirmation that that's what they're currently expecting.
(09:41):
We were asking my CIS person about it. And I think she actually cussed.
She did. Yeah, Mark, the lovely CIS lady that she's awesome. She asked Josh, like, to confirm
etiquette framework. Yeah, if she could cuss to me with me at me. Yeah. He was like, Yeah, he was
(10:02):
like, absolutely. Anyway, that's kind of an ongoing thing, because I don't know why that's
working that way. And I'm not really into shared accounts with our student data. So we'll see how
that plays. But so infinite campus, if you want to sponsor, we wouldn't have you either.
(10:22):
What's the CEO's name? Shout out Charlie, Charlie. Anyway, just kidding. No, he's joking. Not
really.
Why don't you talk about a few sponsors before we get into the news that we do like,
(10:43):
we do like visor and visors. I mean, visor has the visor visor. We love visor. Beyond that they do
asset management. So check out visor dot cloud slash k 12 tech talk. They can manage your one to
one they can do your inventory just in general all your inventory not just tech inventory. They can
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(11:07):
Lenovo to your HP whatever brands you're working with connect to those warranty services and you
can work all within visor to take care of your devices. So check out visor dot cloud slash k 12
tech talk.
And now for the we've already covered the vervet monkey news, man, Mark, what what other what other
news do you have? Mark, I don't know what could measure up.
(11:29):
And that's it, I guess. There's actually a lot going on. So let's start at I like to start with the
federal level. What's going on at the feds? Well, Ted Cruz is announced a gigantic hearing on
Thursday of this week is all about screen time. And it is appears to be kind of a big advertisement
(11:51):
for his kids off social media act, which is a bipartisan bill that Ted Cruz is submitting with
Brian Schatz from Hawaii Democrat from Hawaii. So, you know, I expect that this is going to be
pretty bipartisan. But he has also talked about, you know, we really need to kind of bring this
fight to schools as well. Because and this is where I'm going to read a quote that I know that Josh is
(12:13):
going to just be very furious about the very end. This hearing will also explore how to empower parents
who often struggle to monitor and limit screen time at a time when the US education fueled by federal
subsidies and incentives is providing personal devices to children. Josh, are you giving out personal
devices? Well, okay.
(12:34):
grain of salt here. An uneducated idiot could see a Chromebook as a personal device. I would like
to know what federal dollars are being allocated directly to Chromebooks because we haven't found those
dollars. So I would love some help finding those dollars if Mr. Cruz would like to help us. Oh, he's
(12:56):
100% referring to Essar funding. Oh, get off it. Are you going to watch Mark? Are you going to watch the
hearing? I have it on my calendar. If I can listen to in the background. I will. Yeah, it'll be
interesting. I am I am not discounting the need to push the want to limit screen time, especially at the lower
grade levels elementary through probably fourth, fifth grade. But there is a handoff if and we kind of talked
(13:22):
about this, I think last week with with listener Lawrence's email. If schools are indeed preparing kids for life
after high school, you cannot ignore the technology in use in the real world. I don't know how else to put that. But I
do think there is a heavy medium there, especially at the grade at the lower grade levels. We've talked about this
(13:46):
ad nauseum already. And we're probably gonna be talking about this for quite a lot this year. I agree. I think every
single educator out there is saying that the screen time amount that we currently have going on in schools at home is
just is just too much. It's not healthy. I still think it's going to be a challenge to find that balance. But we do I think we
all agree we need to find that balance. But putting numbers to paper is going to be very, very tricky.
(14:11):
Agree. And you can't legislate what happens in the home either. Like, you know, parents in these groups can come out and say
that there's too much screen time at home as well. Well, that's fine. At some point, the parent has to parent and say, leave
your device in the kitchen while you're going to bed. Like there, you know, there are some boundaries that need to be set by the adult in
the room, too.
(14:32):
I think a lot of parents would say I'm struggling with the inbetweens. Just as schools struggle when kids are in the hallway, when
they're not in a classroom, that's when they're pulling out their cell phone. When kids are on the bus, when they're walking home,
that's when they're struggling. That's the hard part to think is that we're, there tends to be this, well, it's over here, the
problems over there, it's the inbetweens that tend to be the bigger issues for me. But anyways, on that note, another story from Texas. So
(14:59):
Texas passed a screen time law that required schools to ban cell phones, just as many other states did. There is one district, though, that's
passed a policy that allows students to use their cell phones in between classrooms. Well, the Texas Department of Education has
said no, you need to ban them from bell to bell. That school district at their most recent school board meeting this week said, no, this is our
(15:25):
policy, we've decided how it's going to be, we're going to stand up and fight. So now you actually have a school board talk about legal
action against the Texas Department of Education because they feel that their school policy on cell phones is sufficient and matches the
definition from the state. So we'll see if these two go up against each other on a matter as simple as kids using cell phones in the hallway.
(15:46):
So help me here. Was that a state law that said bell to bell or that's just Desi's take on the rule? The Missouri legislation called out bell to bell,
like it was beginning of day to end of day. There was no questioning that. I'd be curious with the Texas legislation if it's that granular or that
(16:09):
detailed. The requirements as laid out by the Texas law is the policy must prohibit student use of personal communication devices, include cell phones,
tablets, smartwatches, etc. on school property during the school day. I would interpret that to be a bell to bell. I would agree. If it's on school
property, I would agree with you. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with this district. All right. One quick cybersecurity update. There is a
(16:35):
security company named Panda Security. Well, they released a white paper about how they are confirming or they have confirmed that criminal hacking groups
like Scattered Spider and Black Cat are actually recruiting and hiring teenagers to work for their criminal organization and carry out parts of or entire
cyber attacks. So they are seeing recruitment efforts in the United States and Canada. Hacking organizations are basically trying to recruit native English
(17:01):
speakers. Seems like these hacking groups are often located overseas. And so they're trying to find people who speak the native language, might be able to
navigate a little bit easier. And so they're approaching teenagers, I would say, between the ages of 16 to 21. Seems like the target age that they're going
for per the article. And they're looking at Telegram, Discord, gaming websites, plain text, smartphone messaging, offering them jobs to join their
(17:28):
criminal organization and help them with cyber attacks. You know, I wonder, I wonder if this is a friendly job offer or if this is like forced coercion. You know what
I mean? Yeah, I tried to look for that particular lens. And I could not tell if this is them having joined the group knowingly or if this was just like it was like you
mentioned, here's a friendly job offer. They did reference there have been some teenagers who have been tried by the FBI who have been caught. I would say that those
(17:56):
are more extreme cases where these are these are teenagers or young adults who know what they're doing. So yeah, I can't tell from the article whether or not this is a
they know what they're doing, or they're just being pulled along.
Well, my concern would be, you know, we this extortion thing was a thing for a while. And it could be rather than asking for money now, okay, well, we're gonna hold this over
(18:21):
your head. And you're gonna do this dirty work for us, or we're gonna release this. And I could see it being that way, too. Like, it's a forced conscription kind of thing.
All right. And finally, Kosen, we're gonna be with Kosen in a couple of months here, but they have released from their advisory board, the three most important hurdles, accelerators and
enablers for 2026. So kind of their their way of predicting what are the main themes for this current year?
(18:47):
I'm an enabler.
Why don't we start with the enablers because I'm surrounded by them. What do you think are going to be the three most important tech enablers to leverage in schools in 2026?
A friendly IT director.
You know, that didn't make the list.
AI.
Yeah, number one.
(19:07):
Oh, sweet.
He's read, he's reading the agenda.
Data and information visualizations, and tools for privacy and safety online. I think all those make sense. I think that's exactly what schools are looking for.
Yep.
Top three most important accelerators. Building the human capacity of leaders is number one. Changing attitudes towards demonstrated learning and then learner agency.
(19:33):
What's what do those mean?
Help me out. Yeah, help the teacher in the room needs to help the nerds in the room. What is two and three?
Changing attitudes towards demonstrating learning. I think this is in reference to artificial intelligence and how we're used to demonstrating learning via I ask you a question and you give me the answer.
And now regurgitation, we need to change how we ask students to demonstrate their learning, knowing that there are tools that can do this for for them.
(20:01):
Mm hmm.
Learner agency just means that the student, the learner is a part of their curriculum. They're a part of their learning process. Rather than just receiving content and receiving instruction, they are dictating what their their learning pathway looks like.
I'm so glad we have a teacher in the room.
Yeah, thank you, Mark.
Oh, thanks, guys.
And then the hurdles, what are the hurdles we got to get over? Well, as always, attracting and retaining educators and I.T. professionals, ensuring cyber safety and cybersecurity.
(20:31):
And then a new one this year is critical media literacy.
So helping students to determine what is real and what is fake.
Stinking monkeys in bikinis, man.
Monkeys in bikinis, not real.
In St. Louis.
Is it?
Well, you know that number one, attracting and retaining educators and I.T. professionals this week.
(20:54):
Again, I heard of another rural small district in Missouri that their I.T. director left for greener pastures at a bigger district in, you know, roughly 30 minutes away.
The original district, the small rural district, is having a difficulty recruiting a qualified candidate to come in and take that position for the dollars that they're willing to offer.
(21:20):
I think this is going to continue to be a large trend.
And it's unfortunate.
I don't know what the answer is.
Yeah. All right.
There's only one other article for the news, but we'll save that one for the main topic, because that is one heck of a conversation.
Chris. Yes.
You want to there a last sponsor for the night?
(21:43):
There's probably a couple more in my pocket.
But thanks to meter for sponsoring.
Go to meter dot com slash K-12 tech talk to book a demo with them.
That's M-E-T-E-R dot com slash K-12 tech talk to book a demo.
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(22:09):
So check out meter, single pane of glass stuff.
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So check out meter.
All right. So Mark hinted at this being a big topic.
And I think there's going to be lots of little rabbit holes and hopefully discussions that go from week to week.
And I think Mark is already working on lining up a discussion for next week about this.
(22:32):
And he he broke this story last night to Chris and I.
So we'll let him introduce the groundwork for this.
Well, so we have talked about chat GPT.
Josh, you have talked about rolling out AI for your students.
Well, one district, the Denver Public Schools, which is around 90,000 students, the largest district in Colorado, obviously, has came out with a public announcement banning chat GPT for students and saying that they're going to be re-evaluating whether or not they want it open for teachers.
(23:02):
Their reasons, and that's the conversation tonight, is first off, chat GPT is releasing new features, including a group chat where up to 20 people can participate in a single chat lens.
We'll be open.
And Denver is saying, well, we don't quite know if there's going to be any controls for us.
And this feels like a hotbed for bullying.
(23:23):
And we are seeing a lot of cyberbullying, so we're not going to take any chances.
And then chat GPT famously last year said that they're going to start to allow adult material on their website.
And so do you allow a chat GPT or do you allow an AI program into your district that in the consumer version, and I want to be very clear that there's a difference between the consumer and the school district version, there's usually more controls and security.
(23:46):
But in the consumer version, there could be very inappropriate and adult content.
With the whole grok bikini situation going on right now, we've got LLMs.
For me, from from my perspective, feels like some going down the dark side and some staying above water.
What do we do about this?
And in K-12, is Denver just the first of many districts that are going to start blocking chat GPT because of because of some political decisions they've made?
(24:14):
The chat GPT thing with the.
The room, the group room thing, have have we confirmed or has chat open AI come out with a statement that that feature is not going to the education side, do you know, Mark?
So I don't know the answer to that one.
I would assume that the adult material one wouldn't make it to the education side.
(24:38):
But, you know, it's that fine, it's that weird walk of are you going to ban something because of the consumer product?
Yeah, but in the education product, it's good.
You know, I was talking with somebody today, Chris, in our Discord channel about what there's nothing that would really force a staff member to log into the education version of chat GPT versus the consumer version of chat GPT.
(25:06):
So there is a a world or a process or, you know, steps where a faculty member might have access to chat GPT in a personal account that has the adult mode turned on or even well, that you got to be verified.
You got to be a verified adult to have adult mode.
Are we going to see more schools is is Denver going to go down that path of outwardly blocking chat GPT access for staff?
(25:34):
I think. So if you're going that route because of adult mode, do you block Twitter for staff?
Because we all know you can find adult material on Twitter, let alone grok getting editing videos to put people in bikinis like where, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
(25:56):
Are you are you going down that route for all of these other tools that have illicit material on the consumer side?
I've always thought Vimeo is a great example.
Oh, great example of adult content.
And what do you do with it?
And here Vimeo is higher quality videos than YouTube and a lot of sites that are great educational sites have Vimeo embedded into them.
(26:21):
That's always been that rocky conversation about, well, what are we doing with Vimeo?
And a lot of schools get torn up.
Like, I don't think I necessarily do what my neighbor does with with Vimeo.
That's hard.
I think the hard part, though, for me, I'll first start with just practically speaking.
I don't know the difference when I'm in my work versus my personal Google account.
(26:43):
Yeah.
I have to look and check.
And so if you have if the consumer version of chat GPT is as dangerous as allowing somebody to make pornography, but the school version is is censored.
If it's up to the user to just double check their browser, make sure they're in the right version.
There's there's a recipe for disaster, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Somebody writing or saying the wrong thing.
(27:04):
And that's that's not just about pornography.
That is just in general that consumer versions of LLMs have more freedoms than the school versions.
But, you know, we've talked a lot about how chat GPT has rolled out the tools,
and there's not really any discussion about how is the district going to manage this?
(27:24):
And if they're not really going to start from a conversation of districts need to maintain
control over their environment, then I don't feel comfortable or safe using a tool like that.
That's kind of where the discussion landed today was if I if I'm at school and I'm logged into my
school account and I go to Gemini dot Google dot com, it's forcibly signing me into Gemini as my
(27:48):
school account. If I go to chat GPT dot com or, you know, opening it, whatever the URL for
chat GPT is, there is no guarantee that I'm signed into my school GPT account or my personal account.
Like you said, Mark, you are you're going to rely on the staff member to pause and look
(28:10):
before they do anything.
So I'd say first and foremost, for me, the decision point is how easy is it going to be
for a user to accidentally use the wrong version? And could that introduce bad content into our
curriculum or into our environment? The second question is, do I as the district have the
(28:30):
ability to take action if something bad does happen in this environment? And then the third,
which is kind of where I land right now, I don't think I really want to support companies that are
openly making the Internet dangerous and harmful for kids by bringing that tool into our schools.
Yeah. And that's I think that's a big difference between like a Vimeo or social like like Twitter.
(28:55):
Those sites that we debate about are like free sites that we're using. Yeah. Chat GPT like we
are. That is a school district deciding to give a company. Yeah. Subscription money
yearly, annually. They also host adult content. Yeah, that's a that's interesting.
(29:18):
That starts to feel a little bit different than just the debate on do you open up Vimeo
because it's got high quality videos on it. Yeah. Well, I remember years ago, geez,
right after I was hired at my district, I had a pretty sizable argument with a teacher about
(29:38):
enabling Twitter for student access. And I'm like, you don't have to get real crazy with your search
on Twitter to find wildly inappropriate thing. And this was back 2015. This is we're not doing
this. We're not going down that route. So it should districts have that same conversation
(30:01):
for teacher access as well for tools like Twitter, where that is crazy erotica or porn,
whatever you want to call it, is crazy accessible without much effort. I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's hard because I think we are trying to uphold a moral standard in terms of
(30:23):
what we bring into our schools and at least take reasonable efforts and steps to protect
your kids from inappropriate content. That's a very gray area. It's a very gray statement. It
is what it is. When you have a company who is and I'll take Grok, for example, not only allowing you
to make images of people in bikinis of other people, right? And we know that there's been
(30:45):
some pretty serious issues of adults making content of other non-consenting adults in
bikinis and there have been minors. With the head of the company openly mocking this trend,
for me, that's like a big line that says, OK, this isn't about I don't want somebody to
accidentally make inappropriate content. You are intentionally deciding and making the decision
(31:09):
to make a platform and produce a platform that allows for encourages inappropriate material.
That has no place in K-12. Yeah, I was just going to say the unfortunate part about that, too,
is for years districts were pushing teachers to be on Twitter and using that as a communication
method for parents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. CHAC-GBT, on the other hand, I'm going to be very interested
(31:35):
to see how they handle this adult content on their site. I understand they're making tools.
They may not necessarily make it safe and easy for districts, but if they are going to go down
the road that Grok is going down and either allow or encourage inappropriate content,
then there's no way they can expect to have any sort of platform within K-12 education. And I would
(32:00):
encourage everybody to block them. So I I don't even like the 20 person chat room for education
like that. To me, that's got disaster written all over it at the student level. And again,
we don't have confirmation whether or not that's going to be allowed for students.
Surely there's a checkbox, right? Well, you saw the rollout for free GPT for schools.
(32:24):
But this comes down to yeah, this comes down to, you know, companies just dropping platforms and
dropping tools and functionality into classrooms. But, you know, when it comes to 20 people in a
room, it's just like the issues we went through five years ago when we all started using
video conferencing and Zoom bombing took hold. Yeah. Well, you put you put 20 people in a room
(32:46):
with adult content turned on. Oh, yeah. It's more than monkeys in bikinis.
But it just it goes down to like the reason Zoom took off in K-12 was because they were the first
and only platform that gave schools controls over Zoom bombing. Yeah. Or they got a whole room.
(33:10):
Yeah. So if Chachi PT can release these features and give districts control back,
they could do OK. But if they don't release controls and they start mixing in inappropriate
content, bye bye. It's going to be really interesting. It almost feels like we're back
in those 2020 days of fast and furious feature sets being released. Like we we got to have
(33:37):
these features. We got to reach these people that are remote. Yeah. Google meet. The links
are all over the place and they stay active after the teacher leaves. And but we're shooting them
out all over the place and all that clean up that take place afterwards. It feels like we're back
in that innovation cycle of I don't care if it works right. Get it out. And we're we're back
(33:57):
to that cycle of feature sets being released every week before anybody really thinks,
do we should this really be in a school? Should this should this feature really be added to this
tool that is already wildly adopted in a number of schools? You know, yeah, it feels like we're
back there again. And even even with the general public stuff, I feel like, hey, let's make it
(34:21):
where there's 20 users that can collaborate. That's like the whole like let's put a bunch of,
you know, rats in a cage and see what they do. Like if we put in 20, let's see what happens.
And hey, I don't know that this is really ready, but let's go ahead and turn on the adult content
and see what they do with it. It's like early and we're turning and we always we've talked
(34:41):
to this before. Technology tends to new technology. When it comes out, it tends to see the dark side
before it gets to the light because a bunch of that's what techs often do. We do the dark stuff
and then we end up getting jobs in K-12 tech and are good people. But that's what this feels like
(35:02):
is that beginning thing of, yeah, let's just see what all crazy stuff they'll do with it. We'll
fix it as we go. Well, there's the story of VHS and Betamax. Why did VHS win over Betamax?
Well, history of this? Well, I think it's probably the same history of HD DVD versus Blu-ray.
(35:22):
Pornography. Porn. Yeah. Yeah. Porn industry was on Blu-ray, not HD DVD. And that's,
yeah. Porn industry was on the VHS and that's why VHS took hold. I didn't realize that. Yeah.
Yeah. They released exclusively. Sorry. I looked it up. I don't actually have like
pornography industry factoids. Committed to memory. But they said that 80% of all VHS sales
(35:49):
were pornography in the early days of home video. So, yeah.
So maybe. Maybe he's just following the winning model. Yeah. 10 years from now.
As his ex. Yeah. Chet, he's going to kill off Gemini because of porn.
Well, did you see Gemini's big announcement this week? Are there a big win?
(36:12):
Oh, you're going to scare me. What? Oh, yeah. But that wasn't, that was announced back in
November too. I don't understand why this is getting news again now when it was back
at WWDC in November, on November 8th or 4th, whatever it was. They said the same thing there.
I don't remember the details of that. I don't. Yeah. I saw that story yesterday because some
(36:34):
people in the office were talking about it and then we looked it up and it's like, yeah,
they announced that back in November. I don't understand why it's news again.
Hmm. Mark, there was this third point that Denver said about academic integrity,
and I feel like that's a walk back too, that the district has concerns about
just the reliance on AI. And again, that's because this is all new territory for us. But
(36:58):
I thought that's, I think that's interesting that that's a bullet point as well, because
we're either embracing AI and what it's going to do for kids in this new way of learning. You know,
we just read Kosen's things about we're going to, teachers need to teach differently.
Kids need to learn differently now. Yeah. But then Denver appears to be,
well, hold on, maybe we're not ready for that yet. Yeah. Well, Josh, you are ready for that.
(37:22):
And you have started a pilot with Gemini with students.
We have. Just a little bit of background. We've had Notebook LM open all year for our
middle school and high school. I've kind of been pushing a little bit for,
to enable Gemini for a pilot group of high school students. So we did that yesterday,
(37:46):
today, technically, did the whole process of informing parents. We've selected three sections
of our AP U.S. history, as well as a class called Transitions. The teacher in that class
picked like 10 or 15 kids of that class. We have a wide, varying array of students to see what
(38:10):
what helps. And immediately I heard from the teacher in the transition class this morning,
and she said already it's making huge difference for our students that are English language
learners. We've had an influx of kids that speak Chinese and there's a couple other ones that we
don't get a lot of. So it's hard to find materials and translate tools and stuff like that. So
(38:35):
already Gemini is a success for those kids. But look at looking at some of the prompts that kids
are feeding it. And again, we're day one, so not a lot of instruction has taken place on
ethical use, appropriate use, that kind of thing. It's it's what you would expect day one,
you know, image generation, that kind of stuff. And Mark, you and I before the show, we were kind
(38:57):
of talking about that. You know, is that expected? Is that inappropriate? Is that par for the course?
And you had a great point. You said realistically, you're just seeing the typical traffic of what a
high school kid probably types in Google search like this. It's not out of the ordinary. And I
will say I am impressed. I'm happy with the built in guardrails that Gemini has that it will refuse
(39:22):
to answer questions that go too far one way or another. We've seen it happen already that, you
know, I can't. One of the phrases it uses, I won't use stereotypes. It's interesting that those
guardrails are prebuilt and it's hard and fast. And I think I told the story I had my technicians
when I was trying to prove a point about this. I had my technicians using a test student account
(39:48):
and they were trying to get Gemini to go dark with its phrasing and, you know, help give
instructions on self-harm, stuff like that. And it absolutely refused. And my guys got really,
really, really creative on ways on asking, like, write a story about a character who blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. It's interesting the guardrails that are prebuilt into Gemini for
(40:11):
that protection. I just tried to create an image of monkeys in bikinis in St. Louis and it refuses
to do that. So really? Yes. Yeah. I'm in my personal account, too. Thank God for Sora. Yeah.
I did the exact same prompt that I did in Grok just now in Gemini,
my personal account. And nope, it won't do it. That's funny. But anyways, I got some more
(40:35):
pictures of monkeys and bikinis if you're ready to see them. Mark's going to get off here and
tell his wife all about the Vervet monkeys in St. Louis. Well, next week we might be having
some special guests to talk about this one with some more details. So I'm looking forward to next
week. And if you're with OpenAI and you would like to kind of talk about this, is that going
(40:56):
to be available for education accounts? Sam? Mr. Altman, by all means. We know you listen. So
yeah, it'd be great to have Mr. Altman on. Anything else? Anything else good for the cause?
I can talk about where we're going to be going for 2026. Where are we going? Where are you
leading us in 2026, Chris? Well, first and foremost, we want to thank Manage Methods. You
(41:20):
can check out Manage Methods at managemethods.com. They can help you with your student safety with
looking at your drive, your Microsoft environments for what files and what activities going on with
that. A new sponsor for us is IncidentIQ. Check out incidentiq.com. They can help with your support
requests, your assets, your district workflows all into one hub so your tech team can move faster
(41:43):
and classrooms can stay focused on instruction. And then Fortinet, email fortinetpodcast at
fortinet.com. But thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to you guys that listen. We're going to the
Security Symposium, Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium in March. That's down the road. But
here in January, we have the Secure Ed Schools Virtual Conference. I'll put some notes in the
(42:04):
podcast description about that. Mark has a keynote in February in Colorado. I'll put a link to that
in the podcast, too. And then we're going to the K-12 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
the three of us in February as well. So hang out with us on the road if you're at any of those
places that we're going to be at, please. Any other closing thoughts? If not, if you're a
(42:26):
listener and you have a topic or you would like to weigh in on this, this chat GPT. Send us your
pics. No. If you would like to weigh in on this erotica stance with chat GPT or the 20 person room
thing with chat GPT, send us an email. Chris, what's that email info at? K12techtalkpodcast.com.
(42:50):
We would love to get your take on this. We will see you next week.
The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh,
(43:11):
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.
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