 Okay, excellent. So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Michelle, thank you for the introduction to Moodle HQ to Michael Martin, everyone who brought me here today. Thank you so much. This is such a tremendous experience. This beautiful campus, this beautiful day. Can we give a round of applause to the weather, which has been absolutely gorgeous, right? Can you ask for better weather this time of year? That's been so thrilling. And I just like to say this is one more round of applause and I think we should give a round of applause to everybody in this room. This is such a tremendous community. I don't know if you know you have something special here, but you truly do. So that's a round of applause for everyone. So for being here. And for being so friendly. So again, Michelle gave a bit of an introduction. Again, I'm Charlie Reisinger. I'm the IT director for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster. That's my day job. I also teach as part of the graduate program for Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, also in Pennsylvania. I'll tell you a little bit about our community just to get you started. First of all, now you saw the map. How many of you have ever heard of Lancaster County before? Oh, cool. Okay. Check this out. Excellent. All right. How many of you been to Lancaster County? Awesome. All right, that's great. How many of you are from Lancaster County? And Debbie, my colleague, doesn't count. Okay, fantastic. Very good. Hello. Hello. We haven't met yet, but now we have. So Lancaster County, Lancaster City, we have a few claims to fame. So I'm gonna first talk to you about a somewhat dubious claim to fame. For one day, we were actually the capital of the United States. How many of you knew that? Show of hands with us. Okay. Do you know why we were the capital of the United States for one day? This is 1777, by the way. All right, so this is old history. We were the capital for one day because the Continental Congress, they were running for their lives from the Brits, who had just captured Philadelphia as part of the War of the Revolution, right? So again, a bit of a dubious claim, right? So that was our first claim to fame, capital for a day. Another one of our claims to fame, I wasn't actually gonna even talk about in this presentation, but after I saw Martin's pie reference yesterday, I couldn't help but bring it up. If you're from Lancaster, you probably know that we have things such as shoe fly pie and whoopee pies. So if you've not visited Lancaster, I really recommend that you try shoe fly pie, especially if you're interested in a pie that's essentially molasses and sugar, right? It's, yeah, it's a bit of a heart attack on a plate, but it's quite good. We have in Lancaster a very rich agrarian tradition. Over the past several hundred years, our community have been phenomenal and fantastic stewards of the land. And I think with that agrarian tradition, you know, we also have a bit of a do-it-yourself attitude that I think comes along with that. This is Lancaster. It's not all of Lancaster, but this is the view down the street from my house. Very, very beautiful countryside. We do export more than just shoe fly pie and whoopee pies, though. Turkey Hill Tea comes out of Lancaster, and we do have a thriving technology economy as well. But like many areas, like many public schools, we're not without controversy, not without our problems. Penn Manor School District, we have about 5,300 students across 10 buildings, seven elementary schools, two middle schools, one high school. And just, as I was saying, just like many other districts, we have funding issues, we are dealing with issues surrounding assessment. Right now, at the state of legislative level, there is a battle, of course, with budget and talking about our standardized test scores. The conversations just keep going on. My fear with that, my concern is that those conversations pull us away from what's really important. And what's really important for us, and I think for all of us, is to make sure that we have classrooms that are honoring our students and providing the intellectual laboratories and the creative incubators that our classrooms should become. And that work happens so much at the local level, and it's very important work for all of us, right? Because we know that our society, our world is changing. I don't really need to really preach this to this crowd because you know this, right? But today, we can learn anything we want via the internet. There are tools out there that allow us to learn anything. We don't necessarily need to have sages on stages and teachers that are fountains of knowledge, right? But not only learn, but we can participate, right? Participatory media. On top of that, our students can build anything. And this is sort of like the next great revolution, right? If the knowledge monarchs were overthrown by the internet, the production monarchs are now being overthrown by the maker movement. We have our dreamos and raspberry pies and 3D printers that are incredibly inexpensive at this point. So our kids can learn anything and they can make anything. And they can communicate with anybody anytime. It doesn't matter where you're located, right? We know this. This is just a day in the office for all of us, right? So this isn't new information. So the question is, is why are so many public schools still stuck in models that haven't caught up with the times? This is a picture of one of our elementary schools, Peckway Elementary in Penn Manor School District. This is a picture of the then modern classroom that was built in 1960, right? It may look a lot like your classroom. Let's fast forward and let's take a look at a new modern classroom that our schools continue to build. And not much has changed. We have a setup that puts a teacher in the front and has our students in a grid. A structured matrix, a grid. It's a knowledge hierarchy again, right? A teacher at the front, he or she is the fountain of knowledge, and he or she is going to transmit this sacrosanct knowledge into the heads of the pupils. It's a hierarchy. And here's what's even more concerning for me as an IT leader, as instructional technologist. We continue to honor in some weird way that hierarchy with our classroom technology. So we mirror this in our classroom tech. A good example of this right now is the trend in many public schools to go the route of tablets. In schools where they have the funds to purchase just one technology device for students, many are choosing to go the tablet routes, and they're all the rage right now. Now, this isn't a slam on tablets. They're great. They have their purposes. But they're not really a full computing device when you think about it, right? When you really think about it, what can a student learn from a computing device that doesn't run a lamp stack? And in those districts where schools or kids are lucky enough to have access to a full computer, IT directors and principals, people like me, they often lock them down. Our students are completely locked out of the operating system. They're not given the opportunity to install software or poke around with the insides of the computer. And when you think about it, this whole practice is completely crazy, right? We're handing our kids probably the most sophisticated technology learning device of the past 2,000 years. But yet, we're treating them like Egyptian tombs, that if you break the tomb, right, if you break the seal, you're going to incur the wrath of the school board policy. I can't figure this out. It drives me absolutely nuts. And what it does is these locked up machines are not honoring our students in quiz of nature. And worse, it's a model, again, it's a hierarchy model based on control and compliance. So as you can probably guess, I think there's a better way. I think open source is that way. And I think that the values of open source software and the principals themselves have a lot of overlap with education. So open source principles such as collaboration and participation, rapid prototyping, they make tons of sense for our classrooms. What they do is they flatten that hierarchy. And it breaks us out of that command and control, that hierarchy model that's been in our classrooms for so long. So let me tell you a little bit about open source at Penn Manor and how it's led to our student programs. For the past 15 years, open source has been at the DNA, I've been threaded into the DNA of everything that we do at Penn Manor School District. We have been making larger and larger bets on open source over the past 15 years, bigger bets. And there's a couple of key projects that have been anchor points for us that have been so successful, it's helped us to drive. What it did is it basically said, yes, we can make this work. We can make open source work. It drove innovation for us. I'm very lucky to work with a team that values self-sufficiency and they have that do-it-yourself attitude. That is, I think, so integral to open source in many ways. And I want to call out one tool in particular, no surprise. Moodle has been a phenomenal tool at Penn Manor. And quite honestly, it's one of those key anchor points that led us to the knowledge that we can build a school based on open source. But I think there's one other element of Moodle, too, that I don't want to lose sight of, that I think is key for education. And that's that Moodle and other open source tools, other source communities and projects that adhere to the GPL are vitally important for education. The GPL is much more than a license. It's a fundamental bill of rights for learners. And I think that's absolutely essential because GPL license software makes a promise that the learning is going to be free in perpetuity going forward. And again, in times when schools are crushed by budgets but also crushed by the weight of the expectations of proprietary software vendors, I think that the GPL makes tons of sense. And I think that's why Moodle and its kin are such a great match for education. Our journey with Moodle started formally in 2003 when we launched a small pilot program across Penn Manor School District. We caught some press on this in 2004, which Martin picked up on in the forums. And I have to thank him and the team for keeping the forums alive for so long so I could go back in time and even find the reference to our project. But it made waves, it really made waves for our teachers and made waves in our community when we adopted it as a virtual classroom system. And today Moodle has grown to hundreds and hundreds of blended courses, full courses in our district. We use it for everything, not only in our classrooms but also for our school board meetings. We use it for our community watering holes. It's just so deeply threatened in the Penn Manor. And in the past few years we've used Moodle to launch a somewhat unique initiative in our part of the state. It's an entity, it's an organization, a consortium called Open Campus PA. And what we've done is we've partnered with two neighboring high schools to work together collaboratively to build courses that are available to high school students in each one of our three high schools. So the way it would work is that if at Penn Manor we happen to have an astronomy course that we offer, but yet one of our neighboring partner districts does not, they don't offer it, students from that partnering district can join and take a virtual course that is led by a Penn Manor instructor and vice versa. And this has been tremendously wonderful for us on multiple levels. The collaboration of our teachers working together to build these courses and to teach these courses has really taken the learning to a whole new level. It's given our students the opportunity to experience online blended learning before they go on to college and careers. And it's just been tremendously successful and Moodle's been key to that. So that's a little bit about the backend. So let me get to the part that I find most interesting. Not that the backend, the servers and the platforms are interesting, they are. They are the drivers. But what happens when you take open source and push it to the student level, to the classroom level, to push it to the devices? In 2011, we were faced with, as you can imagine, budget issues at Penn Manor School District. We were faced with how are we going to supply more and more technology to our kids. And at the time, there were changes from some of the big vendors, Apple, for example, was one. That was just to be very candid. Not providing much in the way of pricing concessions for schools. I was faced with how are we going to provide even more laptops into the hands of our kids. And my team and I started batting around the feasibility of going Linux on the desktop. As a cost savings measure, but also from the perspective of freedom. We started in 2011 with a smallish group of laptops. We purchased about 600 Lenovo machines. And at the time, we installed Linux on them in the desktop. Not quite netbooks. They had slightly better specs than netbooks. We went with Ubuntu as the operating system. And we installed XFCE as our desktop environment. And if you're not familiar with Linux, one of the great things about Linux is that if you don't like the desktop environment, it's not a problem. You go out and choose something different and modify it and change it. You have the power and the control to mix up, remix your own desktop environment. And that's exactly what we did. For our elementary students, we took XFCE, that desktop environment, and we took feedback from our teachers and from our students. We said, what do you want to see? What do you want to see in your computers? And we customized the desktop environment for them based on their needs. Now, this was a little risky at the time because, again, Linux on the desktop was highly unusual, to say the least. So my colleagues thought I was a bit bonkers to go this route. But it worked out and it was tremendously successful. And we ran with this for a number of years, which brings us to our biggest project to date, and that's our one-to-one laptop initiative at the high school. And what we found at the elementary level with Linux was actually planting seeds for what we later did then when we got to the high school deployment. Now, I have to tell you, you know, rolling out one device per child in a high school is a pretty tricky gig, right? High school students? How many of you have high school age students? How many of you have middle-aged school students? Okay, so you know what kids are like, all right? It can be challenging. We have 1,700 students at Penn Manor High School, so this was a pretty big deployment. We're not a mammoth school system, but we're relatively large for a small team to manage. So when we went this, when we decided, actually when we started talking about this route of going one-to-one, I was fortunate to have very good school board support. They were behind us. In fact, they wanted to move pretty quickly, which was great. And we had to slow them down a little bit to explain to them, this is a pretty big technical project, but more importantly, it's a mammoth instructional change, right? When every child has a device, think about how you're flattening and crushing the hierarchy now. And that takes time for our teachers to be brought up to speed. So we had to slow our board down a little bit. One of the things that we did is we created a, prior to launch, we created a guiding committee, right? A guiding coalition, to decide what values and what was important about the one-to-one. We knew we wanted to go this route, but we really wanted to solidify a couple core values. We didn't want to lose sight of the why, of why we were about to spend all this money, all this time, all these resources, and hand every single one of our children a device. So the team came up with a few guiding principles, and I'm not going to read these to you, but as you look at them, they're probably very similar to most high school one-to-one programs that you would see around the country, around the globe. But there's one in particular that is key that I want to spend a moment on, because this is where we start to deviate from your standard high school, middle school, laptop programs. And that's the very bottom line, and that's the concept of curiosity and agency. What we wanted to do was, obviously, not only provide access all the time for our kids, right? And promote our STEM initiatives. But we wanted to give our kids true ownership of the laptops. We wanted to allow them to drive their own learning, to let their inquisitiveness drive them into new areas, areas beyond our standardized curriculum. And I think that's what's most exciting about our program. We did that by starting the conversation with trust. When we were launching the program, we brought all of our students together into our auditorium, and we were explaining this new laptop program they're getting a school-issued laptop. But we started that conversation with the words, we trust you. And that was very powerful for many of these students. What we did is, we were explaining to them that we're not only trusting you with this expensive device, right, this school-issued device that we hope you're not going to drop and break and leave out in the rain, but we're trusting you with root admin access. And we explained to the students that we were giving all of them local control. Essentially, they were admins on their own computer. We were breaking the software locks. And again, this is a huge, huge leap away from tradition, right? Again, most schools command and control, they're locking them down. But we explained to the kids that they would have the ability to tinker underneath the hood, to install programs. If they wanted to install LAMP and run their own little web development environment on their laptops, they were free to do that. They didn't need to ask permission to learn. And that's where we broke from tradition. Now, as you can probably guess, when we go this route, right, or when we were going this route, this was pretty scary. If my colleagues thought I was bonkers for going Linux at the elementary level, they thought I was completely mad for going this route at the high school level, right, and trusting kids. But I think that's based on fear. And, you know, to counter that, I don't quite understand why so many schools continue to venerate this old school command and control tradition, right? I think what's mad is not giving our kids total autonomy and power and control over their learning devices. I mean, why would we not? So let's talk about the pilot itself. When we first launched this program, we started in the fall of 2013. And we started with a small group. It was a group of about 90 students. And we were testing our Linux recipe and testing our laptop and just testing everything, right, to see how this was going to fly. So our pilot group was actually based on students that were taking open campus courses, right? They were, you know, perfect. They were, you know, they blended online. They were just a perfect group of kids. And also a group of kids that we knew would be okay with a couple bruises and bumps along the way, because we were learning too, right? When you roll this out, there's feedback that you're getting from your students. So now, how did kids react when we hand them a Linux computer for the first time? Now, some of the high school students had already experienced this at the elementary. But we did a couple things to ease the transition. Not only providing, obviously, root access, but we did things like pre-install steam. Oh, okay. The kids clapped as well, I should say. And, you know, countering to this, you know, again, colleagues, well, why would you pre-install steam? Well, have you ever played Civilization? Tell me, you can't learn a great deal from Civilization. I mean, we know this. I mean, we're preaching to the choir here, right? Portal, for example. It's a fantastic game, right? Fantastic game. Some of your big portal fans, excellent. Good, good. But we pre-loaded it, right? We pre-loaded it. We wanted our kids to get comfortable in an environment that they were used to. Now, steam wasn't the only thing that we pre-loaded, right? Okay. We pre-loaded a pretty large menu of open-source programs. And this is a critical point and a critical juncture. So, the fear, traditionally, has been with open-source. Well, there's no applications out there. That is absolutely not the case. This menu, and this is not exhaustive, right? I just ran out of space to put more stickers up there. But there is such a rich menu and collection of deep, deep open-source applications available. I will say this, folks. I don't know, though, that we could have done this five or six years ago. It's really been in the past five or six years that these applications have really, you know, come to fruition. You know, LibreOffice in particular, I don't know if you're following them or not, but if you're not familiar, LibreOffice is a truly free, as in cost and freedom, alternative to Microsoft Office. They just released version five this morning, and it's looking phenomenal. It handles office documents with amazing fidelity. It is just software, like so many of these projects, Moodle, LibreOffice, the big communities, you know when software is crafted with love. And it's important for us, right? Because these tools are just tremendous for our kids. You know, and something else, too, we heard a little bit of resistance about, well, why aren't you teaching the Adobe Suite, for example? Or why are you teaching LibreOffice as opposed to tools such as Microsoft Office? Well, you don't need to have the Adobe Suite to be a creative powerhouse, right? You know, it's about the skills that is not necessarily about the application. And some of that discussion was part of our work with our parents, part with our teachers. And our teachers, by the way, were phenomenal with this, absolutely open to these concepts and just great to work with. A lot of our education is with the parents. One of the stories that, actually the story that I have about that is when we were launching and talking to our parents about this whole project, I had a parent say to me, well, this is fantastic because now that every single child in the high school has a laptop, that means they'll all learn how to use Excel. So I had to do a little bit of education saying it's not about learning Excel, it's about learning to solve problems that happen to need the use of a spreadsheet. So education for the adults was a big part of this. Okay. So here I think we arrive at the other differentiator for our program. And I want to really spend the rest of this morning talking about our one-to-one student help desk. It's our student apprenticeship program. So when we launched the program, early on it was just so clear to us that we were going to do this with student helpers. Now one-to-one, I'm sorry, student help desk programs are nothing really new for colleges, right? We've had student help desks for forever. They're not all that uncommon for high schools. What's uncommon about our program though is the level of access that we give our kids. And I hope to demonstrate that in a few moments. So what's our student help desk? So our student help desk at Penn Manor is a course. Some high schools will structure this as a before school or after school activity. Some of them will structure them as a club. But ours is actually a course that students take for a regular credit at high school. It's an independent study, and we weigh it at the honors level. So it has a higher weighting than even really a college prep course. And our students will come to the help desk, just like they'll arrive there, just like they would any other course, math or science course. So that's about where all the similarities to traditional courses stop. So we treat our student apprentices just like junior administrators in our school. In fact, the program is set up so that when the students arrive, they are working side by side with my technicians and my team and my engineers, all in the same space. We have a room now that's set up where when you walk into the room and you turn to the left, there's the adults in the room, and if you turn to the right, so they're all in the same space together. So that's one of the first barriers that we eliminated. They're all together in the same room. And our students, especially the initial core group, they were there with us the whole way for the one-to-one program. There's three of them from the core group initially. Even before the course started, many of these students were spending hours, and I do mean hours, as in hundreds of hours on their own time over the summer coming in after school, before school, just because they wanted to be part of what we were doing. They wanted to be interns with us. So even before we launched, some of these core students had already established a pretty huge bank of work. So our students were with us for the launch. They were also with us for the massive imaging party that we had to do. So how many of you are IT administrators or someone who has ever imaged or set up more than 300 laptops? So we all share the same pain of mass imaging machines to get them prepped and ready. So we brought our students into this process, and this is a couple snaps of what we did building up. This was in January of 2014. So this was a stormy January weekend in the Northeast. This was actually a Friday into a Saturday, and together we built a laptop factory in our school cafeteria. So what you see in the background there, that's the boxes from 1700 soon-to-be-distributed student laptops. They came to us without an operating system. We had already blended together our own Linux, obviously, version of the Linux system, and we had to get that pushed out to every single one of our laptops. So this is a big deal, right? Inventory, if you've done it, you know. It's inventory, unboxing, labeling, it's a very physical process. But I have to tell you, this is one of those key moments in my entire career, working with the kids. I've worked on to get everything imaged. And I just can't tell you how powerful this was for our kids. When you mix together 1,700 laptops and 10 pizzas, liters of soda, it was just a fantastic concoction. We shook it and now the other side came 1,700 image laptops. But it was great. Our kids absolutely owned this project. It's amazing what happens when you involve students in their own learning, in something that they truly believe in. Just the passion was absolutely intense. They were working alongside my team. It was just absolutely wonderful. What I think is important, though, about this launch project is that, again, we had an opportunity to flatten the hierarchy. The distinction, the differentiation between the teacher and the pupil was completely flattened. If you were watching the students work, I would kind of challenge you. In your job, it was blended, and you can't tell the difference between the kids and the adults. So how did we image all these machines? This is another story within the story. Now, there's tons of ways to image computers. If you've ever used fog or anything like it, you know that you can take a master image, you use fog, and you push it out to all the other boxes. Well, we could have done that, or we could have built our Linux image and shipped it off to the manufacturer and had it preloaded. That's another option to do this. One of our students, a senior at the time, his name is Andrew Lobos, he came to my team and he said, hey, I've been thinking about this. What if I built a tool to do mass imaging? And we said, sure, why don't you work with us, and let's build something. And Andrew built something. It's called the Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit, Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit. And we have it up on GitHub if you want to check it out. So again, this is a senior in high school. Essentially what he did is he took open source ingredients, tools such as PartClone, stitched them together and created something new, an imaging system for our school. And what I love about this work is that it really honors the open source, the UNIX, particularly the UNIX, the Linux philosophy of having an individual tool that does one thing and does it very well. He took multiple tools and spliced them and stitched them together to create a new creation. It's artwork when you think about it. So here's Andrew explaining things such as multicast and imaging and a gig versus 100 megs to our local news crew who did a great interview and just sort of smiled and nodded politely as he was talking about all these technical things. But it was a tremendous, tremendous opportunity for him. But think about this, of course. This is a great resume piece for Andrew. It's something that he'll be able to take on and he certainly did as he moved into college. So we were picked up on Linux.com again, you know, phenomenal for these kids, you know, for the work that they were doing. It wasn't just Andrew, obviously, it was a huge team. Anyway, just fantastic experience for them. So Andrew is on the far right and on the near side here was his programming partner at the time, Ben Thomas. And those two didn't stop with FastLinux deployment toolkit. They worked with us on the help desk to develop a ticket system and help desk system for the entire project. Right? Do you recognize... Oops, sorry, here we go. There you go. Do you recognize the framework there? That looks a lot like everybody called out together, come on Bootstrap, you guys know it, right? Okay, very good. All right. So they worked with that to build the ticket system. This is incredible work, really incredible work. Now, obviously working in concert with my team, okay, they didn't have quite free reign. All right, there's still learning and there are rough edges, but it doesn't really matter, because the point here is that as they develop this, all right, as they develop this software, they were building a system for their peers. Think about this as an authentic learning project, an incredibly authentic learning project. So many of our projects at the high school level had all the format of writing a report about some long dead dude that kids couldn't care less about. This is different because they were creating and crafting code based on something they were personally passionate about and the code was going to be used by their peers every single day. It's tremendous work. And another story within the story and something I didn't even know at the time. Ben Thomas was, for many years, he had learning difficulties and I didn't even know this before he landed in the help desk program. And his story is fascinating because he had pretty much written off the possibility of going on to college, right? He had almost preordained a path for himself that said, you know, no, he's not going to go in, he's not necessary, college was not going to be an opportunity for him. But through the help desk, he really found his passion, he created something inside of him and he found something that he really loved and not only was he working hard on the help desk, for him it acted as a trigger to also do well in his other classes as well. So Ben was featured as part of a documentary that Red Hat Films put together for a high school program. It's out there, if you want to check it out. It's called Open Source Stories. It's a new series that Red Hat Films has created and features Pen Manor and Ben's story and our whole one-to-one help desk story is out there too. So check it out if you're interested in this. I have to give a shout out to Red Hat. They did a phenomenal job with coming up and making our high school look beautiful and they have wonderful, wonderful shots of Lancaster County. So if you're a Lancaster County fan, watch it just for the beautiful scenery. So what else have we done? We have a number of other projects because it's not just what we're trying to do with our kids is we're not just simply saying, we need to be consumers of Open Source. We need to give back as well. So something that we're doing is that we're making our code available as we can up on GitHub because the intent is we want to share this, right? We are the beneficiaries of other people's work. We want to make sure this work is shared out for other schools and the community. So as much as possible, our students and my team were publishing our code on GitHub. So check it out. The ticketing system is out there. The Linux deployment toolkit is there. Our students worked with a member of my team, Alex Lagunas, to put together a tool called Paper Plane which is a little Node.js application that allows you to share files back and forth in a classroom setting. So that code is up there as well. So definitely check it out. We hope that that will be a benefit to you and your teams as well. Now as we sort of wind this down a little bit, I want to make the point that our helpdesk system, our helpdesk program, is not just all about Rockstar programming and coding and development. That's one area, it's one thread that our students can explore. But it's much more than that. It's an independent study program by design. We want our kids to find their passion and run with it. We want to give them a space that's unlike traditional classrooms. So they can run and discover so not every helpdesk kid is a coder. You'll find that they are, some of them love hardware. Many of them come in and they never knew they could ever actually completely tear down and repair a laptop down to its base components. So that's something they discovered. It's a helpdesk, right? It's peer support. So they're learning communication skills. They're learning professional development skills and training skills. Often my team will send the students out in the classrooms to augment a teacher's instruction or even to train a class on how to use a specific software app. Customer service. So they're learning a tremendous amount beyond coding itself. And it's about writing communication. Something that's important too is that we want to get our kids in the mode obviously of writing and journaling and reflecting on what they're learning as well. So we started a little helpdesk student blog. And I have to tell you this has been another small story within the story. This has been amazing to watch because many of our kids are coming into the helpdesk as reluctant writers. It's not something they natively like to do, right? And I think, again, a lot of that is because they're not in positions where they can write authentically about topics that are of interest to them. So for our helpdesk blog, you know, we will certainly put out and publish help articles about how to do things on a computer. But at the same time, I also give them the freedom to write what might be interesting to them or about what might be interesting to them. So do a monitor set-ups, how to build computers, what's happening with net neutrality, you know, whatever is of interest. So I have a couple slides here at the end and then we'll wrap. And this is the one slide that I use in every presentation when I talk about the program because this is my favorite slide for one very specific reason. When we launched on launch day, 1700 machines, when we launched them out into the high school, all the students were there to pick up their laptops. We had a little mini training, right? You know, a little orientation of the computer, you know, how to just very quick, how to navigate around a bunch too, how to find files. And what we did is we brought our student helpers, our student apprentices into the training and we made them the trainers. So what you see there is quite literally my favorite slide, my favorite image from that day. I think this is the point where we have our student, Nick, in the center training his peers on the use of the laptop and giving them a little orientation. I think what we successfully did is we completely crushed the hierarchy at that point. All the lines between student and teacher blurred and what we did is we gave our kids the ability to be in the driver's seat. Again, tech support, learning support, for and about and by the students. And I love this because there's Nick working with his colleagues, the students, but also the adults in the room that are learning from the student. That's one of the higher water marks for all of us as educators. Did we transfer that learning away? In essence, did we make ourselves obsolete? So here's the team. Here's the initial launch team. There they are. Hopefully you can't tell the students from the teachers. That's the goal, right? You know what I look like. But anyway, look at everybody else. Hopefully you can't tell. I hope you can't because that's our water mark. Did we do our job? I think that what was so powerful for me again is and what was so challenging too was releasing that control because that's hard to do, right? As educators, we want to be in front of a class and we want to be the experts. And for me personally, it has always been about, well, people are here to see me or listen to me or to hear the knowledge that I have, but that's not what it's about, right? We should be obsolete. We should be making ourselves obsolete and transfer that learning and knowledge back to our students. And with that, I think that this is an example because when you let kids go, right, when you trust them, right, amazing, amazing things can happen. So as you look at this line, as you look at this line, I have one final question for you and it looks like we'll have a couple minutes for questions, right? So I have one question for you as we ride out the morning. When you look at this line and then you think about your classrooms, which side of the command line are you on and which side of the command line are your students on? Thank you very much. So you have a couple minutes for questions? Okay, great. Ask me anything. It's like Reddit. Wonderful question. How often did students completely mess up their machines? Not as often as we anticipated. So let me answer that in two ways, right? So the first fear was, oh my, all these kids have command line access. They're going to hack the system. They're going to blow up the Pentagon. It's going to be terrible, right? We have had literally high school principal administration, we have had zero discipline issues related to open access. So in that front, it's been zero. How many times did students mess up their machines? It happens, you know, it happens a dozen times or so. But we sort of love it, right? Because the students are learning what not to do or that means they're getting into areas that truly are poking around and tinkering. And if they blow it up, we say, do you have a backup? Yep, okay, great. We're just going to reimagine off you go. We've had some students that have really pushed it and tried some other operating systems as well, because they have root, right? There's nothing pervading them from doing that. I'll tell you the person, my first reaction to that is, oh my gosh, that's fantastic. They're learning all this new stuff and then like the administrator comes into my head and I'm like, wait, that's policy violations. But it's about the learning. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's been fantastic. The students have messed anything up to the point where we have been concerned. So yeah, great. Go ahead. Yeah, so I think there is probably a thousand, a thousand things that we didn't anticipate we didn't know about early on. I think we've gotten better at post launch management of a fleet like this because it's different, right? So again, I can understand why the command control IT architecture is so loved in schools, right? Because you lock things down, you have your perfect pristine environments. With this, it's completely different, right? Kids can run well-known all over the place. So we've gotten better at the post launch ability to mass push software. A tool that we've used in a pinch is Ansible. If you're not familiar with it, it's configuration management typically used on servers, open source tool. We've used that to push updates after the fact, things that we may have missed or even just in cases where new software had to be deployed, such as state testing software, that sort of thing. So yeah, at first it's been a learning process, but I think my team is probably, as we move through this, just getting better at anticipating what happens post launch. Hopefully that answers your question. Gentlemen, right here in the center. Yeah, it's a good question. So observation that for the first round it was exclusive to the boys. And yes, it was unfortunately exclusive to the boys. The stereotypes are powerful to overcome. We have, although we have, and this is a, this pains me that we don't have more girls involved in this. I think we're doing a better job. This year we, for the first time had, our first girl joined the help desk. And that for me was such an important moment because suddenly what was happening then is the other young ladies were walking to the help desk and there was another girl helping them. And that was just, that was really powerful. And I think that was the flood gate that kind of opened up the program for us. And now we have other young ladies that are coming on for the third year for the program. So, and that's not for lack of trying, but those stereotypes are so difficult to break. You know, to the point, I act in the high school, I'm like, hey, you seem to have an interest in this. Do you know that you could join the help desk program and you don't just have to be a superstar coder. Do you have really great art skills? Do you, are you a great writer? You know, are you an engineer? Great, come on in. So, we're trying. Yeah, we're trying. It's definitely, it's a sore spot though. It's tough. Yes. Two really good questions. So the first question is, does the student get to keep the laptop at the end? Currently no. However, we're looking at, at the end of this cycle, we plan for about four years and then at that point we'll probably make a decision that would allow the students to purchase it at a very reduced cost. So probably, let's talk about two years and I'll have a better answer for you at that point. And then the second question, which is really the most important question, is how has this transformed our classrooms? So one story about that. I teach, and it has. I mean, obviously our faculty is phenomenal and I'm very fortunate to work with an amazing group of professional educators. I think the best stories to demonstrate that again are the stories where, you know, our faculty are now becoming very comfortable with releasing the control and letting the students drive a little bit in the classroom. One of our teachers in particular, she has, she didn't know some of the new software for accounting and we said, okay, we need to find some open source alternatives for accounting software. And you know, we went back and forth a lot and I said, you don't have to be the expert here. You know, let's bring, let's involve the kids. And she really bought into that and did a great job with kind of turning that learning into the students and allowing the students to run the show a little bit. I think that's a really powerful example of how this model, not just the technology but the model of true flipping learning, right, flipping it back to the student, I think that's a really good testament to how this is transforming instruction. Not all of our, to be honest, not all of our classrooms are there yet. It is a continual work in progress. Good questions. Yes, sir. That's a great question. Have libraries changed? No, not anymore libraries. You know, it's interesting. I think it mirrors the transformation of libraries everywhere where the internet is one more resource. But our kids still read books. They still read books. And we're not trying to squeeze out the libraries. In fact, what we're seeing, we've played with digital textbooks but I don't want to speak for our entire library system but my general impression is that it's not just paper, physical books. In fact, it's funny. You would think that when everything goes digital they want to, our students want to go digital as well or high school kids, but a lot of them still want to have that physical piece of paper. So I would say I don't think there's been a hit at all to our libraries. In fact, I would say it strengthens them because they're transforming more into the watering hole and the meeting space, the communal spaces where kids can come and grab a book or work on a project. So in some ways I think it's strengthened them and that's a good question. Yes, sir? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Good question. So Ken, are we contributing potentially to open ed resources? The tough part about that is in K-12 so many of our textbooks and our materials are geared towards state-established standards that are purchase systems from vendors that are tightly aligned to state standards. So that's really the barrier until we can completely overthrow that. Did I just say that? I think I did. Until we... Are you offering to lead? Sure, am I offering to lead? Yeah, that's okay. I can lead a revolution. As long as it's bloodless, I'm okay with that. That's the tough part. That's really the tough part. So until we can get that changed I think it's going to be hard for us to meaningfully contribute to that. But I would love to see that, obviously. Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe at time, Michelle? We need to wrap. Okay, very good. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.