Episode 250 - Camera Controversy & Student Data Privacy! - K12 Tech Talk

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
On this week's episode of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, we discuss the recent news about

(00:05):
school flock cameras being used for immigration enforcement and the difficult balance of safety
and privacy with cameras.
We also answer a listener email about data privacy and close with an interview with a
team from RISEvision.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
My name is Josh, Tech Director here in mid-Missouri.

(00:26):
No snow this week.
All the snow is finally gone.
Chris, you're down the street from me.
Hello, Chris.
No snow here, man.
Mark, do you still have snow on the ground?
Yeah.
We got some snow yesterday.
Oh, did you?
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's ugly.
It's melting though.
We had a good sunny day today.
That's good to hear.
I was talking to somebody today.
They're talking about snow and they said that they have like snow, like different cult,

(00:49):
like they're like, we're in a yellow, which means pretty bad snow.
Like we just have snow here.
Oh no, no.
In the city, you go through phases where it starts out as like nice, pretty snow, and
then it turns brownish.
And now we're getting into the gray season.
Huh.
It's awful.
It's awful.
Because of like all the cinders and chemicals and stuff that have been added to it.

(01:09):
Yeah.
Yeah.
We also have the yellow snow, but Chris, I would avoid that.
I mean, I guess maybe we get the yellow too.
Makes great snow cones.
Hmm.
So can we talk about the big game and the commercials?
I know we can't say the other word.
We can only say the big game.
What word?
We'll take.
You're going to have to cut this out.

(01:29):
You can't say bull.
You'll get sued.
Oh yeah.
No.
You know, I tried to make a video on Sora and, and that was, that was kicked out, but
I was able to make a video with the Patriots.
So somehow the Patriots and Seahawks are fair game in Sora, but is not.
No.
Yeah.
The NFL will sue you.
When I was on the radio, we had to be very, very careful about that.

(01:51):
Any, any commercials jump out to you guys?
I thought all the commercials sucked this year.
Wow.
Tell us how you really feel, Josh.
I like the one that was karaoke.
Karaoke?
Yeah.
Oh, it was like a, it was a coin base commercial.
The what?
Yeah.
I, I saw a video online.
It was exactly how my super bowl party went, where everybody was singing along to it.

(02:16):
And then it gets to at the very end when it's coin base and everybody boos the TV.
It was like an NSYNC song, I think.
Or, I don't know which one.
Backstreet Boys, maybe it was that.
Yeah.
And then there was, then there was the big one, the ring camera, which I got excited
about because they start by talking about like, here's how you can find your dog Milo.

(02:37):
And that's my dog's name.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I didn't even notice that.
Yeah.
And then it's all about how the cameras are connected and you can say your dog is lost
and your neighbor's cameras will find your dog for you.
Oh, big brother.
Yeah.
And then the person next to me goes, well, it's dogs now, but what if it turns to humans?
And what if ring becomes government and then government becomes like a new world order?

(03:00):
And then we're just being watched by everyone else but us.
Is it wrong if it helps find a lost kid?
Well, this has been the debate of the week, right?
You've got the case out of Savannah Guthrie's mom, where ring cameras have been used to
locate more and more information on it.
And then we got this big ICE article from the Flock cameras, too.

(03:22):
So Chris probably needs to hit a sponsor before we get into much of that real quick.
In the midst of that, IncidentIQ, speaking of incidents, IncidentIQ.com, they can be
your K-12 school management software, your support request, help you with your assets,
your district workflows and more.
Check out IncidentIQ.

(03:44):
So Mark, besides the big game commercials, what news have you for us?
Let's start with the ICE tapping into Flock security cameras.
This was a pretty explosive article from the 74 and the Guardian.
Flock security cameras, if you're not familiar with them, allow you to track license plates
and in that customers can give permission to law enforcement to access their license

(04:07):
plate records.
Well, guess who's been accessing those records?
As reported by the Guardian and the 74, federal immigration agents have been tapping into
school Flock cameras to track license plate information.
So quite a lot of concerns and red flags here.
As you can imagine, it's a highly political issue across the country.

(04:30):
And so this is a sticky situation.
I think we've talked about, we're going to touch on it today, but then really do a deep
dive and do some more research into this issue for a future episode.
Tell us how you feel, Josh.
Remove Flock from the conversation.
It gets bad.
And I think we've talked about this before, but, you know, everything's cyclical.

(04:53):
And every once in a while, Chris, in the different forums that we're in, I think it's come up
on K-12 Tech Pro, there will be a question from a tech director saying, hey, my local
police department wants full-time access to my district's security camera system.
So to me, there are some parallels there, that access of a law enforcement entity having

(05:18):
access to technically a protected security camera system.
So it's probably good for everybody involved to kind of have a refresher of that conversation
again.
And I think that goes hand in hand, Mark, with the guests who you are working with to
come on the show for that article or for that episode.
Yeah.
I mean, this particular issue is really about external cameras and cameras that are likely

(05:42):
in your parking lot or facing the road near your school.
But as you dig into this, you're going to find more and more schools that have internal
cameras and hallway cameras where law enforcement has either live or historical access to that.
So it's complicated.
I'm not going to say that this is easy.
I mean, there's a lot of benefits to having law enforcement with the ability to help out

(06:04):
a school.
But, you know, this article really shows the importance of privacy and security and knowing
who has access to those cameras and for what purpose.
Well, and just for somebody that might not know what flock cameras are, we've got a number
in our town.
Like, I think there's six or seven on just different public streets in our town.

(06:28):
The whole idea is they're interconnected.
There's the whole huge flock network.
If a car gets stolen or whatever, the police can put a description, license plate, that
type of information into the flock system.
And then wherever those cameras are, if it tags that car somewhere, picks up that license
plate somewhere in town, it will alert the police to the location of that car.

(06:52):
Just coincidentally, in the last month, our Home Depot parking lot in town, Chris, you
know where this is, I counted the other day, eight, eight flock cameras in their parking
lot alone have been added.
Pretty wild.
I didn't expect to see that.

(07:12):
Before that, we just had them in the town, just on Random Street, the major roads in
and out of our town.
And it's actually, I mean, there are positive and negatives to it, but it has cut down on
a large number of car break-ins and car thefts in our town.
The negative to it, all you have to do is do a Google search.

(07:33):
Flock not too long ago had some pretty wild cybersecurity issues and yeah, just Google
it.
You'll find it.
They just released a blog article about a week ago saying that they do not share records
with ICE and that it's up to customers to share their records.

(07:53):
So I'm going to guess that they were anticipating this article from, from the Guardian in 74
because that's the concern.
The, the, you know, Hayden, the new guy with K12 Tech Pro, we have like a little building
in our small town, downtown, I'm talking about like the, the free community wifi access that
we do downtown.
It's a little bitty strip, right?
But we were approached at one point about doing like a camera and I think it was a Flock

(08:16):
one.
It was going to, it was a license plate reader.
And again, there's like pros and cons of like wanting to be a part of that and wanting
to help, you know, you know, if that can help a kidnapping or whatever, whatever, of course
you want to participate in that.
But then there's the other side where like we're going to unpack too, like, cause you're,
then you're involved with some controversial decisions that get made with it.

(08:38):
So we opted out of it.
But we're, you know, I would say that I'm pro police, I'm, I'm for law enforcement,
I'm for protection for society.
But then we opted out of that because we don't want to be that building that has that
thing.
You know, even like the Home Depot that you just talked about, people in your city know
that Home Depot is all about having these things in place that can be seen as a negative

(09:01):
thing.
That's, you know, there's a lot of conversations and, and thoughts that need to surround that.
And then at the school part our last camera system, we were approached when we're looking
at all the solutions and we're like, they're like, here, here's these cameras that we can
put on your building that can scan license plates easy.
And you think about the positives of that when we have like a, uh, an incident in the

(09:22):
parking lot and you know, a high school kid leaves the scene and doesn't know.
That's why you want, want that.
But then, oh man, now we can see all these license plates.
And just the same in all situations.
If once you have cameras, you're going to get asked, uh, Hey, such and such, can you
pull the footage?
Yeah.
So if you had just said no one didn't have it, you wouldn't be having that conversation,

(09:44):
you wouldn't be putting that bad spot.
There's a, I mean, it's a lot.
Yeah.
It extends to the, um, stop arm, uh, cameras on school buses.
So some school buses have a, uh, the stop arm that comes out or the little stop sign
that comes out.
You can have a camera installed and then that will send pictures of people that drive illegally
past a stopped bus so they can get a ticket.

(10:05):
There's a lot of laws and regulations and privacy concerns around those things.
It's done in service of student safety, uh, but what this article, what this issue really
brings up is at what cost.
Uh, and in this case you might have schools who said, Hey, look, we brought in flock cameras
to protect our, our campus from the bad guys and, and now are there federal agents actually

(10:26):
looking at parents license plates coming in and it could it be that our security cameras
that we set up to protect our campus is actually kind of an insider, uh, and, and potentially
getting our families into trouble.
Well, and it's in reality how those things work is they're, they're recording every license
plate that drives by.

(10:47):
Like I know when I drive by the one by my house, my, the make and model of my car is
recorded and my license plate is recorded.
So if I ever commit a crime with my vehicle and they, they know my license plate number,
they can put that in and any, any law enforcement agency that has access to flock would have

(11:08):
would know when I arrived at my house because there's a camera literally down the street
from my house.
So all it would take would be a list of suspected cars of interest by, by a federal agency or
two and they could be getting those alerts of where those things are real time based
on flock camera locations.
So yeah, it's, it's interesting.

(11:29):
All of this is the, uh, is the Bruce Wayne in the dark night.
Uh, when like, you know, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
And, and at what time have you crossed the line on, on what you have access to?
And well, a few years ago I had cops knock on my door.
I, you know, I live in the city and I have a camera on my porch.

(11:50):
I do.
And, uh, if you listen carefully, you can hear the cops and they knocked on my door
and they said, Hey, we see you have a camera.
We're, we're trying to find, uh, somebody drove by the house.
They committed a crime.
We drove, they, we think they drove by your street.
And you look at the footage and let us know if you have anything.
In that case, I was as the owner of the camera and the footage, I was able to look at the

(12:13):
footage and give my permission for them to have access to it.
The challenge with flock is yes, you say yes or no to giving them the, even law enforcement
footage.
But as you mentioned, Josh, every license plate that goes by is, is given access to
law enforcement.
And that's, I think where people get the most concerned about this technology.

(12:35):
On the other hand, you know, when you're in public like that, there is no expectation
of privacy.
So you can't assume that driving down the street, that action is a private action.
You know, like the second you step outside your front door, you are no longer in the
privacy of your home.
You are in the public, right?

(12:56):
Right.
I don't know.
Just alternate view.
Sorry.
Sure.
Yeah.
So there's enormous benefits to our community safety with these cameras and there's enormous
privacy considerations.
So we're going to bring in some experts to help us out.
Hey, and that's not even, I've been, you guys have been following the what's, what's the

(13:16):
last name?
Nancy Guthrie.
Yeah.
Three.
I've been following that horrible story.
Just completely sucked into it.
Yes.
And the camera stuff with that is crazy to me.
And I was talking to my wife, Stephanie, about it.
Like how did Google get the footage and can that get talked about more?
And if there wasn't the subscription on, on it, but it seems as though, was it pulled

(13:37):
from the cloud or was it on the actual device?
Again, I'm, she was like, why do you care?
I was like, cause of privacy, I care.
And again, and this is, it's, it did get pulled.
We can, we can see the guy showing up.
So that's for the good of the cause.
But then my heart, head, soul, whatever is still having an issue with the fact that it

(13:57):
could get pulled, that footage could get pulled to begin with.
It's hard.
It's hard.
I mean, the tough part is we're talking about external cameras.
What about a camera that's inside someone's house in their living room?
Does that person know?
If you have that, that's, I mean, Josh says you're asking for it.
Well, I mean, it's not a great idea.

(14:19):
No, I, I understand.
I mean, I don't have any internal cameras in my house, but.
That you know of.
Good point.
Very good point.
We watch you every night.
But how many people who buy these cameras are thinking that someday law enforcement
can contact Google and get access to this footage?
You're not, she's not thinking about that.

(14:39):
Josh does.
Oh, for sure.
Because he wears the tinfoil hat.
My size eight tinfoil hat.
Yes.
I mean, I'm going to say that most people who listen to this podcast are of the mindset
of I'm going to think about the privacy and security of everything I do, but that's not
the majority of consumers.
No, I have a colleague that completely removed all, um, all home devices.

(15:04):
Is it John?
He's done.
No, but he's done with, uh, Google.
He's done with the Amazon stuff.
He just, he's over it.
He thinks.
Really?
Yeah.
And he's a tech person that not in his house.
Like that was.
Do I know him?
Uh, no, actually no.
Oh, okay.
Not in tech department, but a very tech savvy person.
And I thought, man, I mean, I got, I mean, I'm all about ring.

(15:26):
If I say Alexa's name, she's probably going to talk back in here.
She's all over the place.
I just, I talk, talk, talking about ring.
So I last week, I think we talked about maybe last time, but our hot water heater at our
house rusted out, whatever.
We had water that got into our youngest daughter's room and it was a whole fiasco.
I'm a tech guy, so I don't know how to fix hot water heaters.
Right.

(15:47):
Yet.
He got it replaced, but now we bought the ring water detectors.
Oh, did you?
My father-in-law sent some, uh, what's it?
Is it Govi?
Yeah.
That does the lights.
Yeah.
Like some of those too.
So I have like seven water detectors in our house now.
So like I just let ring monitor everything in my life.
We got the cameras, we got the motion sensors, we got, am I running water?

(16:11):
Ring knows, I guess I'm going to have a conversation with you after the show about that.
So yeah, look for that episode at like, we've already burned enough time just bantering
about it.
It's going to be interesting to hear from the experts on one, this, this flock concern
and how it relates to schools.
And if we can pull in an expert to talk about that relationship between police departments

(16:37):
and school districts when it comes to a school security cameras.
So look, look for that to be coming up, Mark.
I know you have other news.
I do.
This is partly an FYI.
The department of justice is 2024 title four ruling on web content accessibility.
That deadline, if you are a community of 50,000 or more, I say community, that's like a population.

(17:01):
So staff and students together, if you're 50,000 or more, or your audiences is geared
for that, you have a deadline of April 24th to make sure that your websites are compliant
with the web content accessibility rules.
The national school public relations association did a survey and they are seeing a wide, wide
range of readiness.

(17:22):
By and large, most people are not quite ready for this one.
Michelle Brom, the president of the MSPRA had said, look, the most important thing right
now is that you're showing progress.
You're not going to be 100% and a lot of school departments or school districts have, have
a public facing websites with thousands and thousands of pages.
As long as you're focusing on the, the most visited sites or visited pages, the most used

(17:47):
platforms that you produce, that's the most important piece is to make sure that those
are in compliance.
I know a lot of districts I've worked with have asked about, well, what about Google
classroom?
What about these ed tech platforms I work on?
And again, it comes back to focusing on the content and the platforms that you have control
over.
So really mainly your school district website and the content that you're producing on those

(18:09):
websites to make sure that that is accessible with the web accessibility guidelines.
So Mark, back to your comment about community.
If I am a large school district in a large metropolitan area, would that community rule,
is that based on my parents or is that based on the population in my square mileage of

(18:32):
my district?
And this, the thing that I'm reading, the article I'm reading states that for K-12 schools
in counties or cities with populations are 50,000 or more.
But that means population of the county or city, not the district.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, the other thing in Missouri, this has come up cause it's legislative season.

(18:54):
Uh, they are trying to pass a law to prevent, um, what they call it, uh, aggressive litigation
against businesses that do not comply with the ADA rules.
So that's, it's interesting.
Missouri might actually be taking somewhat of a proactive step to this.
Hopefully it doesn't just, Oh, we're going to ignore it.

(19:15):
But yeah, that's a trend.
Cause the less than 50K has until April, 2027, right?
And that's, I think that's what in our group, that's, what's been talked about some, we,
we had a, uh, school district around us that got knocked with an audit on this and he had
to sit there and go through website and figure out he was like a leader for us to look at

(19:36):
because he had to get into full compliance as, as, because he, they got flagged for something.
Huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That happened to us, uh, maybe five, 10 years ago.
Uh, I feel like the department of justice was kind of ramping up for this deadline and
doing pre audits.
And so we got hit with one of those audits and yeah, we had to go through every webpage
and there are a lot of unfortunately expensive tools out there that help you to, to flag

(19:59):
issues.
Uh, there are some obviously low cost tools out there too, or free, but, um, yeah, there
are tools that will look through your website, uh, find issues in terms of, you know, the
image, text, the contrast, the color contrast, the font size, and, uh, basically make a checklist
for you to go through and fix.
My super sent us this long list that he had gotten from maybe our school attorney.

(20:23):
I, I, I don't know, but a checklist for us to go through and, um, again, we have time,
I already kind of let him know, like it, it's going to take a bunch of time, uh, and
or us buying some stuff that will let this happen.
And our school, like our website budget is like 50 bucks.

(20:44):
So that's what, that's what everybody's used to, uh, anything we've ever needed, we buy
a little chintzy template or we figure out how to do it with a Google.
So it's going to be, and again, this is a needed thing.
I'm, I'm for that all people should have access properly to the content that we're
putting out there.
Uh, but it's going to be a change of how we're wired, um, whether it's time and you want

(21:07):
a person doing it, uh, or spending some money.
It's one thing though, to go through your website and get it into compliance.
It's another thing to make sure that every single person in your district that adds content
to your website knows what they need to do to stay in compliance.
All right.
The last article I have is the, um, Khan Academy.

(21:27):
This is a little bit more of a fun one.
Khan Academy has a writing coach tool, but they have also announced a reading coach tool
where it will help students to kind of coach them through the writing process.
And now we'll coach them through the reading process.
They announced a big intricate integration with Gemini, so that will be powering this
tool.
If you take a look at what this does, it's very interesting.

(21:48):
It will take a student through the writing process from ideating to, uh, creating your
first draft to editing, peer editing, and serve as kind of a coach for that student.
And then, uh, Khan Academy also has another tool called Schoolhouse, which is a peer to
peer tutoring program that was very, very popular after the COVID period.
Well, they've also announced an integration with Gemini where Gemini will be coaching

(22:10):
the tutors.
So rather than students learning from AI bots and things like that, which nobody's really
interested in that, the Schoolhouse has a much more creative solution, which is to have
real human tutors.
And after sessions, the Gemini bot will coach the tutor, uh, and give them some feedback
on how the coaching session went and, and help them to improve with some, some new skills.

(22:34):
It will also allow them to practice tutoring with a virtual student profile.
So I, I like this approach.
This one feels a whole lot better to me where you're not putting kids in front of AI bots
and asking them to learn, uh, from a chat bot.
You're actually, uh, improving the human to human process on the backend.
So I like that idea.
My only hesitation with this is a fear of a district or whoever trying to use that to

(23:02):
actually replace a teacher with a volunteer or a para or, you know what I mean?
Like, if you're taking that expert out of the loop, the expert is now the agent and
the agent is just telling, you know, a, a volunteer that comes in twice a week to help
kids with reading how to get that kid up a level.
I, I, I don't know.

(23:23):
I, I see some room for abuse there, but there's room for abuse with anything.
I could use a AI agent.
Like when I talk to a teacher and then I'm like, I wonder how I did, did I come off,
did I come off rude?
You, you should start doing that and you should just ask the teacher, do you mind if I record
this conversation and Mark and I, Mark and I will grade you.

(23:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll be.
I don't like human feedback.
I just want AI generated feedback because it's with bias, positive.
It's over.
Yeah.
That's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great job, Chris.
Thank you again.
I like how you insulted that teacher.
I like it.

(24:05):
All right.
That's it for the news.
What's next?
I assume a sponsor.
Oh yeah, sure.
And then we'll jump into this listener email.
We want to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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That's meter.com slash K-12 tech talk meter.com slash K-12 tech talk.
They can do your network infrastructure.
You can think of them kind of like subscription based networking.

(24:27):
They can help you with your internet, with your wire, with your wifi, with your cellular,
do your full stack.
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All right.
So we have a listener email from Fred in Illinois, and he said, can you talk about student data
privacy?
Where do you start?
What organizations should you engage with?

(24:49):
What process procedures do you go through to determine what websites, applications,
extensions need to be vetted and need a DPA?
Josh, I know you like student data privacy.
Mark, I know that you're a big fan of it.
So can we help out Fred from Illinois?
Oh no, I hate student data privacy.
I think it's awful.
I thought he was going to say he hates Illinois.
I'm like, God, Mark, we just did a session for them.

(25:13):
You know what?
I would say start where your neighbors are.
What are your neighbors doing?
What are some districts around you doing for data privacy agreements?
This is why I love the student data privacy consortium, SDPC.
They have a standard agreement that everybody can use.
There's a national one.
A lot of states have their own version.
A lot of the vendors and ed tech companies are already used to this.

(25:34):
So if you were to send an agreement and say, hey, we're ready to go live with a pilot or
rollout, do you mind signing the student data privacy consortium?
Chances are they will reply to you with enthusiastic yes, and because they're used to using this
for other districts.
So start where your friends and neighbors are already and use the student data privacy
consortium as a template for your first agreement with an ed tech vendor.

(25:58):
So I am on the SDPA's website now.
It's the letter A, the number four, the letter L.org, A for L.org.
They have a map of the United States and then they show all of the states that have agreements
or consortiums in green.

(26:18):
Illinois is one of those states.
Actually there's only a handful of states that look like they are not members of the
student data privacy consortium.
That would be Nevada, Kansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Louisiana, West Virginia, and
a couple on the East Coast over by Mark.
So Illinois has already done, I would assume, the hard work for you.

(26:39):
The question would be finding that state organization that manages that consortium for the state
of Illinois or your home state, wherever you may live, and joining that.
I know Missouri has one.
It's ran through our consortium called MoreNet.
So I would assume it's similar for the state of Illinois as well.
The other thing that you could look for, there's an organization, TEC, the Student Data Privacy

(27:05):
Alliance.
They actually will go and negotiate and capture these agreements for you.
So the SDPA consortium is kind of like the portal where you self-manage those agreements.
You're going to vendors and asking them to sign the agreement, agree to the agreement,
and then you upload it to the A for L portal and track it through there.
The nice thing about TEC, the Education Cooperative, is they do most of that work for you.

(27:31):
You go into the portal, you say, hey, I want an agreement with X, Y, Z company.
Then the TEC people kick in and they go and negotiate and capture those agreements with
those companies on your behalf.
Because quite frankly, that's the biggest pain of this process, is getting the company's
attention and getting them to agree to sign to the contract, as well as not editing the

(27:54):
contract.
Like we saw with Follett, who is wanting, and this has been resolved, by the way, Follett
was trying to put a limit of liability in the student data privacy agreement to where
if there was an incident that they were wanting to limit their outlay of cash, they have since
changed their mind on that and that is no longer an issue.
So TEC takes care of that if you're a TEC member, as well.

(28:17):
That's where I would start.
All right.
Start with your neighbors.
Start with the Student Data Privacy Consortium.
Check out TEC while you're at it.
Chris, any other tips from your side?
My biggest tip is to talk to your colleagues.
So Josh got way hyped up and all about Student Data Privacy way before it was something that
I had any kind of care about.

(28:38):
He had a passion for it.
So let someone else, like Josh just gave you the quick way to get started.
So if you have someone around you that's all about it, jump on them.
Oh, I have good news.
I have good news for our listeners in Illinois.
You know, LTC, the people that brought us on to their conference and had us speak, they

(29:02):
manage the SDP, the Student Data Privacy Alliance for Illinois.
And better news, they are partners with TEC.
So that's your answer, Fred.
That Fred, you need to get a hold of LTC and find out how to start working with their data
privacy portal and TEC.

(29:23):
I think most of the hard work has been done for you.
All right.
I got one more question for you related to this.
Let's say that you got an agreement.
You're ready to go.
Maybe you're going to work with TEC, SDPC, or you've got your own district agreement.
Where do you start in terms of what applications and tools and systems do you start with?
SIS.
Go with your big hitters.

(29:45):
I would leverage the reporting tools if you use Clever.
Leverage the reporting tool in Clever that will tell you what apps kids are using.
There are a number.
Lightspeed has a really good tool as well if you pay for it.
Get an idea of the apps that are the most popular.
Shoot, you could even look at the Google, the SSO dashboard in Google and find the top

(30:10):
usage apps and start there.
Go there.
I would definitely hit the heavy hitters.
The stuff that has your most sensitive data, that's where you want to start.
Stuff that's used the most.
And then you work your way down.
Don't sweat the small stuff.
Go for the big stuff.
And then once you've got that under control, then you can start at the small applications.
Love it.
Cool.

(30:31):
Well, I hope that advice works for him.
I should probably get started on student dental privacy.
So quick shout out to some sponsors, Fortinet, Fortinet podcast at fortinet.com.
You can get all your Forta stuff, including your FortiGate firewall, classlink, classlink.com.
They can do some analytics for you just so you can see what applications you're using
too.
And then Manage Methods.

(30:52):
They can help you with your Google stuff, your Microsoft stuff.
Get a good pulse on student, staff monitoring, all that kind of thing.
We're doing some trips.
Mark, you're headed to Colorado.
Is that correct?
I am, next week.
And what are you doing there, good sir?
I'll be delivering the keynote at the Calais conference.
I'm pretty excited about that.

(31:13):
And then doing a workshop on student password policies.
Awesome.
That's February 18th through the 20th.
If you're in Colorado or a surrounding state there, you should check out that conference.
And then we're going to the K-12 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
That's February 24th through the 26th.
That's thanks to our sponsors and thanks to our listeners.
So we have a final episode here.

(31:34):
This is with Rise Vision, a proud sponsor of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
They've been hanging out with us for several episodes now.
This is the bit where we try to get someone from the company to come on to kind of clear
the air.
Sometimes we fumble the ball when we talk through, you know, what the heck is Rise Vision?
What do they do?
Whatever.
So I asked Blake and Rob to come on.

(31:55):
We did a quick sit down to unpack Rise Vision, their digital signage, their emergency piece
that can work with your school stuff.
So this is an interview with Blake and Rob with Rise Vision.
Thanks for listening.
All right, I'm hanging out with some folks from Rise Vision, Rise Vision, a proud sponsor

(32:16):
of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
I got Rob and Blake here.
How's it going, guys?
It's going great.
How's it going over there?
It's good.
So I'm in Missouri.
Blake, you said Kansas.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I'm on the Kansas City side.
So up near Kansas City on the Shawnee, Kansas portion.

(32:38):
And then, Rob, you are Canadian.
I'm over in, yeah, Canadian, over in Kingston, Ontario, which nobody knows where Kingston
is.
It's about three hours away from Toronto.
Okay, cool.
I had one friend in high school that was from Canada.
We always said A, and I don't know if that is really what you guys do or whatever, but

(32:58):
that was the joke from high school.
We just always said that.
He probably hated it.
He took it as a reason for Canada jokes.
The more you start drinking, the more the A's come out.
And we did not do that in high school.
All right, so let's unpack RISE Vision a little bit, but I guess before we get into that in
a bigger conversation, can you guys talk about what you do at RISE Vision?

(33:22):
Yeah, so for me, excuse me, I've been with RISE, this February will be 21 years.
I started in support, and I've been with support and QA and IT and all over the place.
And what I finally, where I am now is I work with the CS, the customer success team to
make sure that customers are using RISE Vision, they are, you know, finding it reliable, any

(33:47):
issues that they're running into, they bring up to us and making sure they're getting kind
of the best that they can out of it.
Right.
I'm the senior account executive for the Midwest and Northwest.
I've been here 11, almost 12 years now.
Kind of like Rob, you know, worked around and support customer success.
And now I'm on the sales team, really enjoy it, really love it.

(34:08):
I get to talk to schools all around the country and in Canada, about solving their communications
problems with digital signage, and RISE Vision as a suite of solutions.
So love talking to schools, getting ideas of new products that we can build to help
schools out.
That's one of my favorite things to do is kind of dig in there and see what we don't

(34:31):
do that we should be doing, and then pass that along.
Love doing that.
Love talking to schools and other customers day in and day out about our solution.
Very cool.
So I use, my school district that I work for uses RISE Vision.
So I'm going to ask the generic question, but I know the answer to it, and we'll unpack

(34:54):
it some.
What is RISE Vision?
Yeah, we're a communications software.
Started out as just digital signage.
But RISE Vision as a digital signage product is very robust, very mature.
From the content management system to the scheduling, the 600 plus templates that are

(35:17):
designed for K-12 educators that are super easy to customize.
It's really a communication software that's easy to get anyone in the school into to make
updates to the signage and deploy it.
Now since we're really good at digital signage, we figured the next step was emergency alerts

(35:37):
and announcements.
So we've since recently, well, not really recently, a few years ago, pivoted to displaying
emergency alerts from different emergency management systems on our displays, as well
as being able to push announcements to displays with the click of a button.
So maybe it's not an emergency announcement.
Maybe it's just a bell schedule to count down to the next bell, or a bus dismissal schedule.

(36:04):
You can push those out to any screens in your schools just by making a couple clicks within
the RISE Vision app.
We also now have screen sharing.
It's a great little feature that's included in our pricing, but basically you can use
any RISE Vision display as a collaborative display now, sharing your laptop, your tablet,

(36:24):
your phone screen to that digital signage display in a secured way, but it's also very
easy to share.
Yeah, so my school district, we were using Chrome Sign Builder, right?
So we had a bunch of TVs with Chrome boxes or Chrome bits attached to them.

(36:48):
And then when Google was like, hey, we're not going to support that stuff anymore, that's
when we started looking at a lot of different things and we landed on RISE Vision.
I know of a lot of schools that are still using like a rigged up solution similar to
that, or they're doing like a PowerPoint kind of vibe.
You said it with the templates.
I think the biggest impact, quick impact for us was RISE Vision isn't just a new slideshow.

(37:18):
There's a lot of content and templates that change how we actually have up-to-date information
on our screen.
So I guess a two-part question, would you unpack that just a little bit more?
Talk about those templates and that content, but then also just describe for a school what
equipment it takes to put RISE Vision in.

(37:40):
Yeah, maybe I'll take that first part and Rob, you can talk about the equipment part.
But yeah, our over 600 templates now for K-12 educators are super robust.
So everything from a menu that links to a Google Calendar.
So you don't have to have a nutrition person in RISE Vision.

(38:02):
You can give them a Google Calendar.
They update that Google Calendar and then it's updated automatically on the displays.
To auto-updating templates, we've got about 50 templates that automatically update every
single day with new content.
It's not necessarily specific to your school, but it's K-12 vetted content.
It's animal of the day.
It's the joke of the day.

(38:23):
It's the March Madness men's and women's brackets, which I know you're going to have in your
school showing here in a couple weeks, Chris, as March Madness takes hold.
Really like there's a million different possibilities on how you use these templates and they're
all super easy to customize.
So if you want to recognize a student for some achievement that they've made, we've

(38:46):
got a dozen student achievement templates that you come, you look at which one you want,
you select it, and then you just replace the name in the text box, replace the picture
in the picture box, replace the bio with your own text, click publish and send it to
a screen.
It really couldn't be easier.
And when you're moving from a solution like Chrome Sign Builder, I have schools that have

(39:09):
done it in as little as 15 minutes.
They push the app, the Rise Vision app out to these Chrome boxes that are already in
existence.
They're already running digital signage.
Then they place their Google Slideshow into one of our zoned templates, just to get a
new look and feel.
And then our zoned templates will show time, date, and weather for the location, a little
welcome message.

(39:30):
You're up and running in no time.
So you can get as complex or as simple as you want with our templates.
Cool.
So yeah, Rob, talk about equipment.
So like I said, in my case, we had a bunch of Chrome bits and some Chrome boxes and some
TVs.
I know that we can buy Rise Vision stuff though too.
So can you unpack that?

(39:51):
Sure.
So one of the best things about Rise is we're hardware agnostic.
So Windows, Linux, Chrome, Pi, Android, everything that's out there, we can pretty much run on.
And exactly as Blake was just saying, especially for an organization that's moving off of Chrome
Sign Builder, you're not going to have to go out and ... The cost of purchasing a bunch

(40:16):
of new hardware, be it our own hardware or new Chrome boxes, new Windows boxes, that's
pretty significant, but then it's all the manpower that has to go into setting all of
those up.
It's a lot of work to get it all rocking and rolling, whereas with Rise, it's like, yep,
I'm just switching over to this.
It runs on the hardware I already got.
Perfect.
You just roll out our app on all those machines and you're up and running, exactly like Blake

(40:36):
said, sometimes in just 15 minutes.
We also, exactly as you mentioned, we had our own hardware and we have our own hardware.
One of the reasons that we started working and building our own hardware is we would
get ... People really come to trust our advice and we work with users.

(40:57):
We're not one of those, hey, you're using Rise, bye, we'll never talk to you again.
We are constantly communicating with people and it was like, what should I run on?
What would you guys recommend?
What about this?
What about that?
And we were like, you know what?
Why don't we just come up with our own recommended hardware?
And so that's one of the spots that our hardware came from is we wanted something that we could
depend on.
We all run ourselves in our own offices to make sure that it works.

(41:19):
So yeah, that's one of my favorite things about Rise is we kind of run on everything
that's out there.
And to really drive it home, I've got somebody that I'm working with right now that's currently
on Fedora 21, which for any tech people out there is about a 14-year-old operating system
and it's still run Rise.
We're, of course, replacing those machines, but that's a real testament to how we kind

(41:42):
of work on anything.
Yeah.
I would say that we got to a place.
I don't remember who I talked to with Rise Vision before, but I thought there was a sentence
about didn't get to the hardware game.
That wasn't the entry point.
The entry point was the digital signage and then text like, hey, can you help us out with
the hardware stuff?
Yeah.

(42:03):
That's really what it came down to is we were getting so many hardware questions about it
and people are like, what would you suggest?
What would you suggest?
We got it enough that we're like, all right, let's actually put our money where our mouth
is.
Let's put out something we suggest.
Yeah.
We've appreciated our boxes that have come from Rise Vision and the times too.
I know one time we were playing a different kind of video that was a little heavier on

(42:26):
video, on audio and our Chrome devices were struggling, but even with support, we get
to work through some different settings that we could do to try to make those things buffer
quicker and work better.
Okay.
So you guys talked about the emergency management stuff.
I guess, can you dig into that just a little bit more?

(42:49):
So I think that's probably with like Crisis Go or different things like that, could you
talk about that?
Yeah.
Blake, why don't you talk more about that?
Sure.
Yeah.
So we actually integrate with any emergency management provider that supports common alerting
protocol 1.2, which the vast majority of them do.

(43:10):
So the integration is very simple from the Rise Vision and the things.
We provide you with essentially a web token that you provide to the cap alert provider,
and then they provide you a username and password.
Once that's set up, you select in Rise Vision, which template that you want to show these
alerts and then in Crisis Go, if you have an emergency or a drill, you push it out through

(43:35):
Crisis Go, it's going to treat Rise Vision the same as it would any other endpoint.
It's going to send the text, it's going to send the email, and it's going to send the
messaging to our Rise Vision common alerting protocol presentation, which then takes over
any of your screens that Rise Vision has installed on.
So that's a big deal.

(43:55):
It's not just digital signage that can get these emergency alerts.
Yes, the menu boards in your cafeteria can, the hallway displays can, the office displays
can, but if you have interactive flat panel displays in your classrooms that run Android,
we're going to interrupt anything that's going on on those as well.
So even if the teacher has, let's say they're having a field day or something, they've got

(44:17):
a Nintendo Switch plugged into the back of the TV, they're playing Mario Kart, there's
a medical emergency down the hall.
An alert comes in through Crisis Go, we change the HDMI input over to the Android home base
and show that lockdown or that emergency messaging on the screen.
We're interrupting anything that's going on, regardless of the input.

(44:39):
And on some, a select few IFPs, we can actually bring them out of standby mode, as well as
power them on.
Those are like some of the newer Promethean displays.
Awesome.
And then you mentioned, and I'm not as familiar with this one, but the screen sharing.
Can you unpack that just a little bit more and give me like some use cases for the screen

(45:02):
sharing part?
Sure thing.
So what we found, like I said, I like to talk to schools, figure out what's next, what they
need.
What we've determined and discovered is a lot of schools are unhappy with how their
teachers are sharing to their screens.
Either they're tethered to the projector, they're tethered to the IFP with an HDMI cord,

(45:27):
or they're using a solution that maybe only works 70% of the time, and you know, if something
works 70 or 80% of the time, it might as well not work at all.
When a teacher needs it, they need it.
So what we've done is we've come up with a really easy solution that runs on top of RisePlayer.
So RisePlayer is running, it's running digital signage.

(45:47):
Maybe that's your classroom OS, you're just running digital signage in that room.
The teacher can then connect to that screen wirelessly.
They don't even have to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
They can use single sign-on or a PIN number.
There's various ways to secure it.
They can actually share their screen from their tablet, their laptop, or they can open

(46:07):
up a waiting room.
So let's say they're doing student presentations and they want the students to share, but they
don't want it to be a free-for-all.
They can open up that waiting room, give the students the invite URL, and the students
can join the queue.
The teacher can then say, all right, Billy, Gene, you're sharing to the screen next.
Select them from the waiting room on their computer.

(46:28):
That's awesome.
Then it's Billy's turn to show their presentation.
And like I said, it doesn't have to be the same Wi-Fi network, the same network at all.
So if you have a student network that's separate from the secured network that the IFPs are
on, it's no problem.
Very cool.
Yeah, I can just speak on how the district's been going.
We've had great success with RISE Vision.

(46:49):
It's been great.
Implementation went well.
Any support issues we've had, like I said, that video that was a little unique and different,
support gave us some settings to do that made that thing work better.
But to be able to delegate to even folks that aren't the tech-savviest, and now they have,
they're managing this stuff.

(47:10):
And like I said, the templates and the stuff that you can just say, I want joke of the
day, I want weather, our menu that shows up, that we could delegate that stuff out and
it's easy.
We do teacher webpages in our school district.

(47:32):
And I always despise, I hate when we have a teacher webpage that has a countdown on
it that's old, outdated content.
And I used to walk around to our TVs the old way, and I would just cringe when we would
see some of this stuff.
Like, hey, they haven't changed the lunch menu yet.
Hey, it still has the same joke or interactive thing that's been on there for two months

(47:57):
now.
When we went to RISE Vision, the content, man, that was the thing that, we're using
these TVs in particular at our elementaries, they'll show student accomplishments.
It just hits so nice.
And not that we couldn't do it before, we can just do it easier now and delegate it

(48:17):
out to take out small bits of it to give it to people to use.
Yeah, our marketing department is great because they put together so many case studies on
our website.
You can go and look at case studies where people say, oh, what were you doing before
RISE Vision?
We just had black screens because no one was updating anything.
And now it's so easy to get ahead of everything.

(48:38):
Our scheduling app is simple.
You can get ahead weeks or months in advance with our scheduling app and then set it and
forget it for the next quarter.
You really don't have to do anything if you're industrious enough at the beginning.
I was working with a school, a lady at school a little sometime ago, and she's like, all
right, here's my situation.
We've got like, it was in the electrical, we've got like 500 students and they all want

(49:02):
to see their names when it's their birthday.
And she's like, I just can't have this list of 500 names going by.
I'm like, oh, no, don't do that.
Like piecemeal it out.
So this place from this week to this week, this to the, and you can see the incredulity.
She's like, I can do that.
I'm like, oh yeah, man, you just, this is a set.
And once it's set up, she's like, this is fantastic.
Because you know, exactly as Blake said, the worst part of looking at these screens is

(49:23):
when they just see a black screen, because it hurts, even hurts us over here.
We're like, you know, that's terrible, man.
We want you to be able to, to be benefiting from, from Rise Vision.
And when you can make, you know, the kids that happy with something as simple as they
see their name on the screen, it's going to make it a better experience for everyone.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know that was a couple of years ago, Rob, because we've since released that, that birthday's
template where you can upload a CSV or link to a Google sheet, and then it will just appear

(49:48):
on the day of their birthday or the week of their birthday, and you can just manage it
through a Google sheet.
So it's really, really awesome.
I showed her that, she was like, this is, this is amazing.
This is, this is groundbreaking.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So you mentioned case studies.
So I think we can plug a couple of things.
So if you're interested in this, you're listening, go to risevision.com.

(50:09):
You can click on the contact us button.
Mention that you heard about this from the podcast, please.
And they'll get you going.
But on there too, are some case studies that are very valuable.
And then another thing coming up that I'm going to be on with Rise Vision is on February
18th, we're doing top tech challenges facing K-12 leaders in 2026.

(50:34):
Won't just be talking about Rise Vision the whole time.
So it's not like you joined that thing, you're just going to listen to this same spiel again.
We're going to talk about some hot topics that we've learned on our different platforms,
but then in particular, some use case stuff in my school district.
So looking forward to that.
And there's some other people that are going to be on that thing as well.
Blake and Rob, thank you guys so much for hanging out with me for a few minutes.

(50:55):
I don't think we missed anything, but if you're listening, you have any questions, like I
said, just reach out.
Support has always been great, the experience that I've had.
So someone can give you the answer, they can give you the pricing that you need.
And you guys did some stuff, you can do this per building.
You can roll it all out at one big time, you can be picky choosy.

(51:15):
So again, talk to these guys, get some pricing, get it figured out.
Yeah, support at risevision.com if you need anything.
Best team in the industry, they'll get back to you in a business hour or less.
Awesome.
All right.
Well, thanks, guys.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks very much.
See ya.
The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions

(51:50):
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.

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Episode 250 - Camera Controversy & Student Data Privacy!

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 250 - Camera Controversy & Student Data Privacy!