March 18, 2026 • 64 mins
On Episode 255, Chris, Josh, and Mark return from the MidwestTechTalk Security Symposium to discuss several hot topics. They cover New Hampshire's recently revised data privacy law and the temporary fallout for school livestreams and events, plus a Chicago district using license plate data for residency enforcement.
The guys recap the MidwestTechTalk Security Symposium, including their hands on impressions of Apple's new MacBook Neo.
Chris then interviews R.T. Collins, CEO of Incident IQ, about how service desk and asset management systems relate to incident response, data governance, and the responsible use of AI in K12 operations.
————
Sponsored by:
Meter - meter.com/k12techtalk Visit meter.com/k12techtalk to book a demo! Eaton -Eaton’s solutions fit in every corner of education. Discover tailored solutions for your K-12 library environment through their dedicated interactive environments. From pro A/V equipment and wallmounts to UPSs and charging carts, Eaton’s education solutions have you covered. Discover power protection and connectivity for K-12 libraries at K-12 library interactive.
Incident IQ Chromebookparts.com (Ask for special K12TechPro pricing) VIZOR Fortinet Classlink NTP———— Join the K12TechPro Community (exclusively for K12 Tech professionals)
Buy some swag (tech dept gift boxes, shirts, hoodies...)!!!
Email us at k12techtalk@gmail.com
OR our "professional" email addy is info@k12techtalkpodcast.com
Visit our LinkedIn
Music by Colt Ball
Disclaimer: The views and work done by Josh, Chris, and Mark are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions or positions of sponsors or any respective employers or organizations associated with the guys. K12 Tech Talk itself does not endorse or validate the ideas, views, or statements expressed by Josh, Chris, and Mark's individual views and opinions are not representative of K12 Tech Talk. Furthermore, any references or mention of products, services, organizations, or individuals on K12 Tech Talk should not be considered as endorsements related to any employer or organization associated with the guys.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
On this week's episode, the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, we are back from a short break to
(00:06):
talk about New Hampshire's changing data privacy landscape before Chris talks to R.T.
Collins, the CEO of Instant IQ.
Thanks for listening.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
This is episode 255.
I am Josh.
(00:26):
With me as always is Chris.
Hello, Chris.
How's it going?
He's coming to us from his bunker.
Because in Missouri, we have tornadoes and snow and sleet the same evening.
And with us from yet a different hotel room is Mark.
Hello.
Where are you?
I am in San Francisco for a couple of days.
(00:48):
Josh, do you notice he put his camera just off to the side to make us see the background?
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
It's a fine Hilton Garden suite in San Francisco.
And the view out the window is beautiful.
I've already had to look up the earthquake map to see am I just dizzy or is it an earthquake?
(01:10):
And what was the answer?
I'm dizzy.
Well, yesterday we had rain and then we had potential tornado and then we had snow.
Well, and give a little bit more clarity to that.
It was the high yesterday was 70 degrees yesterday afternoon.
(01:30):
Within a two hour period, it went from 70 to tornado to snow within two hours.
Meanwhile, Mark's dizzy from the beautiful view.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah.
We feel horribly sorry for you.
So I guess we can apologize for this being late.
(01:51):
Yeah.
We were at Midwest Tech Talk.
Yeah, I set up all the stuff.
We were just at the Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium.
Mark, you came in, Josh arrived, I had the table set up.
Mark and I, we sat at the table.
We just have such a good time and we didn't do anything there.
We did sit in front of our recording equipment for a few hours with all three of us in the
(02:15):
same room together and we didn't record one minute of content.
We had people from Apple walk by.
We had people from Google walk by.
We had people like David walk by several times.
Great opportunities.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the highlight of that conference, the unexpected highlight was the Apple folks
brought the Mac Neo and it was just passed around.
(02:39):
No, your highlight of the conference was the photo from midnight 1 a.m. with listener Drew
at Waffle House.
That's right.
Standing in the parking lot, pointing at the Waffle House sign.
Yes.
I'd never been to Waffle House.
What?
Is that true?
Yeah, that was my first time going to Waffle House.
(03:00):
Did you get Waffle House syndrome?
I don't know what that is.
You're just out of it from all the carbs and sugar and yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
We don't have those in New England.
Really?
That's yeah, that's shocking to me.
I thought they were kind of dark girls.
Yeah, me too.
(03:20):
I was with Mark that evening before he went to Waffle House and it was getting pretty
late and I said, you know, see you guys in the morning kind of bit and then the next
day Mark shows me a picture of him and listener Drew and we can just say listener Lori, I
guess maybe.
Okay, listener Lori is probably the safest way to put it.
(03:43):
Who may or may not, I'll just skip over all that, whatever.
But anyways, in a full like they're jumping in the air outside of Waffle House.
Yeah, pretty late at night, early morning.
I don't know.
I had told the waitress at Waffle House it was my first time and then she said, give
me your phone.
We're going to take a picture in front of Waffle House sign.
(04:04):
So we all went outside.
Oh, I thought that was Lori's co-worker that took that photo.
No, no, that was a Waffle House waitress.
That's a wow.
That's hilarious.
And you got a hat, you got a Waffle House hat.
So let's go back to the MacBook Neo.
So Apple came, they brought a MacBook Neo, Josh, you weren't there yet.
(04:26):
So we were telling you that they were giving them away.
Did you believe that?
No, not for a second, because I know you guys are jerks and like, I know.
The Neo's pretty nice.
Yeah.
Is that quick, quick hot take?
Do you guys agree with that?
It feels just like my MacBook Air.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
(04:46):
The proof is in the pudding when you actually get to hold it.
It feels like a very solid laptop.
And I think everybody was passing the thing around very pleasantly surprised at the build
quality.
So I don't know.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
There's been a iFixit video come out, right, Mark?
You watched it?
Yeah.
Some of the commentary after that video has been positive, negative.
(05:09):
I don't know.
It's going to be interesting.
Yeah.
And they're saying that this is the most repairable Apple laptop, but that's not that big of an
accomplishment because Apple laptops have been notoriously hard to repair.
Two things that I want to know about is what does it take to replace the screen?
What does it take to replace the keyboard?
The keyboard is almost 50 screws to take the keyboard off.
(05:33):
On the bottom of that thing, which was exciting to see, you could see the screws, you could
see the entry points, which you're not necessarily used to seeing the entry points on an Apple
device.
So that was exciting to see.
But then 50 screws, that's a pretty high number.
Yeah.
And I did not see a screen repair.
(05:54):
So I think it's a repairable device.
Is this going to be something that you're repairing dozens of laptops in a day or a
week?
I don't know.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens if districts migrate to this.
Do you think, I've read some comments and I'm not sure I agree with these, that they
(06:16):
feel that students will take care of them better because it's a MacBook and not a Chromebook?
Yeah, year one, sure.
I think that will happen in the beginning, right?
If you go from a Chromebook to a MacBook, you're going to take care of that thing a
heck of a lot more.
Just like everybody takes care of their car the first year you get it.
Questions can you keep it up?
I don't know.
Well, some of the discussion we had too is, of course, Apple is going to push for Apple
(06:42):
Care or whatever stuff to be used.
But I think about my school's culture.
We have this technology support intern program at middle school and high school that we've
created this culture where our kids are involved with our one-to-one.
So to say to just shift it, even just put the monetary stuff aside, I don't know if
(07:02):
I like that shift.
You know what I mean?
There's this bigger thing going on where we're instilling into our kids, I think today, how
to troubleshoot hardware and software.
We've even talked, sometimes we get a Chromebook that works well and damages less, like issues
are less.
(07:22):
It's kind of, and I say this lightly, but it's kind of a bummer because that impacts
our student program because they're biting at the bit to fix things and, guys, things
are working.
Let alone if you move to Apple and you're just shipping stuff off.
I guess they can put devices in boxes.
Yeah.
(07:43):
We saw that same thing, Chris, when we moved from HP to the Dell 3100 and the Acers because
they were just a more sturdy device.
Our screen break rate and our keyboard break went way down after leaving HP.
So yeah, I get it.
(08:04):
There's a few things that are going to have to fall into place here.
Monetary is obviously the big one.
But if we continue to see this device cost creep with Chromebooks over the next 18 months,
the way that it has gone in the last three months, there are going to be some very real
conversations had.
Yeah, I think the first conversation to have is if you have an in-house repair program,
(08:29):
even if it's just employees doing it, you need to really kick the tires on this one
and see is this a device that you still want to repair in-house.
I do have a feeling that Apple, their most repairable laptop is not necessarily enticing
districts to repair this thing in-house.
I do think it's still a steep curve to repair just a broken screen or keyboard.
(08:50):
But then the next question is how many districts that are on Chromebooks will switch platforms
and what's the lift to do that?
So I would say based on the Midwest Security Symposium, the excitement that people saw,
a lot of districts are going to kick the tires on this thing.
Oh, no doubt.
There is buzz and excitement around these devices, 100%.
(09:12):
And you've got districts that normally would 10-foot pole an Apple device that are going
to buy a handful of these devices, mine included.
So yeah, it's going to be really interesting.
I think this is how you get every teacher onto a Mac at an affordable rate.
(09:33):
Well, so yeah, that conversation of wanting to replace desktop computers with a laptop,
Chris, I think you've already done that for teachers in your district.
If that, instead of a Windows laptop, which you're talking $1,000 minimum, likely $1,200,
now you can do that with a $499 device, $599 if you want a fingerprint reader.
(09:57):
And they think they're getting an upgrade.
Right, right.
Because ooh, Apple.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, sponsor plug here, talking about broken things.
Chromebookparts.com, a great sponsor of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
And they can give you special K-12 Tech Pro pricing on all your Chromebook parts.
(10:18):
And they're also great with some videos and different things for your student repairs
or your tech department repairs.
So check out chromebookparts.com.
Mention K-12 Tech Pro, they'll give you special pricing.
Mark, can I hit a piece of news that you don't have on your list that isn't K-12 related,
but it's the Striker hack?
So last week, Striker, it's a medical equipment manufacturer.
(10:42):
They were hit with a major hack, a major breach.
And it is believed to be attributed to a hacktivist group aligned with Iranian interests.
And I was just reading before we came on the call here, before we started recording, I
was just reading that they said there was no malware loaded to wipe all of these devices.
(11:06):
And they wiped, hang on, let me get the number.
Tens of thousands is the number, not super specific, but could you imagine wiping tens
of thousands of devices with no malware?
You want to know how they did it?
Oh, let me guess, they got into the MDM?
They had admin access into Intune.
(11:27):
Oh, man.
A global wipe command.
Yep, yep.
So that's from bleepingcomputer.com.
There's a story over there on there that is going through this story.
It says a source familiar with the attack told Bleeping Computer that the threat actor
(11:49):
used the wipe command in Intune.
Nearly 80,000 devices between 5 and 8 a.m. on March 11th were wiped.
I have seen over the last week a lot of alerts to be on the ready for hacktivist groups that
are sympathetic to the Iranian cause.
(12:11):
So you've got their two allies right now, Russia and China.
We know that those three countries alone account for the majority of hacktivist groups.
So now's the time to button down the hatches if you haven't done so already.
Yeah, and if you're in K-12, don't think you're immune to this.
What do you think the Intune administrator of that thought, like those initial, those
(12:38):
first 10 minutes of seeing that play out?
I'm going home.
Light up a cigarette and I'm going home.
And I don't smoke.
It said the attacker carried out the action after compromising an admin account and creating
a new global admin account.
Years and years and years ago, I used to work with a guy that to save, I don't know how
(13:00):
much money you can even save, but he would do the thing where you buy your own tobacco,
like the paper and then the tobacco.
And we'd be at this one school district and he'd be going to take a smoke break.
And that smoke break would take like 30 minutes because he had to roll his own cigarette.
I bet that guy went and bought the old stuff so he can make his own.
(13:23):
Take your time outside, man.
Or marijuana.
Because that helps.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Mark.
What other news you got?
What other marijuana inducing news you got?
She just threw me off the game right now with that.
Well, you are in California.
We just assume things, Mark.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
(13:44):
Let's go to New Hampshire.
So last year, New Hampshire passed a new law that was signed in by the governor that requires
parents to give permission, schools to have written permission from parents anytime they
want to record their child.
This was not interpreted by the Department of Education until six months into the law.
So in December of this year, they clarified that that also states that a parent must sign
(14:08):
permission if they're going to be at a basketball game and the game is going to be recorded.
That even implies two rehearsals.
And if a student is going to be recorded for any sort of teacher professional development,
that's not public.
So off hell broke loose in New Hampshire.
All of a sudden, every school district went dark with their basketball games, with their
(14:28):
Christmas concerts were not streamed anymore.
And the New Hampshire legislature had to quickly, quickly rush and get a clarification out.
So they passed a new law just the last couple of weeks that clarified that events hosted
by schools that are semi-public or are designed to be where public can attend, you do not
(14:49):
need parental permission for that one.
So do you guys record or stream any of your sporting events and Christmas concerts?
Oh, yeah.
Every Christmas, choir, band, whatever.
I think the only thing we don't make an effort to stream and it's due to copyright issues
are the musicals and plays that our middle school and high school put on.
(15:12):
Other than that, if it's a band or choir concert or whatever, music, sporting, football,
basketball, volleyball, all the balls, wrestling, baseball, softball, all of it gets, like I
said, all the balls, it all gets streamed.
What about tennis?
(15:33):
We, yeah, last I know, I'd have to ask our PR guy, but we have a hotspot.
What about lacrosse?
Are you kidding me?
We're not some uppity high school.
We don't have lacrosse.
Do you?
Okay.
So next question though, do you post a sign or is it just the assumption that because
(15:53):
it's in a public area?
We don't have a sign and actually, you know, that's a good discussion point.
Yeah.
Maybe we do need to just, you know, on the doors to the gym or the baseball field, the
gates, whatever.
You maybe record these, these premises are live streamed or whatever.
That's probably not a bad idea.
(16:15):
Because I think during a football game, the microphone on our huddle cam was picking up.
Let's just say some colorful language from a spectator.
That's that's probably not a bad idea, Mark.
We just had some interesting conversation.
Like we, we do a media consent, you know, acknowledgement you know, but that's even
(16:38):
the olden days of, can they be in the newspaper?
You know, it applies to social media and stuff, you know, so I think you could add some sentences
that would work your way through this, but we actually had some buildings.
So we're finally getting into what many of you have done for years, which is online registration.
Our school district's been behind on that.
(16:59):
We're finally moving into that with infinite campus.
And that brought about our different buildings doing different things differently.
Where one building would ask for media consent, and then separate from that was like yearbook.
And that's interesting that a parent might want their kid in the yearbook, but not consent
to social media.
(17:19):
And there can be different circumstances.
But we were trying to line up all the buildings to be unified.
What is interesting with that too is eventually the yearbook gets posted online.
So then that would go to whether they do the media thing or, or not.
So again, I just think about this where you're, when we think about they sign that form where,
(17:39):
you know, we weren't necessarily wearing the hat of, yeah, because that applies to all
the games that we're streaming, when yeah, maybe we need to work, work that policy, massage
that thing just a little bit to make it make sense again.
Well, you've got some sporting events that are on a field outside clearly in public view,
and then other sporting events are in a court, which is you have to go into school grounds.
(18:03):
So it's, it's not, it's not clear cut, and it does require a little bit of clarification.
So glad to see New Hampshire legislature quickly turned that around and passed a revised bill
within two or three months of the issue being brought up.
But that was a little bit chaotic during the Christmas season for those schools.
Well, New Hampshire, Chris, what is their state motto?
(18:25):
What is it?
Don't tread on me.
Live or die.
What is it?
No.
Close.
I have it on my wall somewhere here.
What's the bit?
I had a tattoo to my chest.
It's live free or die.
That's right.
Yeah, they are.
They're deemphasizing the or die part.
If you see like tourism ads for New Hampshire in the Boston area, it's just gonna say live
(18:48):
free.
Well, we, uh, we really enjoyed our time up in New Hampshire and there are a lot like
Missourians.
Oh yeah.
Which is why I brought home that sticker that I get the, like when I'm having a hard day
and I'm, you know, thinking about different things, I just look up and it says, live free
or die.
It makes me feel a certain way.
(19:08):
What's the group of people?
What's the free staters?
Free staters.
Yeah, that was, yeah.
Interesting people.
Chris joined their movement.
Yeah.
I joined the club.
All right.
So speaking of cameras in schools, let's go to Chicago.
(19:29):
There was a district just outside of Chicago that the local NBC Chicago store, a news outlet
to the story on them using a contractor that uses license plate detection to enforce residency
requirements.
I thought this was flock when I first read it, but it sounds like they're actually using
(19:49):
data from a third party provider to verify license plate.
They were paying $46,000 for a three year contract to get licensed by data.
They would then use that to enforce their residency requirements.
I'm ha floored that they would go to that length because when you're enforcing residency,
(20:11):
you're actually kicking families out.
It's actually hurting your revenue.
But to go even as far as tracking license plates and kicking a family out because you
detected that their license plate was constantly being used in another city in this particular
area that raised the issue had had loaned their car out to a family member.
And that's why the school district had thought that they were living somewhere else.
(20:33):
It wasn't going after going off of car registration information.
It was going off of usage, apparently.
That's goofy.
Chris, how hardcore is your district on proof of residency and making those families prove
they live where they say they live?
I again, and that's an interesting question because we're digging deeper into the online
(20:58):
registration like we've launched it.
I mean, we're hardcore to make sure we're, you know, hitting the proper marks.
But I know we have a neighbor school district that like every year they make their residents
do a lot of extra checks.
And I don't believe we're doing and that's extra.
Like that's not a requirement that we just have to do.
(21:20):
So I know that we're not, whatever you want to say, quote unquote, that that hardcore with
it.
We're hardcore.
We we make them prove it every year.
And it's to the point where this last year we have like, I think, three or four faked
electric bills to try and say they were.
(21:40):
Didn't you say one was like a piece of paper that just said like electric?
No, it wasn't quite that bad.
But we've had handwritten notes before that get denied.
These three or four were our provider is Ameren, our electric provider.
And you could tell like the fonts didn't match.
Yeah, yeah, we had I think we caught three or four this year that were faked electric
(22:04):
bills.
We had an entire department whose sole purpose was to invest residency and then go after
families.
It was pretty intense.
Huh?
That's been again to talk about our district finally doing online registration.
And it's twenty twenty six.
And I'm really excited that we're finally finally doing it.
But that's that lift.
(22:24):
We were determining.
Oh, it's a lot.
Someone has to do this stuff.
And we've not had like a district registrar.
We've not had people that are responsible for that.
But, you know, we've had it's been very fragmented across the district.
Well, we need consistency.
That's been a yeah, quite a heavy lift to figure out.
Yeah.
It it hurt feelings like I just this last week, like we added something to our building
(22:51):
secretaries to do.
And it's like I was telling the principals, this is really easy for me to say, like this
is needed and let's do this.
But it's just adding more work to our secretaries, which is not that's not an easy sentence to
say when you're in, which is why I asked them to go tell their secretaries, please.
(23:12):
So let me let me know after you've told them and I'll do the follow up email.
Yeah.
All right, Mark.
What else?
Yeah.
By the way, check out Eaton Eaton Solutions fit every corner of education.
They can tailor whatever you're needing for your district with their dedicated stuff.
They have you covered so they can do your power protection, your connectivity, all that
(23:36):
you need.
So check out Eaton.
All right.
And last but not least, Wired has done a story on a problem that we've been seeing for years
in schools.
And now it's reached a hole in the fever pitch, which is teens using a fuel that slander pages
to mock their teachers.
slander pages, meaning TikTok accounts, Instagram accounts where they're posting text images
(23:57):
and most recently AI generated videos.
So Wired has finally jumped on this one.
There are a few, I would say, third party AI tools, one that I had never even heard
of before.
That's commonly used called Vigil, Vigil AI.
And this is what teens are using.
They're uploading their child or their their teacher's image and then having some pretty
(24:18):
inappropriate videos.
How do you spell that?
So V-I-G-G-L-E.
Are you uploading our photos right now to this and making some AI generated videos?
We'll see.
We'll see.
We'll see.
What have I done?
Anyways, have you, I've dealt with slander pages and Instagram accounts for years.
Are you guys starting to see AI generated slander pages for teachers or other students?
(24:41):
I can't say that we've seen slander page use, but last week I disabled cameras for
our middle school on Chromebooks so they couldn't take pictures of staff or themselves.
So I mean, read into that what you want.
Yeah, we haven't had, we haven't had AI misuse like that yet, but you know, absolutely over
(25:04):
the years we've had social media, fake accounts and the whole bit.
So it just makes sense that this is what's going to happen.
It's coming.
What's the fallout there?
Like how far, I don't know that there's really anything the district can do unless it's taking
place at school on a school device or interrupts the learning environment during the day.
(25:26):
But say you're a teacher, Mark, put on your teacher hat again, teachers probably can't
wear hats, put on your teacher whistle or whatever.
What would you do if a kid created a slander AI video of you doing something horribly inappropriate
with potential of ruining your career?
(25:47):
Like where does, what's that outcome look like?
I mean, you gotta, you just have to blow your whistle at them and then they usually take
it down.
Yeah, that's it.
And so the amount, the amount of effort that that kid is putting into making that AI video,
I would say is similar to the amount of work that our parents and grandparents did when
(26:13):
they drew that very detailed drawing of the teacher.
Like it's the same problem.
It's a mischievous kid.
It's just the technology has gotten a lot better.
So I don't, you know, the punishment should be the same, right?
It's hard though.
I mean, there's, there's not much you can do to answer your point or your question,
Josh.
(26:34):
I mean, you can report it to Instagram and Meta and try to get these things taken down,
but they're not going to listen to you.
They don't really care.
No, they don't care at all.
Yeah.
It's a little easier when it's student to student, because then if, look, my little
tidbit here is if you report an image as being for somebody under the age of 13, they act
pretty quickly to take those images down.
(26:54):
But if it is a teacher, you know, students generate content about their teacher or administrator,
there's not much you're going to, you should expect to get of a response from Meta or Instagram
or any of those companies.
So unfortunately this is hard.
Yeah.
I would agree with everything you said, Mark.
Yeah.
I used to, I wouldn't say I laughed at the SRO or snicker, but that's, that's, that's
(27:18):
the words I got, but used to, you know, they would come in when they heard about a snap
was sent.
And they just think that we can magically take all kinds of action and get this thing,
you know, brought down.
And I had to inform them that's not how it works.
Yeah.
And, you know, some learning took place over time, but this technology, I mean, that's,
this is what's going to happen.
(27:39):
This is the world that we're creating to live in.
So the ones that killed me were the, the confessions pages where you'd have a random form, usually
an old Google form, you know, to submit your confessions.
And then a student would post all those live on Instagram and they were just horribly embarrassing.
You could never verify who put it up there.
Yeah.
(28:00):
And these things were just, it was just virtual bullying at a, at a much larger scale than
before.
So this is where I wish the tech companies would play ball on this stuff, but they do
not.
Like you said, though, if, if you contact them and you utter the phrase that, you know,
with a kid under the, under a certain age, they, they tend to act rather quickly.
(28:22):
But yeah, you've, you've got to know how to say it and what to say.
Well, that's, that's my final tip for you.
If you need to report something on social media, don't do harassment or bullying.
Do somebody under the age of 13, you're going to get a much faster response from the tech
companies because it's a federal law and opposed to some of the other categories there.
(28:43):
I guess.
So I, should I talk about the interview?
Sure.
Before we get right into, I do want to talk about meter.
Check out meter.com slash Kato tech talk.
That's meter.com slash Kato tech talk.
You can book a demo with them.
They will do your full stack networking, your wired, your wireless or cellular.
They can help you figure out your ISP, all that kind of good stuff.
(29:04):
So check them out.
I got to hang out with incident IQ, the CEO of incident IQ, RT Collins.
So this is an interview.
This is not like a, Hey, just talk to me about incident IQ the whole time interview.
We actually dig into just thinking about your work order system or your, your, your assets
(29:25):
and how much data you put into there.
I think sometimes it gets overlooked what kinds of data we're putting into our ticketing
systems or asset management systems.
So we unpack that with RT, and then we talk about the future of AI in regards to those
systems as well.
So pretty cool interview with RT.
(29:47):
So check it out.
All right.
I'm hanging out with RT Collins of incident IQ.
You are the CEO of incident IQ, RT.
Glad to meet you.
Happy that you're here.
How's it going today?
It's going great, Chris.
Thank you for having me.
Long-time listener.
(30:08):
Excited to be with you this afternoon.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
We were just, so we just met for the first time over a zoom call.
And you were saying that you, that you've listened to us for a while and of course we
appreciate that.
And what is your, what is your ritual?
So sometimes we talk to listeners and they have like a particular time.
(30:29):
Sometimes it's random.
What's your, what's your thing?
When do you listen to us or when do you try to listen to us?
I try.
I try in the midst of other chaos going on in the Collins house sold, I'm a, I'm a father
of five as I was sharing with you.
So it's, it's bonkers at our house.
My wife's morning to sleep in a little bit is on Saturday.
(30:53):
So I'm up early with the kids on Saturday and I'm making pancakes or refereeing fights
or whatever I'm doing.
And then I've got you and Josh and Mark in, in one of my years, Saturday morning.
So that's when, that's when I consume the pod and I love it.
(31:14):
Sometimes I have to go back and relisten as you might imagine if I've got things going
on.
That's awesome.
But yeah, well, very cool.
Very cool that you listen.
And of course we're excited about our, our sponsorship and partnership together.
So oftentimes we talk about a company, we talk about their product service and we fumble
the ball.
(31:35):
We don't unpack it as great as the, the, the expert would.
So that's why you're here today is to talk about instant IQ.
I bet our listeners have a pretty good idea, pretty good vibe of what it is that instant
IQ does.
But we always like to kind of go all the way back to the bottom and just start again.
So in a nutshell, I guess, would you tell me and tell us what is incident IQ?
(32:01):
So your listeners may be familiar with this.
We've been focused on serving K-12 needs around IT service management, IT asset management,
and then other back of house departments, if you will, their workflow needs through
(32:21):
the years.
We've been at this over a decade now, and we currently serve over 2,100 school districts
across the country in representation in all 50 states.
And that translates to 13.6 million students and some change that are in some way supported
(32:44):
by the IQ platform.
So roughly one out of every four or five kiddos, depending on what big list you pull,
is served through our products.
We got our start with IT, and I know that's our, your audience's focus and probably our
(33:05):
focus this afternoon.
But over time, our customers really, as led by them, have taken us to other spaces within
the broader operational ecosystem of the K-12 school district and have asked us to
help them solve problems around facilities, maintenance work orders, HR-related service
(33:30):
requests, business office workflows, things like that.
So pretty much anything that lives in, like, email or Adobe jank in your districts is,
that's kind of ripe for streamlining with our tools.
But our bread and butter, IT support tickets, IT service management, and IT asset management.
(33:55):
And yeah, that's probably what a lot of your listeners know us for.
Awesome.
So I want to throw a little bit of, like, cybersecurity and student data privacy, those
kinds of questions at you.
So if we think about ticketing, we think about asset management, what would you say
(34:15):
is the role of those things as far as, like, incident response?
Like if a security event is happening, who cares about tickets and who cares about asset
management?
Can you unpack that some for me?
Yeah.
So if we're thinking along the lines of, like, a cyber incident in particular, I assume it's
going to be the direction of the question, you know, for your ticketing system, that's
(34:41):
going to kind of be probably tangential, right, as you're working on those kinds of issues.
If there's really kind of two dimensions that come to mind for me where I've seen, you know,
you want to kind of be thinking about this on that bigger checklist of however you might
(35:01):
be responding to that incident.
So one thing you'll see is, like, if an affected system, an attack or other incident is going
to want to be one of those core systems in all likelihood, like ERP or SIS or something
like that.
So that's the kind of thing that, like, is just naturally going to be the source of a
(35:23):
lot of inbound support requests as various users discover, oh, something is amiss with
this core district system.
So there's kind of two things that I think your ITSM solution can help you there.
One, it could potentially be early telemetry.
If you've got an issue going on with a core system like that, if suddenly you see a bunch
(35:45):
of inbound tickets, everybody is struggling to execute a particular transaction, the ERP
or SIS access seems limited for some reason or whatever, well, then that's, like, okay,
you've got something going on with the core system.
So tools that flag problem tickets and kind of things that track back to a root cause
(36:07):
like that, those are things where we see our customers kind of utilizing those approaches
to support that could be an indicator that you've got a cybersecurity incident maybe
on your hands.
But beyond that, I think the other thing that you would want to be thinking about is just,
(36:28):
how to basically manage that second-order effect of user disruption around a core system
before you get it back online.
So to the extent that your ticketing solution has tools to proactively let users know, hey,
we're aware of how the SIS access is disrupted and here's why, being able to communicate
(36:51):
those things proactively in the space where they would go to log their issue or kind of
raise their hand that, ah, I'm having trouble with this core system, you're going to want
to do that, right?
So you're just going to save yourself a bunch of redundant follow-up and kind of pain once
you eventually bring that system back online.
And then anything else that you might use to do one-to-many communication to your teachers
(37:14):
or faculty staff or whomever might be using that core system, you know, use that to close
the loop eventually when you kind of get up and running.
So that's just some quick thoughts.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're kind of touching on a bigger picture thing here.
I was just talking to a secretary.
She had emailed me directly and we had gotten a support ticket too with an outage we were
(37:40):
having and I did some follow-up with her just because I ran into her, like, in the office.
And somehow we started talking about, I was just doing some quick education on, you know,
we have a thing that pings are important stuff every so many minutes and, you know,
we will find out that that thing is happening.
(38:02):
This was something that was down, right?
And she was like, oh, well, then I won't email you anymore.
I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
We completely welcome, you know, the support tickets and the emails.
And, you know, you want people to feel like they can report an issue, feel comfortable
to report an issue.
And then some of that, though, is that, which is what you're kind of touching on at the
(38:24):
end, we need to communicate well when things go down and people need to have a good way
of hearing from us and they know it's us and they know what's going on.
Your anecdote raises another thing that I overlooked there is if you do have, you know,
(38:44):
those core systems that are, you know, you rely on to protect the network, monitor, things
like that, that can be another way where, you know, you can get those automated alerts
if you've got those systems configured to fire emails or if they have APIs and you want
to build an integration, that can be another way to flag issues automatically.
(39:09):
If you're getting pings in those systems and then you want to have that record of responding
to it or addressing the issue within your ticket system, just setting that up, avoiding
that manual step of, oh, I got the ping, let me kind of create the record here.
That just kind of gets back to kind of what your priorities are for tracking and managing
kind of record keeping of everything you, all the work that gets done in a given day.
(39:34):
It matters probably more for bigger teams, smaller teams, kind of good visibility.
Maybe it's a little overkill, but it never hurts to build a record, particularly if it
ultimately tracks back to an issue and folks kind of want to do the postmortem.
Yeah.
We, you know, we can dig into the weeds on the asset part of it.
(39:56):
When the bad thing is happening, you need to know what assets you have.
Yeah.
If you're going to go around, you have to touch every computer and image every computer.
You need to have a good inventory.
You need to know what you have going.
So you need to have that voice, you just do.
I feel like I'm putting you in a hot seat just a little bit here.
You're not even going to talk about instant IQ, you're just going to talk about these
bigger picture things.
(40:17):
Well, and I'm, I'm happy.
I mean, so everything I'm saying applies to things that we're helping districts and our
partners solve with, with IQ tools.
I can talk IQ all day and I know that it's kind of, I'm happy to, but yeah.
Let me give you another hot seat, Juan.
I think sometimes or oftentimes a tech does a good job with putting documentation into
(40:45):
a ticket almost to the point of that we put too much information into the ticket.
So I guess to pick your brain on this student data, maybe in a technician's notes, and maybe
it's not even the technician that did it.
Maybe it's the teacher that says little Johnny's device is doing X, Y, Z, and is explaining
(41:05):
this stuff.
What's your hot take on like data governance as far as your service desk goes?
Yeah, this is a great question and, you know, kind of weirdly has a, has a few different
dimensions to it that we think have thought a lot about for the years at IQ.
(41:26):
So our experience has been what you described is, is, is usually it's going to be that end
user, that teacher that are sending in the tickets and, you know, helpfully or unhelpfully
injecting data that make that a little more sensitive student data or otherwise.
(41:47):
My thought on this and where we've seen our, our partner districts have a lot of success
is if you know that there are particular types of tickets that correlate with protected student
information or other sensitive data, then it's always going to be a good idea to try
to use routing and automation as well as your approach to permissions within your ITSM tool.
(42:12):
Just make sure that those are only kind of going where they need to go.
So if you had tickets related to SIS, related to the gradebook issues in your LMS or wherever
that kinds of information, things that are going to tend to invite that teacher to jam in,
hey, Johnny's student number X, Y, Z, his grade is wrong in the gradebook, that, you know, that,
(42:36):
that's, that's the kind of thing that we would kind of maybe want to pay a little more attention to.
Well, then if you've got the capability to route based on those issues and those areas of expertise
and hey, that can just go straight to that person who owns the SIS and they're going to be the right
person to handle that as opposed to hopscotching from that building tag to my network admin over
(42:59):
eventually to the right spot. Now that's only as good as the system's ability to correctly
categorize issues, which I can talk about that as a challenge. I think we've got AI coming up
on the docket a little bit later. AI shows a ton of promise to make sure you can get the benefit
(43:19):
of this kind of approach to routing and access for tickets. So that's one. If, so if there are
things that you, we can kind of predict when it'll come in, that's good. We've also built some tools
in InsightQ that can enable the end user, the requester, the ticket to proactively flag when
a ticket is going to contain protected information. And then likewise, agents have a tool to do that
(43:44):
too. So what that accomplishes within an IAQ is usually you've got some kind of notification
schema for tickets that's going to fire off emails to people and kind of give them those updates.
So when tickets contain protected student information in IAQ and those flags are triggered,
either automatically through AI or proactively intentionally by the user, then system external
(44:07):
notifications, so emails that are getting fired off, will not contain the data that's flagged as
protected. So you'd have to log in, have to be authenticated to see that, and then you get the
benefit of permission. So it's one little step to kind of keep this from having that data in a place
where it's like easily forwarded or printed or otherwise kind of leaking out. Yeah, I think
(44:32):
I would say if you quick asked a lot of techs, you know, to identify, you know, their systems
that have a lot of data, you know, that if it were compromised, you know, what would that mean?
I bet a lot of us might skip over our service desk just because it's just not on the radar,
but there's a lot of good data that would be a big deal if it were compromised
(45:00):
or it needs to be taken seriously with the confidentiality pieces that are in it as well.
Correct, yeah, and kind of to dovetail that, you know, the last kind of thought I'd have for folks
out there is, yeah, so things like your service desk tend to be overlooked when district IT teams
(45:23):
or broader administrative teams get FERPA data requests from parents. So every student or
emancipated minor or parent or parent guardian, you know, can request like audit and access to
their student education records, and we go to things like SIS and kind of pull all that down.
(45:44):
But certain times if we really need a complete picture, we'd need to think about these tertiary
systems like your ticketing system. So in addition to strategies for protecting it, having a way to
query it and pull that back. Where I've seen it come up, and you might think, oh, that sounds
theoretical, but where I've seen it come up in real life is around issues with districts that
(46:08):
have student device programs, and you get like intentional damage or whatever, and then
administration's kind of coming around and doing the accountability thing, and then now a parent
guardian kind of says, well, I don't believe that. That's not the case. I want a sense of everything
that's gone on with this where my students allegedly, so suddenly you got to go to these
(46:31):
other systems, and that data is suddenly useful and important in that regard.
All right, RT, let me give you, I think I'm going to give you one more hot seat question.
Sure. Let's talk about AI. We can assume that AI is making, and we know, not even assume,
(46:54):
it's making its way into the K-12 Tech's service desk. What would you say we should be paying
attention to with that? Should we just turn on that faucet, let it do whatever it's going to do?
For us, what guardrails should we make sure have in place if we're adding AI into our service
(47:15):
desk, into our asset management? What's your hot take on the state of that? So, it is really timely,
Chris. Like you said, we've launched products recently. It's last month that are leveraging
the capabilities of AI to start to solve some challenges that we have around service desk.
(47:37):
Definitely get back to the guardrails piece of your question here shortly because that's
very critical. But to just maybe kind of set this up where I see the potential of it adding value
and kind of what I would offer up to the listeners as use cases to think about is, I think, step one
as a threshold matter, what we've really worked hard around with our AI solutions is the
(48:07):
threshold challenge that kind of happens with K-12 IT support. And this is this structural
dilemma, I'll call it, where our teacher, she just wants to get that ticket in as fast as she or he
possibly can. And that teacher may or may not be particularly tech savvy. I know you're better
(48:32):
half as a teacher. We love our teachers, but they may be where they're at on that journey.
And therefore, they're just trying to jam that in and they're trying to get back to the million
other things that they've got cooking. And then those needs of a requester, of a teacher in this
case, run headlong into what we need as IT professionals on the other end of that story
(48:56):
trying to solve the problem, which is we need details. We need actionable data to actually
go work on whatever the issue is. So I'm sure it never happens in your district, but I've heard
tell technicians getting tickets that just say it's broke. What's broken? And the reason that
(49:19):
that's a challenge, beyond the obvious, is that adds tons of time. That adds tons of time to how
long this ticket sit open and it soaks an already overburdened team to get in touch with that user
and ask those questions. So generative AI has got a ton of potential to basically move up in the
(49:43):
timeline and automate the running to ground, the details. So what we have worked on is deploying,
it's really a package of AI agents that do that work, but do it in a really teacher-friendly,
(50:03):
user-friendly way that make that ticket submission experience a really natural
language chat experience where they can just describe what's going on. And then the AI agent
has got all of the context from all the other relevant systems. So it knows who this user is,
it knows the assets that are assigned to that user or their room. It can bring all that to the party
(50:27):
automatically, and then it can ask the questions when all we did to begin with is it's broken.
It can walk them stepwise down the path. And then the net result can be what we need as a tech
team, which is an actionable ticket with all the data that we need to go get going and actually
solve the problem. So I think that that is one of the most exciting and just kind of like step one
(50:56):
efficiency gain. Because what that turns on is any of you, you will able to realize the benefits of
all the routing and automation that you might otherwise have designed within your service desk.
If you can get accuracy on the input, you can get efficient and you can really start to do some fancy
(51:18):
things in terms of optimizing how you organize the work and tackle it on the back end.
Yeah, I can think about the years ago when we could add, like, we didn't have to type the same
sentence over and over. We could just automate the response. Like the teacher says, projector not
working. We could say, can you look at the projector and tell us what the model is? And it
(51:43):
was canned. And then there was technology and advancement where you could more automate that
question. So to then have AI step in and have some conversation and just summarize the ticket and give
the technician the ticket already establishing, this is the projector that you said was in the
(52:03):
room. This is what the teacher is saying, you know, all that kind of good stuff. That's a beautiful
world. It's exciting. And then if you think about those types of issues that you get, where even
more of it is potentially fully solvable by our AI teammates who's having that front end
(52:23):
conversation, or at a minimum, we can be sure that we're going to get all the info we need. So like
a great example would be like unblock a website, unblock a URL request.
Commonly see this across the IQ community as a frequent flyer ticket type. Sure, sure, sure.
(52:48):
And then very also common to these particular requests being incomplete. So just say, hey,
I need this website unblocked. And the district likely has established criteria. And it probably
lives out on the district website somewhere. If the teacher would just bother to kind of like
(53:10):
look it up and give us everything, we could solve their action, their request a lot faster.
But they don't, either because they're unaware of that, or within our ticketing system,
they kind of picked the wrong category and never saw that we need this information.
That's a perfect use case for AI to make sure, okay, I've identified this teacher's trying to,
(53:33):
needs a modification to the filter, needs to get to this website. Let me make sure they're giving
the team that's going to have to evaluate this and approve it or deny it everything that they
want to see. You can go capture that at the front end. And then that request can come back.
And our AI partner could even make a recommendation, right, based on other tools that we
(53:54):
can build to go evaluate that site automatically, things like that. I like it. Okay, so talk to me
about the guardrails of this thing. Yeah, yeah. So I think the things that you need to be thinking
about as you're starting to explore, you know, what can AI agents do for your IT support operations,
(54:14):
there's a ton of potential out there. And even just now, like even if you're just thinking about,
oh shoot, well, the commercial LLM, when I'm playing around with it, I ask it to help me
troubleshoot a power issue with my personal device and my personal life. And it does a
halfway decent job about that. So we're all kind of seeing these glimpses of what this technology
(54:36):
can do with integrated within our IT support operations. So it's exciting. It's a brave new
world. But I think what you need to be thinking about as you're making your forays into this
is first things first, it's like, we don't want to be feeding LLMs more information than they need
(55:00):
to actually process the request and come back. So if we stick with my little hypothetical,
and we were using an LLM to help us generate, you know, steps to resolve a particular power
troubleshooting issue or whatever, or even better, if we were setting up an approach where a user
(55:22):
could maybe self-help, right, we wanted to give the teacher before the ticket hit our queue,
some options to try. Well, then what information ought to be passed over to that LLM?
However, that results being achieved, we want that to be the least amount of data necessary.
(55:42):
And in our little hypothetical, that would be as little information as basically the issue and any
related diagnostic around the issue. So it's a power issue, you know, the cables work, whatever
else might have been captured in that chat colloquy with our AI agent. It's just going to
want to give it that and then the model. So we would, we want to make sure the system is engineered
(56:05):
and designed to not pass it the user's name, because that's unnecessary, not the location.
The LLM shouldn't even know that this is related to a school district, et cetera. And then, however
it's implemented, that needs to not go to any off-shelf commercial version. If you're using
an enterprise instance, then the other thing that we're going to need to see is that the model's not
(56:31):
being trained based on that. So we just want to pass it a bite-sized piece of information to help
us with the problems that that technology can help us solve through the ticket support process.
And it needs to be ephemeral. It needs to just go with that request, return the answer, not train
(56:51):
the model. And then the other thing, I mean, there's multiple, but maybe two of the thoughts here.
As we build and deploy these AI agents, they need to work the way real technicians work,
the way real IT professionals work, which is when we create access within software systems
(57:18):
for folks that work for you on your team, that's cabined and tailored to their scope
of responsibility. So if you're looking at an AI tool and it looks like it's postured to basically
be required to sit on top of any and all data, then that's, I think, an opportunity to hit the
(57:39):
pause button and think about that. Because if the AI's needs and its remit does not require that,
then we're going to want to shape that. And it's going to be better and safer if the jobs to be
done correlate directly with the permissions in the relevant system. So to give an example in
(58:01):
InsightQ, we've got efficiency agents that we're building and deploying now, and we serve a wide
variety of workflow needs, as I was mentioning at the beginning. So we've got teams that use
our platform that are IT-focused, and then they may have counterparts that work in facilities,
and then they may have counterparts that work in HR. And that HR team is getting inbound cases,
(58:26):
hey, update my W-2 withholding, my last name change, very sensitive stuff. And just like we
wouldn't want that going to our building-level tech at IT accidentally, same thing for AI agents.
They need to be able to have the same constraints based on their access, which APIs that they can
(58:50):
bring data from, what can they see in effect? We should be able to understand that and control
that really carefully. And then the last piece of the puzzle is, however we deploy these tools,
it's got to give us tools as administrators of these systems to audit what's going on,
to see the trail of chat colloquies and other actions that the AI agents are taking. We've got
(59:15):
to be able to see that post-hoc so that we can inspect it so that it's doing good work, or in
the event that we get a negative outcome, we've got to kind of backtrack on that. So I know y'all
are very familiar with like the Google ecosystem tools, et cetera. So those are the kinds of
administrative kind of oversight suite of tools that I think are the right way to run a railroad,
(59:44):
and that should be a normative expectation that we should all have as we start to find
efficiencies within IT operations as well. I like it, Artie. I'll tell you, I bet on K2L Tech Pro,
on K2L SysAdmin subreddit, usually a couple of times a year, someone will say,
you know, what work order system was everybody using? Or they say, what's everybody using for
(01:00:09):
an asset management system? And then you'll just get a floodgate of comments because people just,
that's an easy question answer. There's a lot more questions that should be asked
as follow-ups when that answer is given, because we just talked through three, I mean, we talked
(01:00:29):
about service desk and asset management, but related to cybersecurity and instant response.
That's a bigger picture thing to think through with what are you using as your solution.
We talked about data governance and what data are we putting in our system. And now we just
touched on AI and then the guardrails with it. I think service desk, asset management
(01:00:54):
can sometimes be the thing that we pick it and we kind of set and forget.
I think you're touching on it's 2026 and we need to kind of evaluate what we're doing with those
things. Because there's some things we could be doing a lot better probably that, well,
obviously it sounds like instant IQ is trying to figure that out for us. So
(01:01:15):
I had more questions, but I don't think we're going to do them. I think we gave our listeners
some things to think through. Think about your service desk. Think about your asset management.
Think about those things in relation to your instant response to your cybersecurity.
Think about those things in relation to what data are you putting into them? If your service desk
(01:01:39):
were compromised, what data is in there? Again, how are you assigning those things? Who's seeing
those things? Who has access to those things? If you're listening, evaluate that. And then if you
don't have an AI workflow management, service management, asset management piece to what
you're using today, maybe you should start thinking through what that world can look like.
(01:02:03):
So check out instantIQ.com. R.T., thanks for hanging out with me. We will do this again at
some point down the road. My pleasure, Chris, and look forward to it. Thank you for the time.
Thank you. All right. So thanks for listening. We have a couple things coming up where we get
to hit the road. So April 13th through the 15th, we're going to be at COSEN. That's in Chicago.
(01:02:27):
The three of us will be there hanging out with the podcast table doing an episode. And then
fast forward, May 11th, Hayden's going to be in Actum in Maine at their leadership conference.
You can check out Hayden there. And then all the way into July, we're going to be at the
Gamus Conference. The podcast is Savannah, Georgia. And then also in July is the Midwest
(01:02:48):
Tech Talk Technical Conference. So check out those events. But those are brought to you. And thanks to
our sponsors, you guys that listen, of course, as well. But our sponsors like Visor,
that's V-I-Z-O-R. They just did a huge release, over 70 new features. One of those is a redesigned
barcode check-in checkout interface. So check out visor.cloud.com. And then last but not least,
(01:03:13):
Fortinet podcast at fortinet.com. They were just at the security symposium showcasing all the great
products, as well as classlink.com. Check out classlink for your rostering and more. And then
NTP, our friend David over at NTP, email davidrenn, D-R-E-N-N-T-P-I-N-C.com. Thanks for listening.
(01:03:38):
The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh,
Chris, and Mark, and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations
(01:03:59):
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, the K-12 Tech Talk podcast, we are back from a short break to
(00:06):
talk about New Hampshire's changing data privacy landscape before Chris talks to R.T.
Collins, the CEO of Instant IQ.
Thanks for listening.
Live from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
This is episode 255.
I am Josh.
(00:26):
With me as always is Chris.
Hello, Chris.
How's it going?
He's coming to us from his bunker.
Because in Missouri, we have tornadoes and snow and sleet the same evening.
And with us from yet a different hotel room is Mark.
Hello.
Where are you?
I am in San Francisco for a couple of days.
(00:48):
Josh, do you notice he put his camera just off to the side to make us see the background?
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
It's a fine Hilton Garden suite in San Francisco.
And the view out the window is beautiful.
I've already had to look up the earthquake map to see am I just dizzy or is it an earthquake?
(01:10):
And what was the answer?
I'm dizzy.
Well, yesterday we had rain and then we had potential tornado and then we had snow.
Well, and give a little bit more clarity to that.
It was the high yesterday was 70 degrees yesterday afternoon.
(01:30):
Within a two hour period, it went from 70 to tornado to snow within two hours.
Meanwhile, Mark's dizzy from the beautiful view.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah.
We feel horribly sorry for you.
So I guess we can apologize for this being late.
(01:51):
Yeah.
We were at Midwest Tech Talk.
Yeah, I set up all the stuff.
We were just at the Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium.
Mark, you came in, Josh arrived, I had the table set up.
Mark and I, we sat at the table.
We just have such a good time and we didn't do anything there.
We did sit in front of our recording equipment for a few hours with all three of us in the
(02:15):
same room together and we didn't record one minute of content.
We had people from Apple walk by.
We had people from Google walk by.
We had people like David walk by several times.
Great opportunities.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the highlight of that conference, the unexpected highlight was the Apple folks
brought the Mac Neo and it was just passed around.
(02:39):
No, your highlight of the conference was the photo from midnight 1 a.m. with listener Drew
at Waffle House.
That's right.
Standing in the parking lot, pointing at the Waffle House sign.
Yes.
I'd never been to Waffle House.
What?
Is that true?
Yeah, that was my first time going to Waffle House.
(03:00):
Did you get Waffle House syndrome?
I don't know what that is.
You're just out of it from all the carbs and sugar and yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
We don't have those in New England.
Really?
That's yeah, that's shocking to me.
I thought they were kind of dark girls.
Yeah, me too.
(03:20):
I was with Mark that evening before he went to Waffle House and it was getting pretty
late and I said, you know, see you guys in the morning kind of bit and then the next
day Mark shows me a picture of him and listener Drew and we can just say listener Lori, I
guess maybe.
Okay, listener Lori is probably the safest way to put it.
(03:43):
Who may or may not, I'll just skip over all that, whatever.
But anyways, in a full like they're jumping in the air outside of Waffle House.
Yeah, pretty late at night, early morning.
I don't know.
I had told the waitress at Waffle House it was my first time and then she said, give
me your phone.
We're going to take a picture in front of Waffle House sign.
(04:04):
So we all went outside.
Oh, I thought that was Lori's co-worker that took that photo.
No, no, that was a Waffle House waitress.
That's a wow.
That's hilarious.
And you got a hat, you got a Waffle House hat.
So let's go back to the MacBook Neo.
So Apple came, they brought a MacBook Neo, Josh, you weren't there yet.
(04:26):
So we were telling you that they were giving them away.
Did you believe that?
No, not for a second, because I know you guys are jerks and like, I know.
The Neo's pretty nice.
Yeah.
Is that quick, quick hot take?
Do you guys agree with that?
It feels just like my MacBook Air.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
(04:46):
The proof is in the pudding when you actually get to hold it.
It feels like a very solid laptop.
And I think everybody was passing the thing around very pleasantly surprised at the build
quality.
So I don't know.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
There's been a iFixit video come out, right, Mark?
You watched it?
Yeah.
Some of the commentary after that video has been positive, negative.
(05:09):
I don't know.
It's going to be interesting.
Yeah.
And they're saying that this is the most repairable Apple laptop, but that's not that big of an
accomplishment because Apple laptops have been notoriously hard to repair.
Two things that I want to know about is what does it take to replace the screen?
What does it take to replace the keyboard?
The keyboard is almost 50 screws to take the keyboard off.
(05:33):
On the bottom of that thing, which was exciting to see, you could see the screws, you could
see the entry points, which you're not necessarily used to seeing the entry points on an Apple
device.
So that was exciting to see.
But then 50 screws, that's a pretty high number.
Yeah.
And I did not see a screen repair.
(05:54):
So I think it's a repairable device.
Is this going to be something that you're repairing dozens of laptops in a day or a
week?
I don't know.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens if districts migrate to this.
Do you think, I've read some comments and I'm not sure I agree with these, that they
(06:16):
feel that students will take care of them better because it's a MacBook and not a Chromebook?
Yeah, year one, sure.
I think that will happen in the beginning, right?
If you go from a Chromebook to a MacBook, you're going to take care of that thing a
heck of a lot more.
Just like everybody takes care of their car the first year you get it.
Questions can you keep it up?
I don't know.
Well, some of the discussion we had too is, of course, Apple is going to push for Apple
(06:42):
Care or whatever stuff to be used.
But I think about my school's culture.
We have this technology support intern program at middle school and high school that we've
created this culture where our kids are involved with our one-to-one.
So to say to just shift it, even just put the monetary stuff aside, I don't know if
(07:02):
I like that shift.
You know what I mean?
There's this bigger thing going on where we're instilling into our kids, I think today, how
to troubleshoot hardware and software.
We've even talked, sometimes we get a Chromebook that works well and damages less, like issues
are less.
(07:22):
It's kind of, and I say this lightly, but it's kind of a bummer because that impacts
our student program because they're biting at the bit to fix things and, guys, things
are working.
Let alone if you move to Apple and you're just shipping stuff off.
I guess they can put devices in boxes.
Yeah.
(07:43):
We saw that same thing, Chris, when we moved from HP to the Dell 3100 and the Acers because
they were just a more sturdy device.
Our screen break rate and our keyboard break went way down after leaving HP.
So yeah, I get it.
(08:04):
There's a few things that are going to have to fall into place here.
Monetary is obviously the big one.
But if we continue to see this device cost creep with Chromebooks over the next 18 months,
the way that it has gone in the last three months, there are going to be some very real
conversations had.
Yeah, I think the first conversation to have is if you have an in-house repair program,
(08:29):
even if it's just employees doing it, you need to really kick the tires on this one
and see is this a device that you still want to repair in-house.
I do have a feeling that Apple, their most repairable laptop is not necessarily enticing
districts to repair this thing in-house.
I do think it's still a steep curve to repair just a broken screen or keyboard.
(08:50):
But then the next question is how many districts that are on Chromebooks will switch platforms
and what's the lift to do that?
So I would say based on the Midwest Security Symposium, the excitement that people saw,
a lot of districts are going to kick the tires on this thing.
Oh, no doubt.
There is buzz and excitement around these devices, 100%.
(09:12):
And you've got districts that normally would 10-foot pole an Apple device that are going
to buy a handful of these devices, mine included.
So yeah, it's going to be really interesting.
I think this is how you get every teacher onto a Mac at an affordable rate.
(09:33):
Well, so yeah, that conversation of wanting to replace desktop computers with a laptop,
Chris, I think you've already done that for teachers in your district.
If that, instead of a Windows laptop, which you're talking $1,000 minimum, likely $1,200,
now you can do that with a $499 device, $599 if you want a fingerprint reader.
(09:57):
And they think they're getting an upgrade.
Right, right.
Because ooh, Apple.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, sponsor plug here, talking about broken things.
Chromebookparts.com, a great sponsor of the K-12 Tech Talk podcast.
And they can give you special K-12 Tech Pro pricing on all your Chromebook parts.
(10:18):
And they're also great with some videos and different things for your student repairs
or your tech department repairs.
So check out chromebookparts.com.
Mention K-12 Tech Pro, they'll give you special pricing.
Mark, can I hit a piece of news that you don't have on your list that isn't K-12 related,
but it's the Striker hack?
So last week, Striker, it's a medical equipment manufacturer.
(10:42):
They were hit with a major hack, a major breach.
And it is believed to be attributed to a hacktivist group aligned with Iranian interests.
And I was just reading before we came on the call here, before we started recording, I
was just reading that they said there was no malware loaded to wipe all of these devices.
(11:06):
And they wiped, hang on, let me get the number.
Tens of thousands is the number, not super specific, but could you imagine wiping tens
of thousands of devices with no malware?
You want to know how they did it?
Oh, let me guess, they got into the MDM?
They had admin access into Intune.
(11:27):
Oh, man.
A global wipe command.
Yep, yep.
So that's from bleepingcomputer.com.
There's a story over there on there that is going through this story.
It says a source familiar with the attack told Bleeping Computer that the threat actor
(11:49):
used the wipe command in Intune.
Nearly 80,000 devices between 5 and 8 a.m. on March 11th were wiped.
I have seen over the last week a lot of alerts to be on the ready for hacktivist groups that
are sympathetic to the Iranian cause.
(12:11):
So you've got their two allies right now, Russia and China.
We know that those three countries alone account for the majority of hacktivist groups.
So now's the time to button down the hatches if you haven't done so already.
Yeah, and if you're in K-12, don't think you're immune to this.
What do you think the Intune administrator of that thought, like those initial, those
(12:38):
first 10 minutes of seeing that play out?
I'm going home.
Light up a cigarette and I'm going home.
And I don't smoke.
It said the attacker carried out the action after compromising an admin account and creating
a new global admin account.
Years and years and years ago, I used to work with a guy that to save, I don't know how
(13:00):
much money you can even save, but he would do the thing where you buy your own tobacco,
like the paper and then the tobacco.
And we'd be at this one school district and he'd be going to take a smoke break.
And that smoke break would take like 30 minutes because he had to roll his own cigarette.
I bet that guy went and bought the old stuff so he can make his own.
(13:23):
Take your time outside, man.
Or marijuana.
Because that helps.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Mark.
What other news you got?
What other marijuana inducing news you got?
She just threw me off the game right now with that.
Well, you are in California.
We just assume things, Mark.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
(13:44):
Let's go to New Hampshire.
So last year, New Hampshire passed a new law that was signed in by the governor that requires
parents to give permission, schools to have written permission from parents anytime they
want to record their child.
This was not interpreted by the Department of Education until six months into the law.
So in December of this year, they clarified that that also states that a parent must sign
(14:08):
permission if they're going to be at a basketball game and the game is going to be recorded.
That even implies two rehearsals.
And if a student is going to be recorded for any sort of teacher professional development,
that's not public.
So off hell broke loose in New Hampshire.
All of a sudden, every school district went dark with their basketball games, with their
(14:28):
Christmas concerts were not streamed anymore.
And the New Hampshire legislature had to quickly, quickly rush and get a clarification out.
So they passed a new law just the last couple of weeks that clarified that events hosted
by schools that are semi-public or are designed to be where public can attend, you do not
(14:49):
need parental permission for that one.
So do you guys record or stream any of your sporting events and Christmas concerts?
Oh, yeah.
Every Christmas, choir, band, whatever.
I think the only thing we don't make an effort to stream and it's due to copyright issues
are the musicals and plays that our middle school and high school put on.
(15:12):
Other than that, if it's a band or choir concert or whatever, music, sporting, football,
basketball, volleyball, all the balls, wrestling, baseball, softball, all of it gets, like I
said, all the balls, it all gets streamed.
What about tennis?
(15:33):
We, yeah, last I know, I'd have to ask our PR guy, but we have a hotspot.
What about lacrosse?
Are you kidding me?
We're not some uppity high school.
We don't have lacrosse.
Do you?
Okay.
So next question though, do you post a sign or is it just the assumption that because
(15:53):
it's in a public area?
We don't have a sign and actually, you know, that's a good discussion point.
Yeah.
Maybe we do need to just, you know, on the doors to the gym or the baseball field, the
gates, whatever.
You maybe record these, these premises are live streamed or whatever.
That's probably not a bad idea.
(16:15):
Because I think during a football game, the microphone on our huddle cam was picking up.
Let's just say some colorful language from a spectator.
That's that's probably not a bad idea, Mark.
We just had some interesting conversation.
Like we, we do a media consent, you know, acknowledgement you know, but that's even
(16:38):
the olden days of, can they be in the newspaper?
You know, it applies to social media and stuff, you know, so I think you could add some sentences
that would work your way through this, but we actually had some buildings.
So we're finally getting into what many of you have done for years, which is online registration.
Our school district's been behind on that.
(16:59):
We're finally moving into that with infinite campus.
And that brought about our different buildings doing different things differently.
Where one building would ask for media consent, and then separate from that was like yearbook.
And that's interesting that a parent might want their kid in the yearbook, but not consent
to social media.
(17:19):
And there can be different circumstances.
But we were trying to line up all the buildings to be unified.
What is interesting with that too is eventually the yearbook gets posted online.
So then that would go to whether they do the media thing or, or not.
So again, I just think about this where you're, when we think about they sign that form where,
(17:39):
you know, we weren't necessarily wearing the hat of, yeah, because that applies to all
the games that we're streaming, when yeah, maybe we need to work, work that policy, massage
that thing just a little bit to make it make sense again.
Well, you've got some sporting events that are on a field outside clearly in public view,
and then other sporting events are in a court, which is you have to go into school grounds.
(18:03):
So it's, it's not, it's not clear cut, and it does require a little bit of clarification.
So glad to see New Hampshire legislature quickly turned that around and passed a revised bill
within two or three months of the issue being brought up.
But that was a little bit chaotic during the Christmas season for those schools.
Well, New Hampshire, Chris, what is their state motto?
(18:25):
What is it?
Don't tread on me.
Live or die.
What is it?
No.
Close.
I have it on my wall somewhere here.
What's the bit?
I had a tattoo to my chest.
It's live free or die.
That's right.
Yeah, they are.
They're deemphasizing the or die part.
If you see like tourism ads for New Hampshire in the Boston area, it's just gonna say live
(18:48):
free.
Well, we, uh, we really enjoyed our time up in New Hampshire and there are a lot like
Missourians.
Oh yeah.
Which is why I brought home that sticker that I get the, like when I'm having a hard day
and I'm, you know, thinking about different things, I just look up and it says, live free
or die.
It makes me feel a certain way.
(19:08):
What's the group of people?
What's the free staters?
Free staters.
Yeah, that was, yeah.
Interesting people.
Chris joined their movement.
Yeah.
I joined the club.
All right.
So speaking of cameras in schools, let's go to Chicago.
(19:29):
There was a district just outside of Chicago that the local NBC Chicago store, a news outlet
to the story on them using a contractor that uses license plate detection to enforce residency
requirements.
I thought this was flock when I first read it, but it sounds like they're actually using
(19:49):
data from a third party provider to verify license plate.
They were paying $46,000 for a three year contract to get licensed by data.
They would then use that to enforce their residency requirements.
I'm ha floored that they would go to that length because when you're enforcing residency,
(20:11):
you're actually kicking families out.
It's actually hurting your revenue.
But to go even as far as tracking license plates and kicking a family out because you
detected that their license plate was constantly being used in another city in this particular
area that raised the issue had had loaned their car out to a family member.
And that's why the school district had thought that they were living somewhere else.
(20:33):
It wasn't going after going off of car registration information.
It was going off of usage, apparently.
That's goofy.
Chris, how hardcore is your district on proof of residency and making those families prove
they live where they say they live?
I again, and that's an interesting question because we're digging deeper into the online
(20:58):
registration like we've launched it.
I mean, we're hardcore to make sure we're, you know, hitting the proper marks.
But I know we have a neighbor school district that like every year they make their residents
do a lot of extra checks.
And I don't believe we're doing and that's extra.
Like that's not a requirement that we just have to do.
(21:20):
So I know that we're not, whatever you want to say, quote unquote, that that hardcore with
it.
We're hardcore.
We we make them prove it every year.
And it's to the point where this last year we have like, I think, three or four faked
electric bills to try and say they were.
(21:40):
Didn't you say one was like a piece of paper that just said like electric?
No, it wasn't quite that bad.
But we've had handwritten notes before that get denied.
These three or four were our provider is Ameren, our electric provider.
And you could tell like the fonts didn't match.
Yeah, yeah, we had I think we caught three or four this year that were faked electric
(22:04):
bills.
We had an entire department whose sole purpose was to invest residency and then go after
families.
It was pretty intense.
Huh?
That's been again to talk about our district finally doing online registration.
And it's twenty twenty six.
And I'm really excited that we're finally finally doing it.
But that's that lift.
(22:24):
We were determining.
Oh, it's a lot.
Someone has to do this stuff.
And we've not had like a district registrar.
We've not had people that are responsible for that.
But, you know, we've had it's been very fragmented across the district.
Well, we need consistency.
That's been a yeah, quite a heavy lift to figure out.
Yeah.
It it hurt feelings like I just this last week, like we added something to our building
(22:51):
secretaries to do.
And it's like I was telling the principals, this is really easy for me to say, like this
is needed and let's do this.
But it's just adding more work to our secretaries, which is not that's not an easy sentence to
say when you're in, which is why I asked them to go tell their secretaries, please.
(23:12):
So let me let me know after you've told them and I'll do the follow up email.
Yeah.
All right, Mark.
What else?
Yeah.
By the way, check out Eaton Eaton Solutions fit every corner of education.
They can tailor whatever you're needing for your district with their dedicated stuff.
They have you covered so they can do your power protection, your connectivity, all that
(23:36):
you need.
So check out Eaton.
All right.
And last but not least, Wired has done a story on a problem that we've been seeing for years
in schools.
And now it's reached a hole in the fever pitch, which is teens using a fuel that slander pages
to mock their teachers.
slander pages, meaning TikTok accounts, Instagram accounts where they're posting text images
(23:57):
and most recently AI generated videos.
So Wired has finally jumped on this one.
There are a few, I would say, third party AI tools, one that I had never even heard
of before.
That's commonly used called Vigil, Vigil AI.
And this is what teens are using.
They're uploading their child or their their teacher's image and then having some pretty
(24:18):
inappropriate videos.
How do you spell that?
So V-I-G-G-L-E.
Are you uploading our photos right now to this and making some AI generated videos?
We'll see.
We'll see.
We'll see.
What have I done?
Anyways, have you, I've dealt with slander pages and Instagram accounts for years.
Are you guys starting to see AI generated slander pages for teachers or other students?
(24:41):
I can't say that we've seen slander page use, but last week I disabled cameras for
our middle school on Chromebooks so they couldn't take pictures of staff or themselves.
So I mean, read into that what you want.
Yeah, we haven't had, we haven't had AI misuse like that yet, but you know, absolutely over
(25:04):
the years we've had social media, fake accounts and the whole bit.
So it just makes sense that this is what's going to happen.
It's coming.
What's the fallout there?
Like how far, I don't know that there's really anything the district can do unless it's taking
place at school on a school device or interrupts the learning environment during the day.
(25:26):
But say you're a teacher, Mark, put on your teacher hat again, teachers probably can't
wear hats, put on your teacher whistle or whatever.
What would you do if a kid created a slander AI video of you doing something horribly inappropriate
with potential of ruining your career?
(25:47):
Like where does, what's that outcome look like?
I mean, you gotta, you just have to blow your whistle at them and then they usually take
it down.
Yeah, that's it.
And so the amount, the amount of effort that that kid is putting into making that AI video,
I would say is similar to the amount of work that our parents and grandparents did when
(26:13):
they drew that very detailed drawing of the teacher.
Like it's the same problem.
It's a mischievous kid.
It's just the technology has gotten a lot better.
So I don't, you know, the punishment should be the same, right?
It's hard though.
I mean, there's, there's not much you can do to answer your point or your question,
Josh.
(26:34):
I mean, you can report it to Instagram and Meta and try to get these things taken down,
but they're not going to listen to you.
They don't really care.
No, they don't care at all.
Yeah.
It's a little easier when it's student to student, because then if, look, my little
tidbit here is if you report an image as being for somebody under the age of 13, they act
pretty quickly to take those images down.
(26:54):
But if it is a teacher, you know, students generate content about their teacher or administrator,
there's not much you're going to, you should expect to get of a response from Meta or Instagram
or any of those companies.
So unfortunately this is hard.
Yeah.
I would agree with everything you said, Mark.
Yeah.
I used to, I wouldn't say I laughed at the SRO or snicker, but that's, that's, that's
(27:18):
the words I got, but used to, you know, they would come in when they heard about a snap
was sent.
And they just think that we can magically take all kinds of action and get this thing,
you know, brought down.
And I had to inform them that's not how it works.
Yeah.
And, you know, some learning took place over time, but this technology, I mean, that's,
this is what's going to happen.
(27:39):
This is the world that we're creating to live in.
So the ones that killed me were the, the confessions pages where you'd have a random form, usually
an old Google form, you know, to submit your confessions.
And then a student would post all those live on Instagram and they were just horribly embarrassing.
You could never verify who put it up there.
Yeah.
(28:00):
And these things were just, it was just virtual bullying at a, at a much larger scale than
before.
So this is where I wish the tech companies would play ball on this stuff, but they do
not.
Like you said, though, if, if you contact them and you utter the phrase that, you know,
with a kid under the, under a certain age, they, they tend to act rather quickly.
(28:22):
But yeah, you've, you've got to know how to say it and what to say.
Well, that's, that's my final tip for you.
If you need to report something on social media, don't do harassment or bullying.
Do somebody under the age of 13, you're going to get a much faster response from the tech
companies because it's a federal law and opposed to some of the other categories there.
(28:43):
I guess.
So I, should I talk about the interview?
Sure.
Before we get right into, I do want to talk about meter.
Check out meter.com slash Kato tech talk.
That's meter.com slash Kato tech talk.
You can book a demo with them.
They will do your full stack networking, your wired, your wireless or cellular.
They can help you figure out your ISP, all that kind of good stuff.
(29:04):
So check them out.
I got to hang out with incident IQ, the CEO of incident IQ, RT Collins.
So this is an interview.
This is not like a, Hey, just talk to me about incident IQ the whole time interview.
We actually dig into just thinking about your work order system or your, your, your assets
(29:25):
and how much data you put into there.
I think sometimes it gets overlooked what kinds of data we're putting into our ticketing
systems or asset management systems.
So we unpack that with RT, and then we talk about the future of AI in regards to those
systems as well.
So pretty cool interview with RT.
(29:47):
So check it out.
All right.
I'm hanging out with RT Collins of incident IQ.
You are the CEO of incident IQ, RT.
Glad to meet you.
Happy that you're here.
How's it going today?
It's going great, Chris.
Thank you for having me.
Long-time listener.
(30:08):
Excited to be with you this afternoon.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
We were just, so we just met for the first time over a zoom call.
And you were saying that you, that you've listened to us for a while and of course we
appreciate that.
And what is your, what is your ritual?
So sometimes we talk to listeners and they have like a particular time.
(30:29):
Sometimes it's random.
What's your, what's your thing?
When do you listen to us or when do you try to listen to us?
I try.
I try in the midst of other chaos going on in the Collins house sold, I'm a, I'm a father
of five as I was sharing with you.
So it's, it's bonkers at our house.
My wife's morning to sleep in a little bit is on Saturday.
(30:53):
So I'm up early with the kids on Saturday and I'm making pancakes or refereeing fights
or whatever I'm doing.
And then I've got you and Josh and Mark in, in one of my years, Saturday morning.
So that's when, that's when I consume the pod and I love it.
(31:14):
Sometimes I have to go back and relisten as you might imagine if I've got things going
on.
That's awesome.
But yeah, well, very cool.
Very cool that you listen.
And of course we're excited about our, our sponsorship and partnership together.
So oftentimes we talk about a company, we talk about their product service and we fumble
the ball.
(31:35):
We don't unpack it as great as the, the, the expert would.
So that's why you're here today is to talk about instant IQ.
I bet our listeners have a pretty good idea, pretty good vibe of what it is that instant
IQ does.
But we always like to kind of go all the way back to the bottom and just start again.
So in a nutshell, I guess, would you tell me and tell us what is incident IQ?
(32:01):
So your listeners may be familiar with this.
We've been focused on serving K-12 needs around IT service management, IT asset management,
and then other back of house departments, if you will, their workflow needs through
(32:21):
the years.
We've been at this over a decade now, and we currently serve over 2,100 school districts
across the country in representation in all 50 states.
And that translates to 13.6 million students and some change that are in some way supported
(32:44):
by the IQ platform.
So roughly one out of every four or five kiddos, depending on what big list you pull,
is served through our products.
We got our start with IT, and I know that's our, your audience's focus and probably our
(33:05):
focus this afternoon.
But over time, our customers really, as led by them, have taken us to other spaces within
the broader operational ecosystem of the K-12 school district and have asked us to
help them solve problems around facilities, maintenance work orders, HR-related service
(33:30):
requests, business office workflows, things like that.
So pretty much anything that lives in, like, email or Adobe jank in your districts is,
that's kind of ripe for streamlining with our tools.
But our bread and butter, IT support tickets, IT service management, and IT asset management.
(33:55):
And yeah, that's probably what a lot of your listeners know us for.
Awesome.
So I want to throw a little bit of, like, cybersecurity and student data privacy, those
kinds of questions at you.
So if we think about ticketing, we think about asset management, what would you say
(34:15):
is the role of those things as far as, like, incident response?
Like if a security event is happening, who cares about tickets and who cares about asset
management?
Can you unpack that some for me?
Yeah.
So if we're thinking along the lines of, like, a cyber incident in particular, I assume it's
going to be the direction of the question, you know, for your ticketing system, that's
(34:41):
going to kind of be probably tangential, right, as you're working on those kinds of issues.
If there's really kind of two dimensions that come to mind for me where I've seen, you know,
you want to kind of be thinking about this on that bigger checklist of however you might
(35:01):
be responding to that incident.
So one thing you'll see is, like, if an affected system, an attack or other incident is going
to want to be one of those core systems in all likelihood, like ERP or SIS or something
like that.
So that's the kind of thing that, like, is just naturally going to be the source of a
(35:23):
lot of inbound support requests as various users discover, oh, something is amiss with
this core district system.
So there's kind of two things that I think your ITSM solution can help you there.
One, it could potentially be early telemetry.
If you've got an issue going on with a core system like that, if suddenly you see a bunch
(35:45):
of inbound tickets, everybody is struggling to execute a particular transaction, the ERP
or SIS access seems limited for some reason or whatever, well, then that's, like, okay,
you've got something going on with the core system.
So tools that flag problem tickets and kind of things that track back to a root cause
(36:07):
like that, those are things where we see our customers kind of utilizing those approaches
to support that could be an indicator that you've got a cybersecurity incident maybe
on your hands.
But beyond that, I think the other thing that you would want to be thinking about is just,
(36:28):
how to basically manage that second-order effect of user disruption around a core system
before you get it back online.
So to the extent that your ticketing solution has tools to proactively let users know, hey,
we're aware of how the SIS access is disrupted and here's why, being able to communicate
(36:51):
those things proactively in the space where they would go to log their issue or kind of
raise their hand that, ah, I'm having trouble with this core system, you're going to want
to do that, right?
So you're just going to save yourself a bunch of redundant follow-up and kind of pain once
you eventually bring that system back online.
And then anything else that you might use to do one-to-many communication to your teachers
(37:14):
or faculty staff or whomever might be using that core system, you know, use that to close
the loop eventually when you kind of get up and running.
So that's just some quick thoughts.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're kind of touching on a bigger picture thing here.
I was just talking to a secretary.
She had emailed me directly and we had gotten a support ticket too with an outage we were
(37:40):
having and I did some follow-up with her just because I ran into her, like, in the office.
And somehow we started talking about, I was just doing some quick education on, you know,
we have a thing that pings are important stuff every so many minutes and, you know,
we will find out that that thing is happening.
(38:02):
This was something that was down, right?
And she was like, oh, well, then I won't email you anymore.
I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
We completely welcome, you know, the support tickets and the emails.
And, you know, you want people to feel like they can report an issue, feel comfortable
to report an issue.
And then some of that, though, is that, which is what you're kind of touching on at the
(38:24):
end, we need to communicate well when things go down and people need to have a good way
of hearing from us and they know it's us and they know what's going on.
Your anecdote raises another thing that I overlooked there is if you do have, you know,
(38:44):
those core systems that are, you know, you rely on to protect the network, monitor, things
like that, that can be another way where, you know, you can get those automated alerts
if you've got those systems configured to fire emails or if they have APIs and you want
to build an integration, that can be another way to flag issues automatically.
(39:09):
If you're getting pings in those systems and then you want to have that record of responding
to it or addressing the issue within your ticket system, just setting that up, avoiding
that manual step of, oh, I got the ping, let me kind of create the record here.
That just kind of gets back to kind of what your priorities are for tracking and managing
kind of record keeping of everything you, all the work that gets done in a given day.
(39:34):
It matters probably more for bigger teams, smaller teams, kind of good visibility.
Maybe it's a little overkill, but it never hurts to build a record, particularly if it
ultimately tracks back to an issue and folks kind of want to do the postmortem.
Yeah.
We, you know, we can dig into the weeds on the asset part of it.
(39:56):
When the bad thing is happening, you need to know what assets you have.
Yeah.
If you're going to go around, you have to touch every computer and image every computer.
You need to have a good inventory.
You need to know what you have going.
So you need to have that voice, you just do.
I feel like I'm putting you in a hot seat just a little bit here.
You're not even going to talk about instant IQ, you're just going to talk about these
bigger picture things.
(40:17):
Well, and I'm, I'm happy.
I mean, so everything I'm saying applies to things that we're helping districts and our
partners solve with, with IQ tools.
I can talk IQ all day and I know that it's kind of, I'm happy to, but yeah.
Let me give you another hot seat, Juan.
I think sometimes or oftentimes a tech does a good job with putting documentation into
(40:45):
a ticket almost to the point of that we put too much information into the ticket.
So I guess to pick your brain on this student data, maybe in a technician's notes, and maybe
it's not even the technician that did it.
Maybe it's the teacher that says little Johnny's device is doing X, Y, Z, and is explaining
(41:05):
this stuff.
What's your hot take on like data governance as far as your service desk goes?
Yeah, this is a great question and, you know, kind of weirdly has a, has a few different
dimensions to it that we think have thought a lot about for the years at IQ.
(41:26):
So our experience has been what you described is, is, is usually it's going to be that end
user, that teacher that are sending in the tickets and, you know, helpfully or unhelpfully
injecting data that make that a little more sensitive student data or otherwise.
(41:47):
My thought on this and where we've seen our, our partner districts have a lot of success
is if you know that there are particular types of tickets that correlate with protected student
information or other sensitive data, then it's always going to be a good idea to try
to use routing and automation as well as your approach to permissions within your ITSM tool.
(42:12):
Just make sure that those are only kind of going where they need to go.
So if you had tickets related to SIS, related to the gradebook issues in your LMS or wherever
that kinds of information, things that are going to tend to invite that teacher to jam in,
hey, Johnny's student number X, Y, Z, his grade is wrong in the gradebook, that, you know, that,
(42:36):
that's, that's the kind of thing that we would kind of maybe want to pay a little more attention to.
Well, then if you've got the capability to route based on those issues and those areas of expertise
and hey, that can just go straight to that person who owns the SIS and they're going to be the right
person to handle that as opposed to hopscotching from that building tag to my network admin over
(42:59):
eventually to the right spot. Now that's only as good as the system's ability to correctly
categorize issues, which I can talk about that as a challenge. I think we've got AI coming up
on the docket a little bit later. AI shows a ton of promise to make sure you can get the benefit
(43:19):
of this kind of approach to routing and access for tickets. So that's one. If, so if there are
things that you, we can kind of predict when it'll come in, that's good. We've also built some tools
in InsightQ that can enable the end user, the requester, the ticket to proactively flag when
a ticket is going to contain protected information. And then likewise, agents have a tool to do that
(43:44):
too. So what that accomplishes within an IAQ is usually you've got some kind of notification
schema for tickets that's going to fire off emails to people and kind of give them those updates.
So when tickets contain protected student information in IAQ and those flags are triggered,
either automatically through AI or proactively intentionally by the user, then system external
(44:07):
notifications, so emails that are getting fired off, will not contain the data that's flagged as
protected. So you'd have to log in, have to be authenticated to see that, and then you get the
benefit of permission. So it's one little step to kind of keep this from having that data in a place
where it's like easily forwarded or printed or otherwise kind of leaking out. Yeah, I think
(44:32):
I would say if you quick asked a lot of techs, you know, to identify, you know, their systems
that have a lot of data, you know, that if it were compromised, you know, what would that mean?
I bet a lot of us might skip over our service desk just because it's just not on the radar,
but there's a lot of good data that would be a big deal if it were compromised
(45:00):
or it needs to be taken seriously with the confidentiality pieces that are in it as well.
Correct, yeah, and kind of to dovetail that, you know, the last kind of thought I'd have for folks
out there is, yeah, so things like your service desk tend to be overlooked when district IT teams
(45:23):
or broader administrative teams get FERPA data requests from parents. So every student or
emancipated minor or parent or parent guardian, you know, can request like audit and access to
their student education records, and we go to things like SIS and kind of pull all that down.
(45:44):
But certain times if we really need a complete picture, we'd need to think about these tertiary
systems like your ticketing system. So in addition to strategies for protecting it, having a way to
query it and pull that back. Where I've seen it come up, and you might think, oh, that sounds
theoretical, but where I've seen it come up in real life is around issues with districts that
(46:08):
have student device programs, and you get like intentional damage or whatever, and then
administration's kind of coming around and doing the accountability thing, and then now a parent
guardian kind of says, well, I don't believe that. That's not the case. I want a sense of everything
that's gone on with this where my students allegedly, so suddenly you got to go to these
(46:31):
other systems, and that data is suddenly useful and important in that regard.
All right, RT, let me give you, I think I'm going to give you one more hot seat question.
Sure. Let's talk about AI. We can assume that AI is making, and we know, not even assume,
(46:54):
it's making its way into the K-12 Tech's service desk. What would you say we should be paying
attention to with that? Should we just turn on that faucet, let it do whatever it's going to do?
For us, what guardrails should we make sure have in place if we're adding AI into our service
(47:15):
desk, into our asset management? What's your hot take on the state of that? So, it is really timely,
Chris. Like you said, we've launched products recently. It's last month that are leveraging
the capabilities of AI to start to solve some challenges that we have around service desk.
(47:37):
Definitely get back to the guardrails piece of your question here shortly because that's
very critical. But to just maybe kind of set this up where I see the potential of it adding value
and kind of what I would offer up to the listeners as use cases to think about is, I think, step one
as a threshold matter, what we've really worked hard around with our AI solutions is the
(48:07):
threshold challenge that kind of happens with K-12 IT support. And this is this structural
dilemma, I'll call it, where our teacher, she just wants to get that ticket in as fast as she or he
possibly can. And that teacher may or may not be particularly tech savvy. I know you're better
(48:32):
half as a teacher. We love our teachers, but they may be where they're at on that journey.
And therefore, they're just trying to jam that in and they're trying to get back to the million
other things that they've got cooking. And then those needs of a requester, of a teacher in this
case, run headlong into what we need as IT professionals on the other end of that story
(48:56):
trying to solve the problem, which is we need details. We need actionable data to actually
go work on whatever the issue is. So I'm sure it never happens in your district, but I've heard
tell technicians getting tickets that just say it's broke. What's broken? And the reason that
(49:19):
that's a challenge, beyond the obvious, is that adds tons of time. That adds tons of time to how
long this ticket sit open and it soaks an already overburdened team to get in touch with that user
and ask those questions. So generative AI has got a ton of potential to basically move up in the
(49:43):
timeline and automate the running to ground, the details. So what we have worked on is deploying,
it's really a package of AI agents that do that work, but do it in a really teacher-friendly,
(50:03):
user-friendly way that make that ticket submission experience a really natural
language chat experience where they can just describe what's going on. And then the AI agent
has got all of the context from all the other relevant systems. So it knows who this user is,
it knows the assets that are assigned to that user or their room. It can bring all that to the party
(50:27):
automatically, and then it can ask the questions when all we did to begin with is it's broken.
It can walk them stepwise down the path. And then the net result can be what we need as a tech
team, which is an actionable ticket with all the data that we need to go get going and actually
solve the problem. So I think that that is one of the most exciting and just kind of like step one
(50:56):
efficiency gain. Because what that turns on is any of you, you will able to realize the benefits of
all the routing and automation that you might otherwise have designed within your service desk.
If you can get accuracy on the input, you can get efficient and you can really start to do some fancy
(51:18):
things in terms of optimizing how you organize the work and tackle it on the back end.
Yeah, I can think about the years ago when we could add, like, we didn't have to type the same
sentence over and over. We could just automate the response. Like the teacher says, projector not
working. We could say, can you look at the projector and tell us what the model is? And it
(51:43):
was canned. And then there was technology and advancement where you could more automate that
question. So to then have AI step in and have some conversation and just summarize the ticket and give
the technician the ticket already establishing, this is the projector that you said was in the
(52:03):
room. This is what the teacher is saying, you know, all that kind of good stuff. That's a beautiful
world. It's exciting. And then if you think about those types of issues that you get, where even
more of it is potentially fully solvable by our AI teammates who's having that front end
(52:23):
conversation, or at a minimum, we can be sure that we're going to get all the info we need. So like
a great example would be like unblock a website, unblock a URL request.
Commonly see this across the IQ community as a frequent flyer ticket type. Sure, sure, sure.
(52:48):
And then very also common to these particular requests being incomplete. So just say, hey,
I need this website unblocked. And the district likely has established criteria. And it probably
lives out on the district website somewhere. If the teacher would just bother to kind of like
(53:10):
look it up and give us everything, we could solve their action, their request a lot faster.
But they don't, either because they're unaware of that, or within our ticketing system,
they kind of picked the wrong category and never saw that we need this information.
That's a perfect use case for AI to make sure, okay, I've identified this teacher's trying to,
(53:33):
needs a modification to the filter, needs to get to this website. Let me make sure they're giving
the team that's going to have to evaluate this and approve it or deny it everything that they
want to see. You can go capture that at the front end. And then that request can come back.
And our AI partner could even make a recommendation, right, based on other tools that we
(53:54):
can build to go evaluate that site automatically, things like that. I like it. Okay, so talk to me
about the guardrails of this thing. Yeah, yeah. So I think the things that you need to be thinking
about as you're starting to explore, you know, what can AI agents do for your IT support operations,
(54:14):
there's a ton of potential out there. And even just now, like even if you're just thinking about,
oh shoot, well, the commercial LLM, when I'm playing around with it, I ask it to help me
troubleshoot a power issue with my personal device and my personal life. And it does a
halfway decent job about that. So we're all kind of seeing these glimpses of what this technology
(54:36):
can do with integrated within our IT support operations. So it's exciting. It's a brave new
world. But I think what you need to be thinking about as you're making your forays into this
is first things first, it's like, we don't want to be feeding LLMs more information than they need
(55:00):
to actually process the request and come back. So if we stick with my little hypothetical,
and we were using an LLM to help us generate, you know, steps to resolve a particular power
troubleshooting issue or whatever, or even better, if we were setting up an approach where a user
(55:22):
could maybe self-help, right, we wanted to give the teacher before the ticket hit our queue,
some options to try. Well, then what information ought to be passed over to that LLM?
However, that results being achieved, we want that to be the least amount of data necessary.
(55:42):
And in our little hypothetical, that would be as little information as basically the issue and any
related diagnostic around the issue. So it's a power issue, you know, the cables work, whatever
else might have been captured in that chat colloquy with our AI agent. It's just going to
want to give it that and then the model. So we would, we want to make sure the system is engineered
(56:05):
and designed to not pass it the user's name, because that's unnecessary, not the location.
The LLM shouldn't even know that this is related to a school district, et cetera. And then, however
it's implemented, that needs to not go to any off-shelf commercial version. If you're using
an enterprise instance, then the other thing that we're going to need to see is that the model's not
(56:31):
being trained based on that. So we just want to pass it a bite-sized piece of information to help
us with the problems that that technology can help us solve through the ticket support process.
And it needs to be ephemeral. It needs to just go with that request, return the answer, not train
(56:51):
the model. And then the other thing, I mean, there's multiple, but maybe two of the thoughts here.
As we build and deploy these AI agents, they need to work the way real technicians work,
the way real IT professionals work, which is when we create access within software systems
(57:18):
for folks that work for you on your team, that's cabined and tailored to their scope
of responsibility. So if you're looking at an AI tool and it looks like it's postured to basically
be required to sit on top of any and all data, then that's, I think, an opportunity to hit the
(57:39):
pause button and think about that. Because if the AI's needs and its remit does not require that,
then we're going to want to shape that. And it's going to be better and safer if the jobs to be
done correlate directly with the permissions in the relevant system. So to give an example in
(58:01):
InsightQ, we've got efficiency agents that we're building and deploying now, and we serve a wide
variety of workflow needs, as I was mentioning at the beginning. So we've got teams that use
our platform that are IT-focused, and then they may have counterparts that work in facilities,
and then they may have counterparts that work in HR. And that HR team is getting inbound cases,
(58:26):
hey, update my W-2 withholding, my last name change, very sensitive stuff. And just like we
wouldn't want that going to our building-level tech at IT accidentally, same thing for AI agents.
They need to be able to have the same constraints based on their access, which APIs that they can
(58:50):
bring data from, what can they see in effect? We should be able to understand that and control
that really carefully. And then the last piece of the puzzle is, however we deploy these tools,
it's got to give us tools as administrators of these systems to audit what's going on,
to see the trail of chat colloquies and other actions that the AI agents are taking. We've got
(59:15):
to be able to see that post-hoc so that we can inspect it so that it's doing good work, or in
the event that we get a negative outcome, we've got to kind of backtrack on that. So I know y'all
are very familiar with like the Google ecosystem tools, et cetera. So those are the kinds of
administrative kind of oversight suite of tools that I think are the right way to run a railroad,
(59:44):
and that should be a normative expectation that we should all have as we start to find
efficiencies within IT operations as well. I like it, Artie. I'll tell you, I bet on K2L Tech Pro,
on K2L SysAdmin subreddit, usually a couple of times a year, someone will say,
you know, what work order system was everybody using? Or they say, what's everybody using for
(01:00:09):
an asset management system? And then you'll just get a floodgate of comments because people just,
that's an easy question answer. There's a lot more questions that should be asked
as follow-ups when that answer is given, because we just talked through three, I mean, we talked
(01:00:29):
about service desk and asset management, but related to cybersecurity and instant response.
That's a bigger picture thing to think through with what are you using as your solution.
We talked about data governance and what data are we putting in our system. And now we just
touched on AI and then the guardrails with it. I think service desk, asset management
(01:00:54):
can sometimes be the thing that we pick it and we kind of set and forget.
I think you're touching on it's 2026 and we need to kind of evaluate what we're doing with those
things. Because there's some things we could be doing a lot better probably that, well,
obviously it sounds like instant IQ is trying to figure that out for us. So
(01:01:15):
I had more questions, but I don't think we're going to do them. I think we gave our listeners
some things to think through. Think about your service desk. Think about your asset management.
Think about those things in relation to your instant response to your cybersecurity.
Think about those things in relation to what data are you putting into them? If your service desk
(01:01:39):
were compromised, what data is in there? Again, how are you assigning those things? Who's seeing
those things? Who has access to those things? If you're listening, evaluate that. And then if you
don't have an AI workflow management, service management, asset management piece to what
you're using today, maybe you should start thinking through what that world can look like.
(01:02:03):
So check out instantIQ.com. R.T., thanks for hanging out with me. We will do this again at
some point down the road. My pleasure, Chris, and look forward to it. Thank you for the time.
Thank you. All right. So thanks for listening. We have a couple things coming up where we get
to hit the road. So April 13th through the 15th, we're going to be at COSEN. That's in Chicago.
(01:02:27):
The three of us will be there hanging out with the podcast table doing an episode. And then
fast forward, May 11th, Hayden's going to be in Actum in Maine at their leadership conference.
You can check out Hayden there. And then all the way into July, we're going to be at the
Gamus Conference. The podcast is Savannah, Georgia. And then also in July is the Midwest
(01:02:48):
Tech Talk Technical Conference. So check out those events. But those are brought to you. And thanks to
our sponsors, you guys that listen, of course, as well. But our sponsors like Visor,
that's V-I-Z-O-R. They just did a huge release, over 70 new features. One of those is a redesigned
barcode check-in checkout interface. So check out visor.cloud.com. And then last but not least,
(01:03:13):
Fortinet podcast at fortinet.com. They were just at the security symposium showcasing all the great
products, as well as classlink.com. Check out classlink for your rostering and more. And then
NTP, our friend David over at NTP, email davidrenn, D-R-E-N-N-T-P-I-N-C.com. Thanks for listening.
(01:03:38):
The views and opinions expressed on the K-12 Tech Talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh,
Chris, and Mark, and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations
(01:03:59):
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.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Kingdom of Fraud
It’s the unlikeliest of criminal partnerships: a devout polygamist from an insular Utah sect joining forces with a shadowy Armenian tycoon from LA. The result - a billion dollar fraud conspiracy. In Kingdom of Fraud, investigative reporter Michele McPhee traces the origins of the extraordinary alliance between Jacob Kingston and Levon Termendzhyan. Together, the two men trigger the largest tax investigation in American history and weave around themselves a web of dirty cops, influential political relationships and transnational money laundering. All this is set against the backdrop of Jacob Kingston’s clan – The Order. A powerful and secretive polygamist organization in Salt Lake City. To whom Jacob is desperate to prove his worth. Kingdom of Fraud is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit https://novel.audio/. You can listen to new episodes of Kingdom of Fraud completely ad-free and 1 week early with an iHeart True Crime+ subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “iHeart True Crime+, and subscribe today!