Hi everybody, my name's Ross, you should hopefully see me in a yellow box somewhere on your screen, probably signed up from my kind of Eventbrite page or my newsletter directly, I'm Ross Teacher Toolkit. I'm going to introduce everyone and just tell you the format you'll be pleased to know there are no slides, no slides, so some of you might like slides, so tough, there's none. So you're going to get the recording later and I'll introduce people. So just to make sure you're in the right place with all the high points we clicked today, you might have clicked the wrong link. So you're in a webinar with me, Ross Teacher Toolkit, and we're Matt Pearson from LBQ and Victoria Morris Primary Headteacher. I'm going to introduce those to you shortly. I've got 500 people signed up, many people are going to be watching this recorded later, and thank you for everyone for joining live. So I guess just kind of technicalities and things, the chat box comes to me only. Okay, so if you could just say hello where you're watching from, I can give you a shout out. So if you want your town or city made public and get some airtime, now's your chance. So tell me where you're watching from. Who's got the most snow? Hi Jill from, I can't pronounce that name, Chetwind, Chetwind. Okay, Stoke-on-Trent, Hornchurch, no snow, Izmir, Turkey, wow. Bury, not too far from you, Matt. Okay, Woodley, I don't know where Woodley is, Dublin, Birmingham, Pontifract. I've been to most of these places before lockdown, but I've been stuck at home for a year. Dubai, thanks for watching. Got these chat boxes in comments. I'm already suffering from a lot of load. Okay, right, so I give a couple more minutes, everyone, tunes in. So thank you for that. One more question, I guess, for me before we get started. What's your current headache? What's the headache at the moment? Too much homework, too much remote learning, trying to homeskill? Just ping a few comments through and I'll read one or two out. I'm going to put a nice little survey on your screen, just three simple questions. And then I'll show those. So what are the problems we've got? Google Classroom, assessment and marking, too much screen time for kids yet? Juggling everything, including their homeschooling and cooking, student participation, student engagement. Okay, what else, what else? Okay, live marking, AFL, the matter of workload, working more hours, everybody, all or fewer hours. In fact, it said lots more, lots more. Okay, I will stop posing through the provocations. And so just before I start, I'll just get Victoria to take over and just introduce yourself, Victoria, several notes who you are, and tell everyone what you do. Hi, I'm Victoria Morris. I'm a primary head teacher here at Elm Park Primary, which is based in Horn Church in the London Borough of Hagering. Okay, thank you, Victoria. And we're going to come back to you for your expertise and wisdom shortly. And Matt, over to you, can you just say hello? Yes, I will. So I'm Matthew Pearson. I'm an education consultant at Learning by Questions. I've been working for them a couple of years now and very much helping schools to find out what LBQ is, whether it fits with what they want to do and then making sure they get on board and they're used to it. I'm based in Bowie, near Manchester, but actually I'm not sure locations matter anymore because, you know, in a Zoom world, I could just as well be on the, you know, on Mars as long as I've got an internet connection. Okay, thank you Matt. So I'm going to put a couple of questions on your screen, everyone. I can see one or two people find some questions through. So if you haven't any connection issues, don't worry, I'll try and resolve these as we go through. And everything's going to get recorded. So if people can't connect, you'll be able to watch this retrospectively. And so three questions coming up on your screen, you need to go through all three questions and then press Submit at the end. So they should be now on your device. So give us your answers and I'll pose those results in 30 seconds or so. Okay, so while you're doing that, just some reminders. And so what we're going to be doing in this session everyone is looking at the seven expectations from the Department for Education here in England. So I know there are lots of people tuning in from countries around the world. So that might give you some guidance you might be working in the British context overseas. So that gives you some kind of food for thought. And we're going to look at some of those expectations and consider how difficult they are to achieve, you know, from a kind of feedback and engagement perspective also. And how we can meet these expectations on already stressed and overworked teachers. And then we're going to talk about the technology so I'll share some of the insights and some of the research I've been on picking throughout the pandemic and I'll also turn to Matt to just give us a few LBQ so you can get a flavor you can try the little demo and see if it's a resource that you think would be suitable for your south and for your school. And so a couple of more seconds or so on responses and then I'll put the results on your screen. Do fire through some questions on the chat box everybody. And I'll try and respond to those as we go through. So here are the results. So they should all be on your screen now. So take a moment just to scroll through these and I'll just read them out and we can steer our conversation so greatest challenges in the next few months, overwhelming report teacher so remote teaching people well being there and workload feature so we'll make a note of that. So what would you like to keep. So the CPD opportunities. And how is CPD different to lock, you know for people watching here in the UK at least how does CPD check remotely differ to the first kind of strict lockdown almost a year ago. And there's still an abundance of CPD available or is it hard and now we're kind of balancing lots of things to send those comments for an old respond to those in a moment. Parts I'm working from home shift away from exams and so quite a widespread of results that access to devices daily exercise extra family time and your family not driving you mad just yet. Okay question three, what do you hope for as a teacher when choosing new resources so instant feedback and overwhelmingly there so you know from my experience of working with lots of tech companies for a number of years now through my website and seems to be the thing that makes a biggest difference to teach your workload and shoot engagement and so I'll take those off your screen for now. We might refer to back to those later. And so we get started with go straight in and so if you can just remind you all to meet your microphones on your side that'd be very helpful. And feel free to log off if you need to go and we'll get this all shared to you in an hour or so after we finish. And so it's just for a little context you can just forgive me for a moment in lockdown through the government here in England issued a new set of expectations of how schools can deliver remote learning. And so we're going to unpick each of those seven expectations and discuss them and where where we can will ask Matt to just do a little demo of lbq as well as sharing some insights in terms of how you can meet these expectations so let's go straight to number one Victoria set in assignments that are meaningful ambitious and indifferent subjects how has your school responded to this remote teaching situation that you're in. Well, we are fortunate that we decided probably three or four years ago that we wanted to go down the Google route and use G Suite and to support teaching and learning within school and also to look at how it might extend out of school. So we use Google Classroom and Google Meet for most of our remote learning sessions. What happens is that the teachers plan and we use the same curriculum in school as we do for remote teaching so we're not planning two different sets of teaching and the teachers will put that all their planning is through Google Slides. So they put down everything in Google Slides and they make it so that it's accessible to children in school and also for remote learning purposes. So they use all different kinds of resources videos. You know, Google Docs we have workbooks that we use so the children can access and use all their work in that. And I think the other thing that as senior leaders we were mindful of when we were looking at remote teaching was looking for resources that would sit alongside that way of working and be useful to teachers from the point of view that it would hopefully reduce some of the workload. And I know that one of our most popular resources is actually lbq the learning by questions because it is really meaningful children children can access it they love it. So teachers also can set different sort of types of questions and activities and it goes right across. I know that now we're even using sort of some of the reading type lbq activities to support other curriculum areas like history and because it does lend itself to all those things. I'm going to ask you to explain a bit more how you use lbq specifically can just for context where we're watching and listening could you just describe your school environment number of kids teachers that type of stuff. Yeah. I mean on a normal day we were a two-form entry primary school we've got just under 420 children and that's two classes in each year group reception to year six. And we are a Google champion school because again technology for us has always been an integral part of what we think children should experience as part of a high class education. And so we have been using technology to support teaching and learning for a long time. And we're also an exceedingly inclusive school. So we've got probably just over 20% of our children have got special needs with quite a lot of children with social and emotional needs and challenging behavior. So when we're looking at how to support children in school and also with remote learning. We have to take all of that into account to try to make sure that what we're going to use is going to work and be engaging as well as support teachers in being able to do all the things that they need to do in terms of knowing where the children are at, assessing them, giving them feedback. And were you using the LBQ before the pandemic, Victoria? Yes. We started probably about two, three years ago and it's become part of our staple diet in terms of the way that we use it. We ask staff to use it predominantly so that they have to use it to pre-assess so they will, before they do any kind of teaching in maths or reading, they'll do a little pre-assessment with the children using LBQ and use specific sets of questions and it can be differentiated which is also fabulous. So you haven't got just a blanket test that every child's trying to work their way through. You can make the questions relevant to each group of children's ability and then they use it as part of their teaching so that they can get, because it is such a fabulous tool for that instant feedback. And I think that's what our stuff like even before remote learning was introduced, that it's real time, the children are involved in the activity and staff can see straight away how the children are progressing, which questions they might be struggling with. And then they can intervene immediately and that's been happening within the classroom. And then we use it again at the end of a set of teaching as a sort of a post assessment to check actually what have the children understood and learned. And also how do we need to plan ahead for those children that maybe need a little more support or for those children who have clearly got that and actually we need to now be challenging them further. So before I go to Matt, we do a quick little demo and let's just everyone have a look at LBQ Victoria. The second expectation from government was to deliver three hours of remote learning each day. What is that sensible or achievable to how much of this could LBQ offer? And what do you think of that? Looking at actually what our children are doing because we decided that we weren't going to do two separate types of planning that actually we're asking teachers to plan using their Google slides what they would teach in a normal day across the curriculum. I think we are finding that children have got at least three to four hours a day of work that they can, you know, crunch their way through. And that includes using LBQ on a regular basis because again LBQ is it's individual because you can have different types of question sets you can set the length. So if you want something more meaty than perhaps just a worksheet that's maybe only got 10 or 15 questions, you know, you can do that using LBQ so that actually for some tasks they might be longer than others. And then in other instances we just want a quick five minutes you know here's a little refresher or here's an introduction let's get you back into the sort of swing of things. So it's very versatile from that perspective. So can LBQ, you know, although you want kids perhaps fixed to a platform for the entire day and you want to mix up activities, is there scope for LBQ to deliver much of what you want to offer perhaps? Yeah, no we use it right across the curriculum as I was saying I mean definitely we use it for reading we use it for spelling grammar, we use it for maths, and we use it now across the curriculum, probably still to reinforce basic skills. So for example this week I was looking at planning and I saw in year five they were using some question sets which had a historical background, which had come from the reading section, but were linked to the actual the history that the children were working on. So it was just a 5-10 minute thing, it wasn't you know the whole part of the lesson, but it just added and gave them the opportunity to find out actually what did they know and what don't they know and also find out a little bit more so we're using it across the curriculum in lots of different ways. Okay, lovely, so we'll unpick some of those areas in a moment. Now Matt, can I bring you in here, is it possible for us to give us a quick taste there in kind of three to five minutes for people new and to LBQ and want to kind of see what it can do? Yes, it is. I'm just going to share my screen, tell me when you can see it. Great, right, so I'm going to keep this deliberately brief and if I start going on Ross just cut me off. I will, I'm going to disappear and just sort out some technical stuff behind the scenes to let people in. Right, so our website lives at LBQ.org, you can see all of our content without needing a login, you can just go to question sets. And for instance if you wanted to look at maths, click on maths and all of our question sets will be listed, just wait for those to load up, so every one of these is a question set. Normally with 30 questions, and they're 30 questions which are set in levels, so they become more challenging. So this isn't 30 questions that the kids are going to knock off in 10 minutes. It's going to take them some time to work through it. The great thing is because we use a level because we have a mastery approach both in our maths and our English and science as well. What that actually means is that the earlier levels, all pupils can start to make progress. The ones who are really confident will get further on in the question set, start getting into reasoning and problem solving. So you can look at all of our content, you don't need a login, it's just all there and if you click on any one of these, you can see all of the questions in the content. I'll just quickly login and I'll show you how you set a question set. Did you know what you're going to do this quickly? So you don't necessarily follow it, but click on maths. So what I can do is let's say I've got some year fives that I need to sort out. Click on this, I'm looking at year five, down the left is the National Curriculum content. So basically our starting point is the English National Curriculum. We look at what teachers have to deliver and then we build, we have built question sets to look at that. So if I click on measurement, I've got all the question sets here. Click on a question set and it loads up. Now if I want to start this question set so that pupils can start working on it through their own devices, I just click on start. I'm going to choose informal class because that's the quickest to get started with and I'm actually going to add a new name and I'll call this teacher toolkit. You don't have to do this once because most primary teachers, if you're primary colleagues, well, you know, you'll create your group and it'll be there. I'll click on start. I'll now get a code. This is the only code you need to send to the pupils is BCR. If you want to play along with the question set, you need to go to this address here, which is www.lbq.org forward slash task and then you need to enter the code BCR there as you can see on my screen. If you click on go, you can then put your name in and then you have joined the teacher's lesson. A teacher can set up to three question sets at the same time, which is incredibly useful both in the classroom. You might do it for differentiation, as Victoria said. During remote learning, you might want to set a variety of tasks, a mass task and an English task with some reading. It's really up to teachers how they balance it. There's no real ideal way of using LBQ because this is a teacher tool that really puts a judgment of the teacher front and center. We're not AI. We're not trying to, you know, be cleverer than you in teaching. We're just giving you a great tool that works. So there's lots of different ways of using it. But if I just want to answer the question, I click on it and off I go. I'm now joined as a pupil. One of the key things about LBQ is feedback on every question. So if I get it wrong, I get told it's wrong, which a lot of systems will do. But then it actually gives me a clue about how I might have another go and move on. So now I can move that question through. So basically what's happening now is your pupils are all working through in self-paced mode. And they are, they're all working at their own pace. And this works just as well in the classroom as it does for the remote learners. So Victoria said they're not setting a special home curriculum that's different from the school, you know, the in-school curriculum, the classroom curriculum. LBQ works with that. You send the code home to your remote learners. You give this code to the pupils in the classroom. They join on whatever device they've got. And LBQ works on pretty much any, you know, anything that's got the internet will work with LBQ, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, as you'd expect. And then the home learners and the classroom learners all work through it at their own pace. And we mark it and give it and give the results back to the teacher. I'll show you what the results page looks like. Here we go. Here's the results. So these some people have already joined. Well done if you've joined. And you can see here, this is a teacher matrix. It updates in real time. So every time a pupil answers a question, green dot for correct. Amber means they got it right, but needed a few more goes. So there'll be a number and red is wrong. So it's live marking and live feedback to the pupils. And that's probably one of the most important things about it. If you have more than one task running, they just run at the top of your taskbar so the teacher can just flick between them. And obviously in class, you monitor this in real time and there are things you can do. For instance, you may want to pause the question set and do a bit of micro teaching. You may want to address issues. You can do that in the class. Remote teaching, you probably just leave this running and then collect it later. I don't know if that's what your teachers do, Victoria. They kind of leave the question set running and then have a kind of, what's the word, like a mop up session and say, well done. But you've got to remember that when you're doing perimeter, you need to do this. Is that how it's worked? Initially, yeah, but now I know that actually they've managed to incorporate it into their live lessons. So they will say, right, go to LBQ, start your, and then they will track this little format and actually then pick up and say, right, I need to speak to this group of children and do it while they're actually live. Yes. But it works both ways. Yeah, I mean, we're working quite a low tech approach for a school that isn't doing live teaching and we're not going to get involved in whether the live teaching is a good idea or not, because I think that's too much of a complex debate. But we do support sending the question set home and giving the pupils something to do as well as if you want to run this alongside live teaching and a number of my schools actually do that and it works very well. But in a nutshell, that's it. That's what LBQ is. I'm done, Ross. Fantastic. So Victoria, I want to ask the next question in terms of the, you know, the asynchronous and synchronous dialogue.  What's your method? Yeah, we're using a mixture. So for some things it might be that teachers might record themselves and they will use LBQ because the other great thing about it is that it's got a lot of teaching resources that you can use, you know, with your Google slides. And so they can be actually talking through and working alongside whilst they're showing LBQ. So they might make videos like that. They use the selection of, you know, commercial type videos. We've tried different ones, Oak Academy, Purple Mash, LGFL. So we use a selection as well as then trying to incorporate a number of sort of live sessions that allow that sort of interaction that we're missing currently. Can I ask, you know, is ICT a continual priority in your school in terms of teacher training? Did you have the skill for the pandemic or was this already practice embedded? No, I think teachers would say that they've been on a, you know, a much steeper learning curve in terms of their ICT and technical skills in the last 12 months. But ICT is a big part of what we believe, you know, makes our school work really well. So it's always been integral to our school improvement plan. So I think probably in terms of when it first happened and that the first lockdown came, we were in a pretty good position because we were already using, you know, LBQ, we could see how it could work with remote teaching. We were using our Google Classroom and Google Meet in a similar way to now, but that's just been accelerated and, you know, expanded 100-fold since then. In terms of disadvantaged students, have all your, you know, the next DFE expectation is, you know, checking for people engagement. So, you know, you would do the normal things in a normal school situation, but how have you responded to the pandemic, laptop devices, those types of things? Yeah. Well, again, because we've been using Google and our parents and our children are used to that format. Just, we sent out a Google form in March when we first had the pandemic to look at what needs there was, and then we did it again just before the end of term, just to see what we needed. And pretty much at the moment, all of our equipment, bar sort of iPad switch we keep within school for children to use, pretty much all of our equipment is out on loan. So we took advantage of the government's, you know, we could get extra computers and also 4G routers because we found that a number of children were trying to work from phones on their, you know, parents' data, which isn't ideal if you're going to be doing something three to four hours a day. And we tracked very carefully who hasn't got what and encouraged people to tell us. And if you're not online, then we're ringing up and saying, what's the problem? How can we help so that we can make sure? And I think at the moment we've probably got close to 100 children who've been given some form of device to help. So all your students have a connection of some kind to access? And this was before or a response to the pandemic? This time we've really tightened up on that. Previously we kind of gave out sort of hard copies to certain parents and families. Any tips for anyone struggling or still trying to get one or two devices? Any resources or contacts you can recommend? I know that we kind of look out for anybody that might be getting rid of their old laptops and I know that there is a sort of government system where you can join and anybody, any business that might be giving away their old laptops because you can use the neverware software to convert your any kind of laptop into a Chromebook. If it's too old you do sometimes you lose the camera functionality so for live lessons and things like that is not so great. We've benefited greatly, probably got 30 or 40 laptops that have gone out just in January alone from a company that were getting rid of all their old stuff. So we use the neverware software and turn them into Chrome. I've just put a link into the chat box for everyone. This is from someone I know at the British Film Institute who I think set this up. And I think it's just the database to relate what schools and this is for England everyone watching. Kind of map where people can donate laptops and perhaps people watching might want to share that with their friends on Facebook and those types of things. You might find one or two people can find a school near you or someone else and find a device so that might help in some cases where people are still struggling. Now the next DFE recommendation part for education asks for schools to gauge how well pupils are progressing through the curriculum.  Could you show us kind of some data side of things the geeky side where I can see and track in a bit more depth and detail what kids are doing as a teacher in the classroom how I could respond to how students are progressing through. Yeah, I mean teachers do love data. And it's good what we curious. LBQ generates an awful lot of data. But we hope that that's useful for you. So whenever you run a question set we always save the results you don't have to go and say to LBQ Oh that was a good, you know, set that my kids have done I want to say that we just save everything by default. If you ever wanted to discard a question set you can but mostly it's just going to run and the data is going to pile up. So what happens now with LBQ if I just I'll just reshare my screen remember to do that. So on the on the my LBQ page, as you run question sets we basically just list them here so for instance if I was to move back to my demo class. This is looking at maths. All of these squares are a question set that I have run. And that and it will actually tell me what it is, and average score and completed score. And if I click it, it will actually allow me to actually load through the results. So the question matrix that I showed you very briefly before, although that runs during the session that actually is saved all the while. So this is what a matrix might look like if you've got 20 odd pupils and they ran a task for say 40 minutes. Every single response from every single pupil is saved here. So for instance if I wanted to, you know, focus on a particular pupil so let's see how Matt did these aren't real kids by the way this is my test data. Then I can actually see every single question that that pupil answered within that question set. So it's great for teachers in planning what they do next you can see how well the pupils have engaged with a particular question set you can plan what you need to do do you need to reteach something or can you move on. We even have question sets now that that allow you to assess whether it's appropriate for pupils to move on maths based on some the NCETM guidelines. So it's great for planning for teachers, you know, planning what they do, and it's also great for accountability as well. Because you've got this data and if the worst came to the worst and sorry for mentioning the old word but offset turned up or, you know, wanted to zoom meeting with your SLT and say what do you do with your remote learning. Well one of the things that you'll be able to show them is your lbq with a clear sense of how they've been engaged. Now, Matt, we don't want to talk about offset. I've got a few questions in the chat box from people just asking is it just for core subjects or just secondary kind of context. We are we are English maths and science, and we start we've got a little bit of lbq content in key stage one. We have everything for key stages two, three and four for those topics, as well as some cross curricular reads in primary for geography and history that Victoria alluded to. If people want to know about the content, you know, it's all there under the question set so you can actually have a look nothing's behind a, you know, behind a magic curtain, all of our question sets are publicly available. I've got a question here from Hazel Matt and what is the range of question types for science in particular, and is it more suited to primary or secondary. It's suited to both we have, you know, we have colleagues using it for teaching secondary science as well as lots using in primary science. The question types are multiple choice, including multiple response so one answer or two answers. We have ordering activities, which are particularly useful actually in all topics you know put these in the following rank order you drag and drop them. And then we have questions which we code as blue. These are open ended questions now lbq doesn't mark the blue questions. We haven't found a way we haven't found software intelligent enough to actually mark an open ended question. There are long essay dances that there are examples where we might ask a pupil to explain why something is so. And so the blue questions just require the teacher to actually look at the content and just do a little bit of quick checking just is there. If a teacher doesn't want the blue questions as Victoria said lbq is massively customizable, and you can remove the blue questions very easily if you want. So we'll come back to another little kind of demo in a moment. Victoria, I want to ask about how you've adapted your curriculum you know given you know learning lots know what we know about retreat retreat will practice and memory. You know pupil well being and stuff like that. Just give us an overview of how you've responded. So you know all the dialogue about sats and things like that and how are you having a best fit for your school community. Well again we've tried where possible to make sure that we are trying to cover our curriculum as we normally would obviously certain aspects of curriculum subjects are not possible certainly the remote learning. So for example for science and it with the remote teaching it's been difficult in terms of that you can't organize necessarily great practical investigations, you can suggest things for the children to do. And so we have relied more heavily probably on the science question sets and lbq to drive, you know, making sure that we keep up to speed with children learning the appropriate science curriculum. And that's been easy to just drop in dependent on what subjects and what your group without too much more work.  Well again because we've always put technology at the heart of things we've also expected every member of staff to be able to manage some form of technology so you know teachers are doing live lessons and using lots of different resources like lbq to try to make sure that they're teaching and also getting feedback and lbq is fabulous for assessment. I mean, I think at the moment that that is probably the biggest element within remote teaching the teachers are finding really useful. But in terms of being able to make sure that we're meeting and mean all the children's needs including our vulnerable children, you know we've got some who are in school, but if not then all our support staff are learning support staff. We've also trained in using Google Meet and they're expected to join in with Google Classroom and we have breakout rooms so that if you are a Sen child then you've got a room to go to and then you can be taught and have somebody there to talk to. And similarly with lbq sometimes will set us differentiated and I think Matt said you can have up to three sets running at any one time. Have you got a particular success story perhaps maybe with a vulnerable child without going to specific details and can you give us a little success story of how lbq might have rescued them. I mean, I think it's rescued a lot of children and a lot of parents I would say, firstly with the vulnerable children we've got one by who absolutely will not engage in kind of literacy in any kind of written form. But within school, we started using lbq in tiny little you know question sets for him, just to get him into the habit of doing some spag doing a bit of reading and because it's online, and it is engaging we have 100% engagement with our children. And actually when we look at we try and break down the remote learning and look at you know who's uploading work back on their workbooks what's the percentage who actually logged into lbq today by far and away the biggest percentage of children go for any type of activity like the lbq. How are you managing, you know, a kind of 24 seven connectedness and that kind of ICT well being for your children you know the online etiquette and what kind of procedures have you had in place. And well we've got and we've got a live lesson etiquette and we've also done sort of a thing for parents around. This is what remote learning looks like we've been very clear about what the expectations are for everybody so we've made you know a little section this is what children the expectations are. So can they grab something off your website your school website to look. Yeah, yeah it's we've got on our website there's a section called remote learning. And then the policy all the information that parents get the live lesson rules all of that is there, and they can, they can, anybody can have a look and take that. I'll shout out I'll put that in the chat box in a moment thank you for it. Matt, I'm going to put you back into a kind of geeky corner here. And how can I look you know from a live perspective, a live feedback perspective. How can I tune into the data maybe you know a kind of more finer detail and maybe respond to individual students. Can you show us a little bit more. Yeah sure so we've still got our task running that we we set up before my little micro demo. Although some of you have moved away from it I can see because you've gone yellow but you can easily drop back in. And if you were to, if you click on a particular pupil, it will drop into all of their results and you'll be. Right sorry, I knew I'd do that in the end. Yeah, here we go. Right so what I what I've done there I brought the results up and I've just clicked on a I'll show you what I did I clicked on a pupil, and that allowed me to pull up the results for that particular people and how they've answered. So you can actually see if there's an issue with a misconception at the kind of pupil level and then take appropriate action with, albeit in the classroom or maybe remotely. Well you can also do is you can actually drill down on to an individual question. So if you were to. For this I'll use my sample date because it's it's more it's more representative. You can see here on my sample data that question 25 was giving a lot of trouble to the pupils. Now if I click on this and just view the responses, we collect all the responses together, including the most common wrong answers. So again a teacher is going to be able to have a quick look at that and then work out if there is a misconception that's happening and what they need to do next so they need to reteach or reinforce a certain point.  So you could share this via your live feed, and you can actually start working through the content, including the, including add an ink. And if you want to if you hit this button, this will actually send out the, the, this particular question to all of the people devices. You're not kind of locked into one thing or another with lbq as I said it's all about teacher professional judgment will will send the questions out to the pupils and let them work through them. But the teacher can drop in on multiple data points and then make a decision about what to do next. Now, Matt, you mentioned earlier that it's not you're not you're not an artificial intelligence platform so this, this is something that the teacher would have to assign it's not necessarily something that would automatically happen. Listen, I mean, I can tip I can talk about typical workflows for for teachers both in the classroom and for remote. And basically you look at what your pupils want to do, and you find your question set. That's not going to take very long because we've got question sets to support it because we are complete for math, English and science so you can always find the question set. You can find the time and workload. That's going to take them a couple of minutes at most. We've got some handy planning tools so they can actually plan ahead, which question sets they're going to use on a particular day. And we will put them in the my lbq space, and they will actually be there and they just need to be started so you can see I've actually got a question set today that I can click on start.  So the code I'm using here the BCR that will be, that's unique my unique code for the day, but it will be a different code tomorrow. And the final task of the remote learners is just to paste that link on to your platform so the pupils can access it. If you actually pick up the link from here. If I was to copy that into Google classroom if I say if I worked at Vicki school. That's got the pit embedded.  They're really big on it being simple. You know this has got to be something that teachers can use every day it's crucial that it's an easy platform to use and that's what we've really focused a lot of our development activities on come to work load and second can I put you in the corner Matt could you. I know this is a very hard question for people to answer sometimes but what are the kind of broad costs per people per school that's actually quite an easy that's quite an easy question for me I was really worried that he put me in the corner. So it's a subscription model so you need a you need a license if you're a teacher and it gives you access to everything so you don't have to say I want to use a mass content, you get everything is 250 pounds per year for a teacher. Or you can have a three year license for a slight reduction of 625. How many questions are on last time I checked was 60,000. It's near a 90,000 so roughly speaking we've got 3000 questions sets that's roughly 90,000 questions. So, it would be very difficult for a teacher either during lockdown or in and you know when we back to normal to use up all of our content. We have the questions in a book format don't you, I believe. We do, we do we actually have, we've published them in books, I'll just get one. Yeah they're the renormous and they're a fabulous resource so I just thought I'd mention there's one Matt's got there. Yeah so these are the, these are the question sets printed out so because teachers sometimes like to go through and scribble on them and plans that we kind of ended up doing some publishing stuff as well. But the main thing is the contents there. They're also customizable as well. For instance one thing that some teachers do we've got a feature in the platform called question collection. That allows you to pick a mix questions from all over lbq. So for instance let's say you've got some learners and you want them to do a little bit of fractions but you also want to throw some measurement in. Well you can take questions from anywhere in the platform and add them into a little kind of shopping basket a little bit like your Amazon shopping shopping basket. So put them all into there. When you've got them all together. You can just start that as a question set and all of the questions will then be available. So it's incredibly configurable as a system, as well as just being great off the peg as well for a really busy teacher who's just got to get through the week, you know, without having a breakdown so for people watching So Matt, let's say I'm a large secondary school, maybe 1,800 kids of the cost still going to be about 600 pounds for your license. No, if you're if you're a larger school and you need to buy multiple licenses, then we do start to do volume discounts. So the price of that license the most you'll ever pay for a license will be 250 pounds. We've got another question, a tiny small school with three teachers. So I don't know a number of pupils, but I guess maybe let's call it 60 or 80 kids. Yeah, so that would need that would just need free teacher licenses at a standard cost. Okay, and send me through your scenarios and opposing for you. Victoria, just before we actually a question on kind of workload, could you just call out your school website address where people can maybe look at your policies in terms of ICT and things. Yeah, it's www.lparkprimary.co.uk. Okay, thank you.  I think it definitely has and I did ask staff to sort of give me the five, you know, best things about certainly LBQ as long and some of the other resources that we're using. Before I came on to this.  You're not having to scrabble about to try to find questions. They often say that you know you can get a worksheet but it doesn't quite fit the bill. And if you don't like the question set that you can customize it. So I think from in terms of workload and time reduction, it's all there for you. You can also then pick out parts that you want to use along with your teaching to create videos or to just use on your slides. And again, those books, that's what our teachers use them for. They flick through look at, you know, if it's measurement, and it gives you very clear sort of pictures of what the slides and the teaching would look like. And then they can just incorporate that into their slides very quickly. I think the other big thing for them is that particularly with this remote learning is the assessment side of things. And that they've been very worried about how are we going to assess how children are progressing and how are we going to get, you know, feedback, because it's all well and good looking at a worksheet that somebody's completed. But, you know, we're not sure how they did it and, you know, how much support they've had. Whereas with the LBQ is so clear because you can see straight away, you know, if a child hasn't got it right the first time. And the other thing I would say, I know it's not to do with workload, but it's to do with parents response. And one of the things that we've had from parent feedback about LBQ is that they like it because actually children can be pretty autonomous when they are using it because it gives them that sort of hint to if I've got a question wrong, you know, here's a hint to try to help you think why it's wrong and what the answer is, and they can work pretty independently. And so our parents have said they like things like that because the children don't need so much supervision. So it sounds all very rosy. You must have one or two challenges at the moment, Victoria. Can you just maybe reassure everyone that they're not alone. What are the current challenges that you've got? I mean, it's still, you know, we still have children and parents who are not online all the time and they're not completing work. We still have issues around, you know, the connectivity sometimes. And also I think we have it's still really hard work and I know that my teachers are probably working as hard as they've ever worked but maybe in a slightly different way. And we are trying to be clever about that with, you know, really fine tuning and looking at what resources best support the reduction of workload. But, you know, we've still got all the usual teething problems that other people have had, even though we're slightly further along the journey. But it's just like being in school, you know, as an SLT we're monitoring every day who's logged on who's done their work who hasn't. You know, we're contacting parents, we get we've got help desks so and children phone up parents phone up. And kind of it's a different way of working but it's still full on and very busy.  What are your hopes, you know, post pandemic, Victoria, you know, you were a technology focus kind of school before the pandemic and lessons learned or things that you'd like to kind of keep going forward. I've said to my staff for years that my ultimate vision is that we would have, I think the new phrases blended learning but I've always said that what I want is that I want this form of technology to be used like we are now for remote learning, we're actually in school so that you could set, you know, lbq and question sets and children we've got children who work on those in school with their headsets, and they get on and they independently learn, whilst the teacher then can take smaller groups. And also we're trying to give children more independence in when and where and how they learn. So let's see if we can take some of what we've learned around having to provide remote learning and see how we can make that work within school so that we can really, you know, give children wings in terms of being independent and driving their own learning forward. And so that's what I would like to take from it. So thank you, Victor. Matt, I'm going to ask if possible you can give us a little student demo just to finish. I'm just putting back on your screens, everyone, just the results from the start, so just in case you joined late or missed it. First question I posed, if you should be able to see these on your screen, what's the greatest challenge ahead? So we've said, you know, we haven't got a representative kind of response here but you know the statistics on the screen, remote teaching exams, people well being. And question two, you know, access to CPD, which is what most people have, I guess benefited from, that you know the shift away from exams, we'd like to kind of keep access to devices, you know, we'll find in time those types. And then question three, you know, what do you hope for in choosing school resources that instant feedback, you know, I've been a fan of LBQ for a number of years now and all these ed tech solutions they often provide the kind of broadly speaking the same types of stuff, a different colour, a different twist, but when you get kind of a sophisticated platform such as LBQ with such a comprehensive range of questions, and it really is a good resource to reduce teacher workload. And Matt, can I bring in one last time to just maybe show us what a student would see if they log in, have you got that possibility to share? Of course, yeah, sure, I'll just reshare my screen. Yeah, so I mean, we are, we are so simple in terms of teacher, in terms of pupil login, that you may be looking for something to be more complicated because in terms of other kind of sign on systems, we really have got it to the point where all you need is a three digit code. So, like, here's just a little Android tablet. And this is the LBQ app. So you can load this onto your Android tablet or whatever. And because I'm running a question set that's running under BCR, all I do is put BCR in BCR. Right, it then checks it's a valid code. If it wasn't, it would say enter a valid code. I put my name in. I click on go, and I've joined. I click on a question set, and I'm answering it. It is as simple as that. We have another way of using LBQ where what we call a tracked class. That's not so good for remote learning, but it's great in the classroom. And that allows a pupil to always log back in under the same name. What they do is they create basically they create an LBQ account with a teacher, and then they choose a passcode. It's very simple, like, you know, one blue chair, and they log back in. That doesn't take much longer than actually logging in with a code, but that's all you have to do. You just need a device pointed at LBQ.org forward slash task, and the three digit code. And then you're in and then you're running. It's as simple as that. Thank you, Matt. Right, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to kind of formally bring things to an end, and then I'm going to respond to people's questions in the chat box and I'll keep this part of the record and share with it. So if you've answered any questions and not had them answered, ping them back into the chat box, and I'll do my best to respond. Victoria, any final words from you? Any words of wisdom? Just, you know, if anybody from this was thinking, you know, is LBQ worth a worthwhile resource? I can't recommend it enough, to be honest to you, and that's from teacher feedback as a head teacher in terms of how it supports. And also, from what the children say, and actually, it speaks volumes because the progress that our children make and using that, and actually the quality of teaching. So I, if anybody's unsure, then, you know, please, please try it because I can't tell you how fantastic a resource it is in terms of supporting high quality teaching and learning. Victoria, so just a recap, because I've seen one or two comments in the chat box. Victoria's head teacher, Elm Park Primary in Haverin, East London, Victoria, Haverin, check my London knowledge. So East London Primary School, and she's got a few resources, and I'll ping in our contact details in the Eventbrite notification once we finish. Matt, any final words of wisdom from yourself? Really, I suppose I just want to go back to, well, I want to talk about just briefly, LBQ was created by a guy called Tony Khan, who was the founder of methane so he's been working with technology for years. And he wanted a system that made a real difference to the lives of children. And that's why he invested a considerable amount of his time and effort and money into learning by questions. He realized that teachers have to have the content to work with it and that pupils actually have to be able to work through, you know, question sets at their own pace. And, you know, the worksheet is very much a, it's probably not even a 20th century technology, not a 19th century technology. So he just realized that technology could do such a better job. And his, his kind of hard work and vision and driven LBQ to the point where, last week, we marked during the working week, money to Friday, 3.8 million questions. So we are, you know, we're providing a lot of powerful learning for the whole of, certainly the whole of the United Kingdom and we're increasingly looking internationally as well so we're well worth having a look at. Thank you, Matt. So any questions from anyone, I'm going to go through the chat box shortly otherwise kind of formality things are finished I'm going to send over the recording to you in about an hour or so but just to kind of recap. On those seven expectations from Department for Education here in England how LBQ and you've heard from Victoria South, explain how at least this platform can help meet those needs. Number one is set in assignments that are meaningful in different, you know, at least our core subjects deliver some at number of hours of remote learning each day allows teachers to send clear explanations upload content to various platforms, a system that will check for people engagement, gauge how well they're progressing through the curriculum and provide we feedback instantly, not just weekly which is Department of Education expectations and finally, and reducing that teacher workload helping teachers to adjust pace, you know with that differentiation will all know and respond to pupils is one of our greatest burdens. And so great resource that's why I'm proud to share it here with you all and really fabulous worth checking out. You've got a kind of insight overview to the costs from Matt. I'm just going to remind you of the plat at the website in the chat box so here it comes where you can book a little demo and or have a little nose around the website so there is in the chat box everybody lbq.org forward slash remote learning. And my name is Ross meal I'm your host of teacher talk it. I've enjoyed by Matt the lovely Matt thank you Matt for all your wonderful demos, and the very hard working and positive. And Victoria Morris head teacher and part primary and thank you to all you guys for joining from wherever you are and I hope you well keep safe and keep up the good work. It's formal finish from here but I'm going to just hang on the line if people got any questions.  I'm just going to have a little snoop through the chat box. We want to do a little kind of virtual wave as you disappear and have a lovely evening. Otherwise, take care and all the best thanks for joining. We never used to do waves at the end of meetings but I took part really nice to zoom the other day someone played some really sad piano music and we all had to wait and kind of sink and it was quite a nice little moment. I might start doing that. Right, let's look at some chat box questions, range of questions do the question set match exam specifications. And was one question. Yes, is the answer. I mean if it's specifically the GCSE content is a little bit challenging because obviously it's less about national curriculum it's more about specific exam boards. But the broad topics that the pupils have to know so if you take math they're going to know algebra and stuff, it's covered. We are going to do more of our secondary content, and we're going to look at making it more specific to actual exam boards so we're not finished developing content as it is. So more of that will probably come later. I've got a question from a trainee teacher who wants to kind of go a little trial but not necessarily ask the placement school to have to pay or sign up is that something they can do. So they can sign up for a free account and all the all the questions are available in teach mode if they want to teach with them, and they can also do a limited push out to people devices. So they can actually have a go with a live lbq lesson. The free version is it just the question bank or the interactive side of it as well. It's limited interactivity so you can set the question set and send it out to your pupils yeah. So the code only works for 90 minutes rather than the full day. And we can't store the data after the session, we do store the results but we have to strip the people names out because a GDPR, but if you did want to try it out and the trial version is worth looking at. Okay lovely right I think I've tackled most of those questions if there's anything that I've not now is your last chance. Otherwise we're all busy people we're all trying to log off. So this is your final 30 second warning. Okay. Any lockdown tips, Victoria Matthew. Always have some cold drink in the fridge of whatever you need. So maybe you know try and try and vary your walk around the neighborhood. I used to do the same walk every day and got really bored so now I've got about four different. I've done my walk in reverse and that was quite exciting the other day. You see everything backwards it's amazing. To be fair you get to really see your local neighborhood in slow motion so you do appreciate things a bit better. They still haven't cleaned the car or whatever you know and you never used to bother that in the whole world.  Lots of gin and chocolate really. Good for you. Right everyone no more questions. I'll post a ping this video to everybody in about an hour. Thank you for me. Thank you Victoria. Thank you Matt all the best and thanks for your time. That's great. Thanks a lot. See you all later. Bye bye. Bye bye.


Hey everybody, I'm Ricky Anderson and welcome to the Fort Report. Guess what? Mayfests is coming up! I just love all the fun stuff they have there. Rides, games, and I think the music is probably my favorite thing.  Who are you? Well, I'm your good old buddy, Courtney the Corn Dog. I'm here to remind you what you really love about Mayfests. It's me! What makes you say that? Oh Ricky, have you forgotten already? Just look at these pictures of us at last year's Mayfest. See how much fun we had together? You know deep down inside that I'm your favorite thing about Mayfest. You're right, Courtney. Who am I kidding? I love you most of all! Mayfest is from May 2nd to 5th. Visit mayfest.org for more information. Here's a look at other events happening in and around Fort Worth in the next few weeks. For a listing of more events and city meetings, you can always check the calendar at the city's website.


Investment banking, an investment bank is typically a private company that provides various finance-related and other services to individuals, corporations, and governments such as raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client's agent in the issuance of securities. An investment bank may also assist companies involved in mergers and acquisitions M&A and provide ancillary services such as market-making, trading of derivatives and equity securities, and FICC services fixed-income instruments, currencies, and commodities. Unlike commercial banks and retail banks, investment banks do not take deposits. From the passage of Glass-Steagall out in 1933 until its repeal in 1999 by the Graham Leach-Bliley Act, the United States maintained a separation between investment banking and commercial banks. Other industrialized countries, including G7 countries, have historically not maintained such a separation as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 the Volcker Rule asserts some institutional separation of investment banking services from commercial banking. All investment banking activity is classed as either sell side or buy side. The sell side involves trading securities for cash or for other securities e.g. facilitating transactions, market-making or the promotion of securities e.g. underwriting, research, etc. The buy side involves the provision of advice to institutions that buy investment services. Private equity funds, mutual funds, life insurance companies, unit trusts, and hedge funds are the most common types of buy side entities. An investment bank can also be split into private and public functions with a Chinese Wall separating the two to prevent information from crossing. The private areas of the bank deal with private insider information that may not be publicly disclosed, while the public areas, such as stock analysis, deal with public information. An advisor who provides investment banking services in the United States must be a licensed broker-dealer and subject to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority FINRA regulation.


Welcome to another CTN member highlight. Today my guest is Amy Anderson, the marketing director at the Cancer Community Center. And you have something exciting coming up. We do. It's a cycle thing. It's an indoor cycling extravaganza. Cycling slash spinning. A lot of people are familiar with spinning. So this is something that's taking place on Friday, January 31st. It starts at four. It goes to midnight. And it's taking place at UNE's campus here in Portland. So easy to get to. Easy to get to. Good parking over there. Good parking. You don't have to brave the streets of Portland on your bicycle. You can actually do it indoors and not be mowed over. But it's a fun event. This is the fourth year that the Cancer Community Center has done this event. All proceeds support the Cancer Community Center. Everything that we do is free. We provide free programming and services for any adults impacted by cancer. So anything from physical wellness, like Pilates, yoga, strength training, Tai Chi, all the way through to the more emotional stability and strength. Things like support groups. We have a buddy program that matches someone who's in treatment with someone who's had a similar experience. Oh, I think that's wonderful. And what I hope that listeners understand too is that our buddies are also for the caregivers. So if your spouse or partner has been diagnosed with cancer or if you've lost someone to cancer, we have a buddy for you, someone who's experienced that. And knows what you're going through. I think that's wonderful. But back to the cycling. So the cycling. Well, I want you to make it clear that you don't have to bike from four to midnight. Yes, please make sure that that is communicated clearly. In fact, we hope people will come and ride for 40 minutes. You can ride for longer than that. But to register, it's a nominal fee. I think it's about $35. And you register, you ride for 40 minutes. There's a 20 minute transition time where the next person can come and adjust the cycle to their height. And you spin along to fantastic music. There's an instructor at the front. Great energy, 100 bikes in the Finley Rec Center. Oh, what fun. Yeah. And you can go at your own pace. You don't have to keep up with that. The instructor. Well, the instructor, that's for people who have never tried spinning. This is a great introduction. The bikes can be as easy or as hard as you want them, as much or as little resistance, depending on just the turn of a dial. Right. So you can set your own resistance. And if you don't want to do the 40 minutes, just being there, cycling for a bit, but encouraging other people is just as powerful. Yeah. And you have different levels. You have some advanced people who may be. Endurance. Endurance. Yeah. Who will be raising some money. Right. Will have sort of a commitment to a certain amount. Exactly. Because this is a fundraiser, we always encourage participants to get sponsors. Your mother, your father, cousins, uncles, colleagues. If they support you in sponsoring you in this event, great. It's very easy to do. The website, I can tell you. We have a Facebook page also. But the website is cancercommunitycenter.org. It's very easy to register in advance. You can also register the day of. We can't guarantee bikes the day of. But with 100 bikes, the odds are good that even if you came that day, you'd be able to jump right on and pedal. Yeah. And I'm sure there are teams who are challenging each other. Great, great question Leslie. To raise money and get out there. We have, in fact, when we looked at this fundraiser, we really wanted to work more closely with our college friends. So there is a collegiate challenge part of this. UNE, USM, St. Joe's colleges and sports teams in particular are using this as an exercise. As a fitness, they come together as a team. They cycle for the 40 minutes or longer. And they're only $5. Students are only $5. That's great. And they also learn about cancer. Well, I'm gonna challenge our executive director to go. And if I can, I just had an e-replacement. If I can talk to my physical therapist, I'll be there too. Great, great. Thank you so much and I look forward to it. Yes, thank you. Bye bye.


We'll be talking about automating cloud native spark jobs with Argo workflows today Thanks for coming. So yeah quick agenda. We'll be doing an intro just talking about the goals for the talk We'll cover some background about the tools. We'll be addressing today and using Talk about a few common problems with spark that we've run into and how we've solved them with kubernetes and Argo workflows We also have a demo for you Plans to be live live demo, so we'll show you how that runs and share a repo with you And then we'll talk about some next steps and leave time for questions So of our intros Yeah, today we want to learn about scaling and stability advantages of using spark on kubernetes So we'll cover that we'll also cover how to use Argo workflows to automate and orchestrate spark jobs as well as Jobs that you might run with different compute frameworks like dask array as well Doing that on kubernetes and then we'll learn about what else is possible, you know now that you've deployed Your spark app onto kubernetes. What can you do next? We'll talk about that Little quick about us. I'm Kaylin the co-founder and CEO of pipe kit At pipe kit we use Argo workflows to scale data pipelines for enterprises And that's essentially we run For companies that like to use spark we help them get spark jobs running on kubernetes And as well as other compute frameworks and help them build fully featured data science platforms That are more reliable And help them move faster So if you're interested in managed Argo workflows, that's what we do We've worked with numerous companies that use sparks. That's why we're talking about some of the issues We've ran into and how we solve them And then I'm also a contributor on the Argo workflows project So you'll see me in the community answering questions commuting meetings And in general helping with the Argo workflows roadmap And I'm fortunate today to be with my talented teammate Darko Hello, so my name is Darko and I'm senior software engineer at pipe kit I am from Serbia and I'm mostly working with distributed systems cloud infrastructure and kubernetes. Thank you All right So now let's cover some background make sure we're all familiar with these three tools So how many folks here are using spark already? A couple awesome Great. Yeah. Well, I'm a little bit about spark then so it's actually the most popular data compute framework currently So in the past you might have used to dupe. It's the next generation of that and then It's a generation before some newer frameworks like dask and ray But still it's the most popular because it's so versatile. So it's kind of the one-stop shop for data science You can run batch jobs Paralyzed jobs really can get them done faster. You can also use a streaming framework that spark has as well That really complements doing batch jobs alongside streaming And then there's a whole machine learning suite as well that you can use as part of spark You can use almost any common language that you would use for data science, which is handy So that's why we see a lot of people wanting to use spark And and as that as their first step However, there are some issues especially deploying spark on the traditional deployment using yarn On a Hadoop and these make doing data engineering pretty frustrating So doing things like managing just dependencies different libraries on the same distribution is really difficult Figure out how do you run experiments between environments or hand off an experiment to a teammate? You know if I want to use different compute configurations on the same cluster That is actually pretty challenging and this is because Spark on yarn actually requires you to do global installs of the version So you you're pretty locked into a single version for your cluster. It's not supporting Docker natively So that makes it really you have to do some extra work to use containers and run your jobs With containerization And then that also means like debugging any issues you run into is a little bit harder And then the actual deployment consumes more resources at baseline than if you were to apply on kubernetes So if you're really display deploying a lot of spark jobs On a on a given cluster this does add up when you're when you're actually not running your compute And then finally there's no auto scaling capabilities like you have with kubernetes So if you want to vertically scale up To a gpu or add more cpu This is a lot a lot harder on the traditional deployment So fortunately we're going to talk about kubernetes today. So is anyone using kubernetes currently at work? Good, okay. Yeah, it's becoming more popular, which is great. And how about for data use cases? Okay, a couple cool. So today we'll be focusing on yeah using kubernetes for data science applications And really the benefits that we see with that are around number one containerization So when you start to adopt containers as the building block for each step in your pipeline You see two big benefits number one being your data pipelines more reproducible So you can hand off portions or the whole data pipeline to a teammate For them to rerun or to iterate off of They don't have to you know fully reproduce your local environment Everything's containerized and if you have a container registry setup They can just pull down their docker images for any step in the pipeline and rerun it So this helps a team move a lot faster Given there's a lot less overhead to reproduce any portion of your data pipeline And then reliability wise you you receive a lot of benefit from having all your dependencies managed in a given container You can move easily between versions of spark or any sort of other Compute framework you're using And deploy that to production and know with confidence that okay is worked, you know in dev. We'll get it to prod The number two biggest thing is Benefit of moving to kubernetes for data science is a declarative approach So we can focus less on how are we going to scale our compute and more define What are the parameters in which we want to scale within and kubernetes will handle the rest for you So we'll get into that a little bit later today But that really changes things and makes the data engineering side a little bit more predictable and easier to deal with A good example of that is vertical auto scaling So this is a key feature of kubernetes that we'll be talking about today So in the in the event that you have a job that's very high in usage You know you get a big data dump in Every so often maybe it's only once a week or once a month You can define parameters that Will scale up the compute and even scale down the cluster to zero If when you when you're not running that job And then the final big benefit of kubernetes is what you get in addition To just the data applications. You also get a bunch of other things In the ecosystem that are built on top of the kubernetes api and let you integrate easily with CICD tooling or observability tooling if you want to add that for a more production ready data pipeline So yeah a quick glimpse of our architecture. Sorry if this is a little small But this is how we we deploy spark on kubernetes We're essentially using the kubernetes master as the scheduler instead of the old traditional approach of relying completely on spark So kubernetes will spin up a driver pod It'll talk to that driver pod and when there's a request for an executor kubernetes will then say okay, I will spin up executor pods for you It then tells the driver pod those pods are ready and the driver pod will communicate and Shard the jobs and spin up the the executions and then of course once that's all done kubernetes knows, okay The job was successful. We'll spin all of this down and that way you don't have to keep it live Now getting into argo workflows. So our workflows is a dag orchestrator A workflow engine And it's the best way to run workloads on kubernetes because it's built for kubernetes So the deployment is very straightforward. There's only a couple of dependencies that need to be deployed And it's very generalizable. So you can use it for just about anything on kubernetes, you know etl Is really popular to use you can spin up training jobs You can orchestrate deployments and then you can do, you know traditional dev ops and cicd workloads with argo workflows as well So that's a big benefit and that's why the community has grown a lot lately So over just about 12,000 stars on github And you'll find a variety of people on in the community using it for any of these reasons or a combination thereof um argo workflows uses yaml as The definition and then it also has a python sdk as well. So you can define workflows with python, which is really handy for as data folk And I think the the biggest takeaway with argo workflows is once you've declared your daggs and your pipelines There's um also ways to um trigger those jobs in a way that you know Just besides manual, which we'll do today, but you can use get to trigger jobs You can do cron jobs. Um, and you can also do event based triggering And so this really just opens up the possibility to do real time workflow Orchestration and do it all on kubernetes All right, I'll hand it over to you Thanks So yeah, now I'm going to show you our architectural diagram and how we connected everything with argo So yeah at the beginning you simply need to submit a new workflow to the argo And after that argo will schedule a new workflow using kubernetes master and specifically kubernetes api And then the scheduler will bring up a new workflow after that Our new workflow will submit a new spark job and we'll start monitoring for the state And after that Kubernetes master will bring up the driver pod for the spark and then spark will request the executor pods and Then we will get our new executor pods inside our cluster And yeah, then spark will schedule all the tasks on the executors And in the meantime argo workflow will constantly monitor the state and when the execution is done We will get the result. So yeah, it can be a failed job or can be a successful job So we already saw how you can well from our diagram how you can schedule Spark job using argon kubernetes. So one of the biggest benefits is You can use the different spark versions inside your same cluster because you're Well, you're using containers. So everything is contained inside your Container images and you do not need to manage any dependencies or install anything And by using that you are also Well, you do not need to download any dependencies at the runtime. So you can run everything really fast And this also allows you to standardize your environment. So You can use the same configuration on your local machine and in the cloud Also, this also provides you Well, you will use a lower resource because you do not need to install anything inside the kubernetes and Because you're using kubernetes. You can auto scale easily And then you can also Use other frameworks besides Spark so you can create and use similar architecture for other frameworks like desk array And you can extend all your toolings And at the end since You're running everything in container and and using kubernetes. You can add some kind of a log aggregator You can provide metrics and monitor everything really easily And you can also extend your c i cd pipeline So you can bring everything inside argon kubernetes and you can cover Your entire process from the moment you are building your images and submitting chains to the git to the moment when you're running test and running the actual workload And this also allows you to easily move from One cloud vendor to the other because you're using kubernetes and that's not the actual Spark service from the cloud provider And yeah, so Now i'm going to show you a little small demo that we prepared So we are going to create small spark job that analyzes the kegel data set So this data set contains some bike Share ride and we are going to analyze this data set and find the How much is each bike type used and we are going to find out How long is each bike type? Read and yeah bike type can be electric bike regular bike So yeah, that's our spark job. And after that, we are going to show you how Argo manifests our workflow manifest looks like and how are we executing that on kubernetes And at the end we are going to simplify our our workflow manifest by using workflow templates So yeah, i'm running everything on local using local kubernetes cluster We already have installed spark operator and argo workflows and we already have pre-built Images for our jobs So We'll just pull up the live demo So yeah Okay, so yeah, here's our spark job written in scala and Yeah, here you can see how it looks like. So basically we are loading everything from our data set and simply calculating the occurrence Of our bike type and at the end we are simply printing everything up And yeah, and this is how our argo workflow manifest looks like and it's really easy to write one So at the beginning you need to define the name for your workflow and you need to specify Your dag tasks so the jobs that you want to run. So here we have two jobs one for the bike type occurrence and another for the ride length And here we are defining how our Spark job is looking like so since we are using Spark operator we are creating a spark application We are defining Spark job name And yeah, here here we are doing some configurations. So since we are using scala we here specify that Our spark job is written in scala It also can be written in java Python or r and since Our driver Pod and executor pod are inside kubernetes. We are using cluster deployment mode And here we are specifying our Docker image our location of our jar inside container and our main class And yeah, one another important thing is here. We are specifying spark versions So you can use two point x or three point x. So it doesn't matter everything will work for flawlessly and at the end we are defining the resource requirements. So we are defining cpu and memory usage And one specific thing for the driver Pod is that we need to specify service account. So service account is kubernetes thing that allows us to authenticate with kubernetes api and allows us to bring up more pods So this service account has permissions to bring up more pods And this is important because here we are specifying how much executor instances we want to have. So in this case we have two instances or Two executor pods And yeah, the second job is quite similar to the previous one. The main difference is this one line So we are using different main class and yeah Last but not least so Since we are using DAG it is important to Let argon know how our execution What our execution is doing and how it ended So here we are specifying the conditions on which our spark job or our spark task will fail or not. So we are monitoring the actual spark job And now let me just go here. So Yeah, this is the argov workflow UI and now i'm going to submit the new workflow And yeah, here you can see a graphical representation of our DAG you can see From here that is quite similar To the our yaml representation. So everything is running now and just let me go here and List our pods. So yeah, you can see that Both our driver pods are up and you can see that our executor pods are up And yeah, let me list again. So yeah, you can see that the job is completed and now i'm going to show the logs for the Bike type. So here we are counting the occurrence of each bike type. So you can see here the result and I'm now going to show you The second job. So here we are calculating the ride length for each bike type And yeah, you can see here that our job is successful and yeah, the last thing I want to show you Is how you can simplify your argov workflow by using workflow templates. So instead of writing Uh, well this complicated manifest you can instead use a workflow template and make your life a lot easier So everything is quite similar to the previous example The important thing here is we are simply referencing our workflow template And we are passing the parameters to our workflow template. So you may notice That we are passing things like language that we are using Uh, well how much resources we need And yeah, now I'm going to show you how our workflow templates looks like So yeah, here it is you may notice that this is quite similar to the one that I'll show you And the important difference here is that we are using these parameters instead of actual values And yeah, they are all specified here. You can specify your default values And there is also different types of templating And yeah, at the end This template is more general purpose purpose template that we use and your template can be a lot easier And simpler. So we are all we are here specifying almost everything And yeah, that's about it for the our Yeah, one quick point on the workflow template is essentially that means that you have one person that would define the original template And they can then enable any other user who doesn't really know Argo well to just simply submit a workflow With the parameters that they want for their job Push that to get and trigger a Argo workflows job off of the workflow template Instead of having to write their own Argo workflows manifest. So that's something we see a lot as teams that implement Argo workflows and then can let other folks on the team who don't necessarily need to know the details start to run workflow jobs Just based off of the parameters that we define Okay, thanks. And yeah, let me just go back To the presentations. So yeah, we saw how you can create the spark job We also saw how you can Use Argo workflows to execute your spark job on Kubernetes. And at the end We showed you how you can simplify your Argo workflow manifest by using a workflow template so Yeah, and the next steps. So well, since we are already running Spark on Kubernetes so By using Argo, we can allow you to use Chrome workflows. So you can run your workflows daily and you can execute Whatever you like on a daily basis or whatever basis you want You can also define a different node pools So you can use different type of instances for your for your machine learning for your GPU Well, you can use the GPU node pools. So then you can use well node pools with different hardware requirements and you can easily Schedule your spark jobs there by using node affinity feature. You can also Easily auto scale your cluster So your spark drop can come up and based on the needs Kubernetes can bring up more worker nodes execute the Your spark job and downscale to one or zero and that way you can Lower your cost and last but not least you can extend your entire pipeline you can use githops and have everything in git and You can also You can also trigger your workflow by Well by creating some kind of events. So everything is possible. So thank you Yeah, and on the last port here's a simple or I guess a Architecture diagram of how you can build on top of this. So we already talked about running batch jobs Which is really the example we did before So you can have data that appears in the database triggers an Argo workflows job and runs a job with spark You can also then add in other data sources. So you can deploy an api That's streaming data through Kafka and can feed that into spark or another streaming analytics tool that you'd like to use And again orchestrate that job up depending on triggers that you set up in Argo And then since Argos monitoring the state of all these jobs It can it can essentially trigger off any sort of machine learning job that you want to do So you could trigger a training job Depending out like once the data has been processed you can trigger that on the same cluster And even once that done you can do a hyper parameter tuning check Or you can move on into model deployment and deploy the model to another api And all of this can be on the same kubernetes cluster, which makes things a bit easier to manage And if you wanted to then do you know one cluster for dev or one cluster for prod All this code is pretty reproducible So yeah, that wraps it up a few extra resources. So once again, we have a repo So you can go check out all the code that we ran today In addition to that we included a cron job that uses python. So feel free to go check that out What's handy in there is yeah, you can pull down the workflow template that We've parameterized and you could start using that for instance So that's really handy. We have a blog that covers more argo workflows topics and spark topics And then a few other things to check out are if you're going to deploy spark on kubernetes Check out the kubernetes operator github repo and check out the argo workflows docs for more details on how you can scale up resources And that's it. Thanks. We'll be happy to take questions Yeah, right in front Yeah, so the question is how do we control the templating? How do you change the the templates and parameters that are available to users? How's it being made available to the source code? Cool. Yeah. So thanks. So, yeah, basically these parameters are available through environment variables So you can easily define them and you can easily use workflow Manifests to add them or you can never even do that programmatically using python sdk for argo workflows Yeah, right behind Okay, cool. Yeah, good question. So the question was What's the advantage of using argo workflows versus like an airflow? Um, so we did have a quick couple points on that The biggest one is it's lighter weight to deploy argo On kubernetes and airflow. So there's less dependencies to manage less overhead from like a dev ops perspective You're also working completely container native with argo workflows. So by default every step runs as a container Which is, you know, just really handy when you're working with kubernetes Um, and then there's a lot of other features with argo Like a lot of the dynamic and the parameter Parameterization we talked about today is is out of the box with argo. Whereas with with airflow It's a bit harder heavier of a lift to to use. I think the biggest challenge is definitely like python Argo workflows is a yaml first approach But now there's python sdk's like this one called harrow workflows That are essentially allowing you to declare your pipelines in python and from like a functional Perspective which is handy. So if you've used airflow or other Python based orchestrators a lot of times you have to use decorators to define a lot of the the pipeline Um, and you actually don't have to do that now with harrow workflows and argo workflows So that's that's something where if you prefer more of a functional approach Um, it's definitely an advantage of using argo workflows Does that make sense? Okay. Thanks for the question. Yeah over there Yeah The question is yeah, since we're using the spark Kubernetes operator. What's the value of also using argo workflows on top? Yep. Um, so the big value there is now you can create larger daggs larger pipeline steps So in in addition to just using spark you can link up spark with other tooling So really I guess the advantage is like since you're adopting an orchestrator to run your jobs Um, you can now orchestrate tooling around that initial spark job So that's probably the biggest advantage is like what you get beyond just the initial spark deployment Like yeah, if you want to just deploy one spark job, um, you could totally just use the kubernetes operator and run that job um, if you want to then do a bit more like event-based triggering or If you want to link in like a get ops approach, that's where argo workflows adds a lot of benefit Um, and then I'd say yeah, again like more towards the right half of this Diagram like as you get more towards deployment. That's where argo workflows is essentially like a ci tool Um, a lot of people would describe it as that where yeah From there you can run a lot of tests and basically your whole ci suite out of argo workflows if you want it so, um, yeah at the end of the day, um, it's not like the simplest out of the gate, but then it Provides much more options going forward. Yes another question Yeah question is how does um argo workflows talk to the kubernetes master and the api? Yeah Okay, thanks So basically argo is implementing Well the entire entire kubernetes api and by using service accounts and all the permissions that are available there Argo is able to well to bring up entire workflow. It's able to monitor everything And at the end it's able able to destroy everything when it's no longer needed Yeah, yeah, so it's uh inside cluster you have like, uh, well entire. Yeah Yeah, sorry So yeah inside the cluster you have uh argo controller and the workflow workflow controller. So these two Services are controlling everything regarding argo Yeah, and that'll be so you'll do um deploy argo into like an argo namespace and then yeah as darko mentioned It has the the resource definition for kubernetes to be able to talk to the api. So that's Like a big advantage of using argo is just all that is very straightforward compared to like an airflow Where there's there's more dependencies and it isn't just built for Being kubernetes native any other questions? Yeah, one more question up front Okay All Okay, yeah as the first question i'll try summarize so you're saying yeah in the past Like I guess you're assessing using airflow and argo workflows one of the two on kubernetes And you've ran into some issues with like the overhead of airflow on kubernetes, but then You're still looking to understand. What is the development lifecycle with argo workflows on kubernetes? Yeah, um and and specifically is the ui the argo workflows ui where everybody's interacting So yeah, as far as like the development lifecycle goes It's you can deploy argo locally, which is really handy And that deployment will be pretty much the same as what you're going to be deploying to aws or google Or azure and the big variance is then just how granular do you want to get in your roles and and like your rback control In your security parameters, but for the most part that deployment's quite straightforward And then once you're running workflows all of the workflows. Yeah will appear in the argo ui So if anyone is not as familiar with like yaml or the kubernetes side of things they can access workflows there And and you would you would make that available to a URL that they could access and then they could see the logs All the workflows that have ran you can set up workflow archiving So you can save the workflows once they're done And that's yeah, primarily the place where folks who aren't As communities oriented would go The other option is you know running it out of a git repo So if once people are very familiar with like the the workflow definitions either in yaml or in python Like we talked about earlier You can essentially set up git ops triggers to basically use the repo as the source of truth instead of like the ui So on any sort of pull requests Or merge you could then trigger workflows But yeah, you end up going back to either the ui or you go back to the kube cuddle to view the status of the workflows that you're running Yeah, oh, yeah, sorry the argo cli as well. Yeah Does that answer your question as far as that goes and yeah, I think we could happy to talk about more about like larger deployments All right Thanks a lot for coming everybody. Have a great day