Hello and welcome to the K-12 Tech Podcast. Thank you again for joining us today. I am your host along with Mike Hotseller, our co-host, and we also have Dr. Joe Phillips of Broward County. He is the CIO for the school district. Joe, or Dr. Phillips, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m going to give you the floor to introduce yourself, and how you came to where you’re at. You know a little bit about your journey and then I will dive into some more specifics topics after that.
All right. Sure. Thanks, Sean. So a little bit about my journey. I went into the Army straight after high school, and as an enlisted soldier, I thought I was going to be an engineer and I ended up as an artillery guy calling in artillery fire. So that was fun for a little bit. And then went into counterintelligence and then into IT and then into H.R. And then I got commissioned as an adjutant general officer for HR. And then I ended up getting branch transferred over into IT again or the Signal Corps. Retired in 2015 from the Army and was going to go work at the VA Hospital in Kansas City, where I’m from and where I was retiring and ended up a job opened up at my kid’s school district as manager of technology support services, and my wife actually encouraged me to apply for that job.
So I did and I got it. And I absolutely fell in love with all things edtech and the impact that edtech can have on students and their futures and just transforming that district. I got there right when we went 1 to 1 in that first district and just watching how it transformed, ripping out those computer labs, doing 1 to 1, doing the training, and then getting all of the impact happening was amazing. So from there, I went to Kansas City Public Schools, which is where I grew up, and I had an opportunity to go back and give back to the district that I grew up in as the CIO there. And then I briefly came down to Florida for an opportunity with the Lucia County schools. And then now I’m the CIO for Broward County Schools, which is pretty cool. It’s the sixth-largest school district in the United States. So we have over 260,000 students, 35,000 staff, and 260 different sites. And we also have probably another 100,000 college students and some college-level staff as well. So going through my first district of 12,000 students to where I am now, it’s been quite the journey, but I’m absolutely loving it and I’m telling my life.
You probably have some pretty slow days every now and then. Yeah, all those students. So we did have a chance to do a little research on you and it looks like something obviously you’re very passionate about edtech and we came across an article that you had written withsome issues that people are dealing with in schools, especially now since the technology for education has been changing so rapidly these past few years, I’d love to have you kind of talk about that. I knew by reading it that you were passionate about it. So I’m very interested to hear what you have to say and how this conversation is going to unwind when talking about what usually would be really great things- MVPs, you know, but why we need to be cautious of some of them that are out there now.
Sure, absolutely happy to talk about it. So I think one of the main things for folks to really catch on to is we’re in a whole different edtech revolution, post-COVID going into COVID. People would say we are in our fourth edtech revolution and really we’ve been doing edtech in the United States since about the 1920. So we got about 100 years in on this and we’re talking when we had radios in the classroom and teaching machines back to the 1920s, and that was going to revolutionize how we did education. You saw the birth of the facility, sorry, facilitated learning model in the twenties and the idea that students could learn from computers or machines teachers could facilitate get away from that sage on the stage and more to that facilitated model. And then you saw that kind of fade. It happened. And then we had something called the Depression. Then the money dried up and those ideas kind of died off until the Russians launched Sputnik in the 1950s. And then you saw a huge rush towards edtech in the classroom again, and that’s actually when the term stem was invented as they just completely overhauled the United States educational system. And you saw televisions come into the classroom, you saw really early computers start to emerge. You got to see facilitated learning, come back, classrooms get broken out of those rows of desks and all of that, and everything’s great.
Landed on the moon. Stuff was really happening. And by the 1970s it started to fade again. And then we saw the eighties and nineties with the class of 2000 coming and the Apple 2 came out and Apple 2e and they really started to get into education and all of that. But by the late 1990s, those computers were kind of chilling in the back of classrooms, collecting dust. In early, early 2000s, like 2000, you saw this big push for districts to go 1 to 1, and then we were kind of it was kind of taken off, but completely different than how it is post-COVID. And that’s that’s really important to understand the cycle of promises of these revolutionary ways to change teaching. Well, what we’re actually talking about is problems of practice. And there really aren’t that many problems of practice to solve when it comes to edtech. How can students show what they’re learning? How can they learn it in a way that’s best for each individual student? How can we help make the job of teaching easier on the teacher? Those are really there some more secondary tertiary ones you can throw in, but those are the three main problems that we’re trying to solve too, with another one, which is how do we get away from the traditional learning model and still educate our kids?
And we can have a whole different conversation on how successful we were or weren’t with that. But what happened during COVID in the edtech side of things is a huge explosion in software. More districts than ever before were trying to solve those four problems all at the same time, and really whatever solution they found to their problem, first they would adopt and roll into place to solve this temporary situation of COVID. And it was temporary and we had temporary funding for that situation as well. We had ESSER funding. So with ESSER funding, schools were not as scrupulous as they are coming back to with their edtech spend and they were just buying whatever they needed. A lot of districts allowed schools to just take whatever they needed to solve the problem, right? It’s kind of as a soldier we had when we were back in garrison, kind of our training environment. And then we have when we were in combat, when schools were in COVID, it was like schools were in combat and they were just having to do what they had to do to accomplish the mission. But what we’re finding now is edtech is still coming out at a rapid rate.
People are still trying to solve those core problems of practice in different ways. And some are really good and some are not really solving the problem as well, or they’re putting a lot more into their marketing budget than they are their development budget, or they’re hitting sales before the product’s really ready for prime time. And then we talk about MVP’s specifically. We’re talking about targeting early adopters. And when you target an early adopter, you’re targeting somebody that’s willing to take on a little bit of risk. They want to be on that cutting edge. It’s okay if the product’s a little clunky. It’s okay if they have to get in and do a little bit more manual labor. If the ease of use and usefulness isn’t as high early adopters are willing to make that sacrifice. The challenges with so many folks throughout the country and throughout the world all looking for products at the same time, who was and what was the early adopter really shifted. And so folks who thought they were early adopters really weren’t. And companies who should be targeting early adopters or going beyond in the adoption cycle to those different users.
And that is going to and it’s already started to create a mismatch. So there are a couple of things going on. One, we’re seeing massive data issues with student data. Yeah, we just saw the FTC file lawsuit two days ago against Chegg for their data issues. And so there’s that there are these apps that in districts will have multiple apps or edtech solutions doing the same things. And we’re paying a lot of budget for the same solutions or different solutions to the same problem. And so what we’re seeing is, one, with MVPs, we have to be careful. We have to know what we’re evaluating. We have to do real evaluation. And districts and schools really need to make sure that they have people with the right skill sets evaluating those solutions.
For someone like me, I’ve always thought of MVPs as most valuable player. Well, clearly you’re not talking about MVPs as a player or a person. So what is it when you say MVPs in the technology world?
Thank you for that question. Yeah, sorry for not elaborating previously. So it would be a minimum viable product. And so when you have a startup or a company that’s working to come up with a product to solve a problem, you have kind of the full-fledged solution and then you have kind of the first phase of it or they the two or version two. And what that really is, is here’s a product that has the bare bones that we can take to market and get our early adopters to, to purchase. And then they can give us feedback as we make improvements to get to our v2, to get to our 2.0 versions, to get to the rest of the market. And along the way, we’re getting those upgrades happening, those feature enhancements. Our customers are telling us what they do and don’t like and what to add before we go to the mass market or market on a big scale. So when you look at those minimum viable products, the company is not a bad thing. I want to be very clear. These are not a bad thing. Every great software at some point started as the MVP.
But schools really have to understand that is a product that’s in the research and development phase. And right, right in the let’s start to see if we can make money and feedback at the same time kind of phase. So if you’re trying to solve big problems for your school or for your district, but the product is in that phase, you can have a mismatch. And so you might want to look at if you’re not willing to go through that MVP kind of process, it’s almost like a partnership when you’re doing the MVP. And if you’re not ready for that process, then you should look for a solution that is more robust, that is ready for prime time, and that not only is ready to solve problem but has a track record of solving that same type of problem in other districts.
Thank you and thanks. I was like because I think the title of the article and not to jump forward is Be Careful with MVPs. And that’s obviously the first thing that caught my mind or my eye was what is an MVP? And coming from a teaching background, I’ve been the firsthand experience in a school that I worked for to saying, here, we’re going to try this year and this didn’t work as well as they thought it was going to. So we’re going to try this one this year and we’re and tried this one this year and it’s like, can we just pick one? You know, and I do see where some of the needs are met or it’s a great program, but you use 3% of it and you don’t need the other 97% of the stuff that they put in there. And it just it gets confusing. So, yes, I’ve personally found the article very interesting.
Thank you very much. And yeah, the process you just described is one that is renowned throughout edtech and intech. But I’ll just I’ll keep it to edtech. And what you’ve seen a lot I’ve seen more pilots since COVID than anything else, where you find schools that are piloting something or the district wants to pilot something. And that leads to exactly what you described. You’re trying something and then next you’re going to try something else. A pilot should never be one product. In my experience, when you’re piloting something, you’ve identified that you have a problem you’re trying to solve or something you’re trying to do better, but you’ve identified multiple solutions that can solve that problem. Potentially, the pilot process is a study to see which of these do we think could actually solve the problem. And you’re collecting feedback from the teachers that are using it. And sometimes when I’ve done pilots, we say, okay, first semester these sixth-grade math teachers are going to use the product and seventh grade we use this product, and then we’re going to switch that semester. And everybody knows that from the beginning. And that gives us a lot of really rich data to make these types of decisions with.
And then you move from pilot to proof of concept, which is, okay, we think this one will solve the problem the best ones- do a whole school or let’s do all of whatever that sample group is going to be to really ensure that it’s going to solve it. We think it’s all here at this pilot scale, but now we need to really see if proof is in the pudding. Once you get past that proof of concept, now it’s time for phased implementation. And that is we’re going to roll it out in steps and in phases. Sometimes we’ll do a master rollout, but typically I like to do those phased implementations. And what has happened a lot is folks confuse those different steps. And so what they’ll say, we’re going to do a pilot by really doing a proof of concept. If you’re only doing one product that’s not a pilot, that is a proof of concept. And you’ve already kind of surpassed phase one of how we should be trying out these different solutions.
So you’ve mentioned a couple of words multiple times now. One of them is problems and I know just from before barriers that students, staff, and teachers need to overcome or run into in schools. What are some of these problems or barriers that you’re seeing and how are these products solving those problems? Or at least maybe not solving them completely, but alleviating some of the stress that the making?
Yeah, absolutely is great question. There are lots of barriers in education. The main goal of education is to make sure that we can educate all of our kids to be able to build their own futures going forward. One of the problems that we have with that is equity, and that can come in a lot of different forms, in a lot of different lenses. But the philosophy that we try to use in education, at least here at Broward and other places I’ve been is it’s every student every day. And that idea is to really it’s almost like putting every student on their individual education plan. Well, that’s really hard to do with technology without getting the data that’s involved, without getting adaptive technology, that they kind of evolve with the students, and without teaching our teachers how to use that data to inform their teaching practice. So that’s one type of barrier that exists. Then there are also Wi-Fi issues at home, hardware issues that can arise, students having social-emotional issues, and that kind of thing. What we end up solving with technology a lot of times is student engagement and motivation for learning. So we’ll see a lot of apps with a lot of bells and whistles to try to keep the students attention.
But the barrier of student motivation for learning being solved doesn’t help if we’re still having that barrier to deep learning. And so we can have great examples of those apps that you scroll through that will keep the students attention for 17 hours. But you ask them any of those videos that they just watched and they don’t remember anything. They didn’t do deep learning. They were engaged, but they didn’t actually learn. And so we have lots of barriers to the teaching and learning process. We have lots of barriers that COVID provided with socialization issues and that kind of thing. And you’ll start to see softwares actually starting to emerge that is really cool, that are getting into predictive analytics, being able to see, okay, student is missing these periods. We’re seeing great slip and they stopped eating lunch. We need to let the social worker at the school know about that so that we can solve that barrier. And then the other barrier, I would say, is parity across school districts when you don’t have proper funding in place to make sure that there’s consistency and standardization across your district. And so you can see by zip code the different technology solutions that have been adopted and put in place. That way.
The amount of products that are coming out, how many of them are actually good or does that completely depend on the school and what they need or what they can afford or the student population? I mean, I’m sure there are a ton of factors, but if there are a million apps out there, there’s got to be some that are excellent and most are probably like, yuck.
Yeah, absolutely. We have a couple of ways that we do that. One is understanding the I call it a problem of practice. That’s just the educational term of something you’re trying to improve. Software should be and hardware for that matter, any tech or edtech should be value added. So first is what value are you trying to add? Sometimes you won’t even know that it’s something you want to add until you see it in the software or a feature or or whatever. I remember when the world-facing camera came out on devices and all of a sudden they were like, Wow, yeah, we actually we need that. There are ways that we can use that immediately. So first is understanding where you’re trying to go and understand what you’re trying to improve or what problems you’re trying to solve.
And then, yeah, I mean, there are thousands of edtech products out there now. And one thing that we make sure that we do here at Broward is I don’t take a lot of calls from vendors. We make sure that we’re trying to solve a problem first, and then we do the research to see which vendors are available or what edtech products or solutions are available to help us solve the problem. Otherwise, you can get too many softwares in your environment. One of the previous districts I was at, I did a scan on my environment. We had over 10,000 different products in our environment and we had 60,000 students and 10,000 different edtech products. And so and many, many of them did the exact same things, but they came in different ways. And we ended up with pockets of folks that really love their product and some brand loyalty had attached there. But understanding where you’re coming from, evaluate those products and we do a needs assessment to really understand what we’re looking for, what are we trying to solve? And that helps us really limit down what features we need in the product.
So like you said, you can have products that have four or five or six great features, but maybe 90% or 70% of the product you’re not using because you’re not that’s not a problem you’re trying to solve. Maybe a district over here or school over here is. But it really is a bespoke and custom process for where your district or where school is trying to go. So we do those needs assessments and we’ll either go out to an RFP bid asking for proposals or we find enough research that we know exactly what type of product we want. We’ll put out an invitation to bid and then we do demos and we do demos with lots of stakeholder groups to make sure that we’re getting all the different perspectives. When you’re doing an edtech purchase, they should all be seen as long-term purchases and long-term solutions. And so you want to get as much upfront perspective and feedback as possible because if not, you will get it on the back end. So I always prefer to have that on the front end go through that kind of survival of the fittest process, select something, roll it out, go through that pilot proof of concept phase, implementation process, and then I go through normally two more Moore’s Law cycles.
So if Moore’s Law says 18 months, we’re going to do 36 and then I’m going to reevaluate. We’re going to go back into our adoption fidelity phase and say, Is the edtech solution solving the problem or making the improvement that we thought it would? If not, why not? Is there ways to upgrade the product? If we need to find another solution did we incorrectly evaluate the problem from the beginning and then bring that into the continuous improvement cycle. And if we have to start that process all over again, find a new solution, great. If there are ways that we can upgrade the current solution that we weren’t aware of, that’s great as well. So that’s the process that I found effective.
Say you found this MVP that’s truly the MVP of MVP for whatever problem you’re trying to solve. Once the school has or I guess once you’ve done the testing with a small group and done the switch and they both like it or whatever that process is after that, I mean, with the rollout- do you see a lot of pushback from staff and teachers or even students if it’s more of a student related product or is there a bunch of training that goes into all of this as well to make sure everyone’s using it correctly? What is kind of once you’ve chosen something, how does that work? What happens next?
Yeah, so one of the things that I’ve developed along the way is what I call PITAC. So it’s an acronym and it stands for the Planning, Implementation Transition, Adoption, and Continuous Improvement. So during that P or the planning phase is a lot of what I just talked about of getting the stakeholder feedback to the needs assessment, making that selection process all the way through the purchase, doing the pilot, and proof of concept. When we start doing that phase implementation, we move over to the I, so part of that planning should’ve been a communication plan, making sure that our stakeholders, know that we’re trying to solve the problem, most of the time we’re going to have surveys, focus groups, interviews, triangulation of data, and it shouldn’t be a surprise anytime that we’re rolling something out. As we do that implementation that incorporates the training, you’ll see a lot of train-the-trainer model getting in with our instructional coaches depending on what it is, and then we’re going to move over to the transition.
So we’ve gotten the product stood up, it’s working. We’re ready to to roll it out. We train the folks that need to be involved in that transition. And so then we start transitioning to the end users. We’re communicating, we’re getting them trained, we’re making sure they’re comfortable. We’re getting our technology support in place. We’re making sure that our techs that are out in the field aren’t just break-fix techs, but they’re actually helping you use the product and solution techs and get that transition happening. Then we do our adoption work making sure that folks are actually using it, and if not, why not? Sometimes they need retraining, sometimes they don’t understand the value add, and other times or just other issues leadership, lack of tech support, something like that. So we try to fix those adoption issues and then we have that cycle of looking every 36 months to see if adoption is still working and then taking it through that continuous improvement cycle.
Again, with all of that, it has, and I don’t like the word pushback. Normally it’s feedback. When you try to push something onto somebody and they didn’t ask for it, you’re going to get feedback. To call it pushback, you’re pushing something and then you’re facing resistance, right? So looking at it from where we’re a team, we’re all trying to reach the same goals and mission and making sure people are part of that process all the way from the P. Now, it’s not you’re not pushing something on and they’re helping solve that problem with you. And districts can really benefit from that process.
What tool is used to identify a problem? Is it teachers coming to you saying they need something? Is it students saying they need something? Then go to the teacher. Then the teacher comes to you. I mean where… So how do you identify what these problems are and then start looking for a solution?
Great question. I don’t have the best answer because it’s going to be anywhere and everywhere. But I’ll tell you some things that we do. You know, all feedback is great and we find ways to incorporate it. We have teacher focus groups that help us. We have technology champions out in our schools and meeting with teachers, principals, and students and just seeing this feedback. So really great example. We were talking about standardized testing yesterday with a group of our teachers and they wanted to go back to pencil paper. The teachers who you talk to adamant that the tech’s not working, they want to go back to pencil and paper we listened and it was great, great feedback that we were hearing that this was about kindergarten and first-grade students.
And what we learned wasn’t necessarily the pencil and paper. What we learned the problem was, is we had just pushed the normal laptop devices up to those grade levels, and there are other devices that we could have put out in those grade levels that allow for that paper and pencil type of simulation or scenario, especially a standardized testing where kids need to highlight, they need to point, you know, you can look at a tablet with a stylus and these other solutions, but these teachers weren’t asked necessarily what their needs were in that device selection process that happened. So by getting these focus groups together and this was let’s just let’s talk about standardized testing. How’s it going? We’re making some changes this year. And it turned into a tech issue. And so it’s really being able and willing to listen to wherever it’s happening. But we have teams, channels stood up for folks to give us information.
We do surveys multiple times a year. And we’re also looking for these opportunities anywhere that they exist. And I think that it’s really important that whoever sits in a chair like mine isn’t having the kind of basement mentality of long ago where we make the hardware work, we make the tech work, and we put it there and it’s going to do its job and we’re going to make sure it does. A meeting with the instructional side of the house social work, safety and security, all of our different folks, and hearing about all the different challenges and problems that they’re having, and we’re sharing that information together and cross-referencing and then saying, Oh, all right, so we can come up with solutions. We’re seeing that we’re having similar problems. And let’s find some solutions to that.
Yeah, I think, you know, standardized testing, since it was ever implemented, has been controversial, even when it was paper and pencil, which is what I took mine on. But it’s always been does it work? Does it not work? But not even thinking about the delivery of that test. I never would have thought about that before, but I can see how or even why a lot of the schools that we work with still use, you know, K through three or K through four, a lot of touchscreen devices just to be able to have that hand to surface experience.
Yeah, absolutely. One of the great, great points that was brought up yesterday is the tests weren’t testing the content, it was testing the kids tech skills because they couldn’t get to the content because these kindergarten first graders couldn’t use a touchpad, they couldn’t type, they couldn’t do these things without putting the right kind of devices there. We weren’t even getting the results that weren’t really valid for us to make you know, whatever changes or feedback we needed to give based off the data. The data was flawed. So yeah, it’s, it’s great to get that type of feedback. And now we have a new problem practice to solve.
So I did want to ask so I know we’ve been kind of going in the direction of MVP’s that are targeting staff and students. Do you ever factor in like parent parental needs like getting information to parents? Are they ever factor into that as well?
Yeah, they are. And so that’s actually we’re working on a project right now with our website and with our mass notification communication tools with parents. But there are also great products out there that allow not just that one-way communication or that blast communication, but to actually collect and aggregate that community and parent feedback. So the last five years there’s definitely been some MVP’s in that market, but there’s also been- I’ve watched and participated in some of that really coming into their own and provide some great value to the school district and to the families and the communities. A couple of these you can throw questions out to your community. They can answer the different committee members can then vote on the answers and rank them. And, you know, the best things will come up to the top. And there are these great products where parents can just send a message directly to the superintendent or to me or to the school board folks and really get that communication happening. And a lot of times it’s hard for communication to get to the district office level. You see a lot more at the school level, but district office, especially in a district our size, it can be a gauntlet to get through, to try to get to the right person.
And titles can be confusing and you think you’re reaching the right department and it’s a different department or that department went away two years ago or that kind of thing so some of these tools have been really beneficial.
Yeah, I didn’t even think about the parent side. I mean, when I was in the schools, you know, all they did was all they could do is check attendance and what your grades were and which assignments you were missing, which I’m so happy that those apps didn’t exist when I was in school. But yeah, to even be able to like voting on things I think is I mean, that’s just a very interesting versus having a school meeting and inviting all the parents and then just ending up with a big argument of, you know, I don’t know how many students are in a grade level in a district your size, but, you know, you don’t need 2000 people yelling at one time about something when they can just silently do it at home.
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other great things is not always are the most vocal people, the most people. And not that vocal people don’t have real issues that need to be resolved. They absolutely do. But data can get skewed if you’re only hearing certain things. So by having some tools in place that allow you to collect more rich data, you can see actual scale of whatever the issue is. And the school district especially, you’re going to have limited resources. So knowing where to properly align those, and aligning your limited resources is your strategy. And so as we develop our strategy, having this type of data definitely allows us to do that much better, more filling way, not just for us, but for our community as well.
Do you find most of these products? I mean, are they so are most of them like free products or the school’s paying for these? And that’s something that needs to be factored into a budget, even though maybe when the budget’s being taken care of or made for next year, there might be a problem that hasn’t shown itself yet. And then you have to go back to or are they, I just I guess I don’t understand the process of actually bringing in these products and whether or not parents are paying for things to have an app on their phone or if the school has to pay for something or.
Yeah, there’s well, so there are quite a few different ways. And what you’ll see a lot that has come out in the last five years, even before COVID you saw this coming out, was the freemium model products. And a lot of those are really, really great. But the business model from the edtech company is hopefully that freemium is their kind of trial and then once they like it, they’re going to upgrade. Okay. A lot of companies go directly to school principals or to school teachers or to get those freemium products in place. So we’ve had to put some policies in place where we have to direct those people to the district level, PTA’s or SAC committees were also purchasing these different things or signing up for the stuff. But what ends up happening is you have teachers loading student data into a free product, and that product might not abide by the law or our privacy policies or these different things.
It might not be a safe website according to CIPA or COPPA but we have to follow as well. And so that’s why we have to run these things through, we have a legal obligation to sincerely vet these products and have our school board sign off on them. They have we have to have contracts in place to be able to share our student data. And educating our folks is one of the biggest things we’ve taken on since I’ve gotten here in Broward and we’ve created our management on the instructional side of the house. We’re creating our management menu, an instructional side as well, and educating folks. Here’s what you are allowed to use. And then if you hear of anything else you want us to look at, anything else, we have an evaluation process. Send it to us, we’ll evaluate it, we decide it goes onto the management menu, then you can use it. If not, then we’ll tell you why you’re not allowed or not able to use that product. Yeah, I would say a lot of it is the free stuff, the paid stuff. A lot of schools can go out and purchase with their internal budgets or a lot comes down to PTA and SACS doing what they believe is the absolute best thing for their students.
But we have to make sure the process that’s followed is appropriate as well. Well, if there are.
One thing schools don’t like hearing is, “Hey, we need a check.” But that’s it’s actually interesting that you brought up the security of apps and programs that people put on their devices at schools because we a few episodes talked to someone who literally talked about security and how not to mess up the network of the school or the students computer or whatever by putting these free apps on there. And they’re just sharing information, which then is breaking the law for the student protection. And so it is. And that’s something that before speaking to that last guest and then to you, I had never thought about I mean, as a teacher, I take my computer home all the time and log on to my home network. And I didn’t have security set up anything. And I mean, thankfully, nothing happened. But yeah, it’s just something I never thought about. And now two people have mentioned it over maybe three podcasts.
Yeah, it’s very significant. So, you know, K12 is the number one ransomware industry in the world and our data is most valuable in the world. So if you look at the black market and if I stole your identity right now, I can maybe get $0.25 for it. If I went to sell it on the dark web somewhere. If I have a student’s data, I could get $25 or $50 for it. And so looking at that difference in the value there and the reason why is if I sell you a kindergartner’s data, you have years and years and years before anybody finds out that that that has been used to create that fake identity and that kind of thing. So the data is.
I don’t think kindergartners have jobs. I don’t know what anyone’s going to steal from them.
Yeah. You know, they’re used to create those fake identities and do other nefarious things. And we’re really up, you know, we’re not up against kids sitting in their mom’s basements having some fun and finding some scripts on Google. In other parts of the world, there are legitimate organizations with bonus fee structures and other things trying to attack us and get our data. And, you know, they just like a sales team. They’ll give high fives and bonuses and all of that. And when this happens, it’s a money-making thing for them. A lot of it is state-sponsored by some of these places as well. But it’s really, really hard, even if it’s not state-sponsored for those countries to crack down on it.
So, you know, the security of things, it’s almost impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube. We have to make sure that it’s safe and secure from the beginning because once somebody is in once somebody has something, it’s out there.
Well, I do want to give you I know we are we’re kind of getting time to wrap up here. So I want to give you time to plug any social media you have directions on how to get to that article about MVP’s you’ve written anything you want.
Okay, well, thank you for that. So I am on LinkedIn is probably the platform that I’m the most active on. I did just start a Twitter handle or account this week. It’s actually @DrJoeCIO. So if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can do that. The article came out from EdTech Digest and you can find it on my Twitter, on LinkedIn, and I put out articles all the time. I try to help the community anytime I see something, any thing I think could be helpful. But I also just like to tell the story of what we’re doing here at Broward County Schools and inside of our IT Division.
Well, I will say I found the article very interesting. It is titled Be Careful with MVP’s and the Growing Number of Edtech Applications. I found it on your LinkedIn. It’s very easy to find you are fairly easy to find as well. But Dr. Phillips, I do want to thank you for coming on. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. It’s been a pleasure. If you like our podcasts, please subscribe to them or if you have any ideas for another episode or topic, or if you’d like to be on the podcast, please go to k12techrepairs.com/podcasts. Reach out to us and we’ll do all we can do.
Thank you, gentlemen.
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