Good morning, everybody. We're so glad to have you for the fourth and final session of our four week fall meeting this year from the Illinois P-20 Network. Today's topic is the career pathways. And really we wanna get in and focus on the nuts and bolts of what it takes to actually implement career pathways and career pathway endorsement work in school districts. So we have two school districts comprising our panel today. We've got two staff members, two leaders from Ridgewood High School and two leaders from Lake Zurich High School. I'm gonna have them introduce themselves in just a moment. But very quickly, in Illinois, we've been able to award career pathway endorsements to graduating high school seniors for two years now. This is year three. So the class of 2020 was the first year that was able to be awarded career pathway endorsements. And that year, Ridgewood High School had, and we've got the experts here. I cannot remember if it was four, five or six. Eric, Lisa, how many students do you remember earned? How many? Eight of them. Eight, so I'm way off and now I've got it straight from Eric's mouth. Eight students earned career pathway endorsements that year. And then last year, four additional districts around the state awarded career pathway endorsements. Over the first two years, we've had five districts award career pathway endorsements. A total of 47 students who are now out of high school have earned endorsements. 25 of those have earned career pathway endorsements in human and public services with a focus on education. 17 of those have earned career pathway endorsements in health sciences and technology. And five of those have earned career pathway endorsements in manufacturing, engineering, technology and trade. So I know sometimes, particularly if you're often at conversations around the career pathway endorsements, there can be a feeling among people like, oh, we're behind schedule on this. And the fact is, you're not. Number one, it's not a race. We're all moving at whatever pace we can move within our own school districts and communities and with our community colleges and partners in our communities, industry and business partners. Second of all, these are still very, very early days. And this will take a number of years. I tell the story of a few years ago, two years ago, being in a high school in a large unit district and they had a bulletin board in the CTE hallway with two career pathway course sequences within information technology. And the person I was walking around with said, yeah, those are for our eighth graders. And it was already on a bulletin board in the high school because that's how far out they were having to plan to ensure that teachers could be credentialed to teach dual credit classes, et cetera. So we're so glad you're here to be a part of this conversation. Again, we've got one school district that has offered students endorsements over the last two years. And the other district is on track to have its first group of students earn endorsements this spring, this May and June as they graduate. So with that said, Eric and then Lisa, if I can have you guys introduce yourselves and then Susie and Zach. I'll go first. Eric Lasky, assistant principal at Ridgewood High School, also in charge of career pathways. And I am Lisa Bellata from Ridgewood High School also. I am the director of career pathways and innovative programming here. I'm Susie Wagner here in Lake Zurich. I'm the director of innovation and I oversee our pathway endorsements. I'm Zach Gam, I am the director of curriculum K-12 and I help Susie with pathways. So let's get started by, I'm gonna ask across our two districts, you to tell us about the reasons that you and your districts have decided to invest in career pathway endorsement work. For Ridgewood and one of the misconceptions people sometimes have about me and Lisa as we talk about it, they think, oh, your school actually doesn't need you guys to do the work. Well, and actually, no, we had our jobs and we realized the value of this. And this was like our secondary evening work that we did because really it's about the equity. And we know that if we can provide our students a path to get a, where they can have a well-paying job, either right out of high school or with maybe a year of education, two years or even four years, that that's what we wanted for our students. That's sort of the gap that was missing with that send everybody off to college for your universities and teller. And if I could add, our goal was the 50% of the kids that were not meeting their needs. And we had to figure out a way to meet those needs. And if it took those evenings and weekends, we knew we had to do this for our kids. I think this was an extension of our work regarding capstones in CTE programming. So we had an effort of trying to create some dual credit opportunities for kids in those classes and then the state work, it really helped inform our process a lot regarding what kids could really accomplish and what the work we needed to do to help them get there. So it really helped define our work in a lot of ways and also create opportunities for students that weren't there before. So with that, I'm gonna direct this question specifically to Ridgewood and that you have had students graduate with endorsements each of the past two years. Can you tell us about the pathways in which students have graduated some of the highlights of their experiences both through the core sequences and through the work-based learning experiences. So this is where we want you to brag a little bit about what those students' experiences have been and what we need to be thinking about in other districts to help accomplish those again in either the core sequence or the work-based learning. To say like, if you look back 2020, we actually had six students in our education pathway. Out of those students, three of them earned the endorsement because they met all the requirements. The other three did not get their 60 work-based learning hours, but even though they didn't get, end up earning that career endorsement, five of them right now are in secondary programs to be in education. And I think the best thing about this is through, like they all sort of felt like they knew they wanna be teachers, but through that 60 work-based learning hours, they figured out what grade level they wanted to teach and what subject. And so that was really important thing for them. Another part is we've had a lot of students that actually had the manufacturing engineering technology and trades endorsement. We're fortunate enough to partner with manufacturers in our backyard that they would get the certifications first semester and then second semester, they would do internships with them. And those students, all five students that earned that endorsement were offered full-time jobs by the companies that they were interning with with benefits making a really, so they could be making $780,000 right out of high school. This past year in 2021, we sort of had the same thing. We didn't have as many students earned the education endorsement, but once again, they knew what they're gonna teach, the ones that did. And there's two of them now that are continuing on into college. And same thing with the manufacturing. We had some more earn the manufacturing endorsement offer full-time jobs as well. So Lisa, anything you want to add? Well, just our favorite story, Ricky Ayala that earned his endorsement with autos. He actually advocated for himself during the pandemic. He was so driven by the career endorsement process that he called Triton himself and said, how do I continue these courses? And he ended up actually all by himself during the pandemic completing the career endorsement. So we really like to celebrate him because we feel like he learned advocacy skills through this process. That's awesome. And one of the things we know is a really important part of the career pathway endorsements that we're not diving deeply on today, but we spend a lot of time talking about is the mix of competencies. There's the technical competencies in their career pathway endorsement area that earning the endorsement, they should have demonstrated that they've mastered those technical competencies. And then there's also the cross-sector essential employability competencies which we call the essential skills for short. And obviously Lisa's story right there is a great example of a student really demonstrating that they've mastered those essential skills and we know how important those are. So thanks for sharing that Lisa. Lake Zurich, you guys are on track to have your first group of students graduate with career pathway endorsements this spring in the area of manufacturing, engineering, technology and trades. Can you tell us about some of the behind the scenes work that you've done in two areas over the past year or so? One, working with teachers in the courses and two, communicating with students and their families about the opportunity. Yeah, sure. What we did was at first we had to take a look and see which courses we were offering that were dual credit. So we went through each of those courses and did some data work to identify which students had already taken the course sequences that included those two dual credits. Originally we thought that we were a few years out. We did not expect to be able to award at the end of this year. But surprisingly, as we did that data work, we noticed that we had students that were not only on track but two of our students had already gone through or were currently in the internship. So right there, we knew that we would have at least two students that were already prepared to be on track to get this endorsement in the spring. So we talked to the students over the summer. It was kind of rushed in hindsight. And if we had a little bit more time, I think that we would have done this in more face-to-face rather than through the Zoom communication. But we reached out to those families. We explained what the career pathway endorsements entailed. And the one thing that I think that some of the families got stuck on was that internship component, the 60 hour and how they were going to be able to do that internship when they have sports and after school activities and things like that. So of course it was optional and we had a few students that said, nope, it's not for me. But where we are right now, we have 10, including those two students that were already on track. We met with the teachers. We talked through what team-based challenges might look like. We are really lucky here in Lake Zurich. We have two very strong engineering teachers who already had really strong components of team-based challenges. So we worked with Jason. He came in, sat down with our teachers and us, walked us through the process to take a look at what our current team-based challenges look like and just added in a few more components to ensure that we were getting two of those experiences, which had to happen this year for those students to graduate with this endorsement. So we just finished one of the team-based challenges. We partnered with Baxter, who came in and worked with the students in an in-school field trip for the full day. And we will be debriefing with that team today. They got great feedback from the students. So there will be some shifts and changes made. For example, the students wanted it over a longer period of time rather than in just one day. Also, I'm trying to think of the other communications. The division heads, we did ask them to reach out to those families since they had a relationship with those students and families. From the district office, we thought that it would be more personal to come from them. Yeah, so anything else that you have to add, Zach? I would only say we're now in the process of refining that work that Susie talked about with the teachers in our other areas where we're going to begin the endorsement process for the human public services teaching and then finance and business services and accounting. So the dual credits are in place, and it's a matter now of I'm trying to build in internship opportunities as we can. And we'll talk a little bit later about Beth Slaughter, who's our community development coordinator, who's a huge help in that, but then also working with the teachers, hand in hand with those engineering teachers to kind of inform team-based challenge work and also competency, building competencies in so that we have valuable assessment practices aligned to those competencies that inform what the team-based challenges really will be measuring. One thing I want to just call out real quickly and the intention is not to publicly embarrass both Zach and Beth with praise, but we're going to do that. One of the reasons that Lake Zurich was able to ramp this up much more quickly than they had anticipated was because of years of previous work working with the College of Lake County on dual credit. So there was a number, they were pretty far along with that already. It just so happened that it worked out well where that sat. And then the second is Beth Slaughter, who is on the call today, is in a role where she's already, was already for a couple of years prior to this, a few years prior to this, partnering with community groups. They were doing internships, they just weren't part of a bigger program. And so Beth's already important and highly visible role in the district has taken on an even higher level of importance and visibility as a result of this move to career pathway endorsements, but they did have a couple of critical pieces in place. So if you're looking at this going, whoa, how'd they do that so fast? We wanna be real clear that they had some of those things in the background. And so this can also give us indications as places where districts might start knowing that they might just be building a foundation initially to eventually come back and build it into a career pathway endorsement. So yeah, that's important to know. Susie Zach, anything else you wanna add on that? I just dropped a link in the chat for Elisa. I'm a member of that organization and I have just in terms of dual credit in partnership with community colleges, that partnership has been really fantastic for Lake Zurich and understanding things like the model partnership agreement, what dual credit can be, how we can help facilitate instruction for the teachers to get where they need to go. So if you wanna check that out, it's a really good statewide organization for dual credit. Agreed, just so everybody's clear, the Illinois P2I Network and Elisa partner closely, we actually meet as leadership monthly to keep that dialogue going because there are so many issues that are critical there. With that, I'm gonna drop a question in here for both districts and we'll come back to Joe's question in a couple of minutes. I think it'll come naturally out of a couple of these. But the early college credit course offerings often dual credit could be advanced placement, possibly international baccalaureate. They tend to be included in the career sequences, the career course pathway, career pathway course sequences, excuse me. They do tend to be dual credit, possibly dual enrollment classes. But tell us about the work you've done with your local community colleges and then internally within your own districts to expand dual credit classes and what your timeline has been alongside whatever those processes have been in each of your districts. I could start with that. We started working with Triton quite some time ago. Eric will do better telling you about the timeline. But what I do wanna tell you is that part of our recruitment process started that right now we have three freshman courses that are dual credit. We have our PLTW Physics and Engineering course. We have Intro to Computer Programming and then PE. So our freshmen receive three dual credit classes as of the end of their freshman year. Our PLTW Engineering class and our Intro to Computer Programming class is also one of our recruitment strategies. And by saying that, we then start to learn who are our STEM kids, who are our comp side kids. So we know how to start recruiting them and getting them on board for the next steps. I also wanted to add, I wanted to empathize with Lake Zurich about the internships. You're right, getting that 60 hours when kids have to work, when kids have to do sports after school or activities is hard. We took advantage of the pandemic schedule. We kept our flexible schedule in the afternoon. Our kids are able to do their 60 hours every afternoon if need be. We're super excited because like we said, we have the manufacturing companies in our backyard and we have recently partnered with a rehabilitation center so that all of our health science kids can also do the same in the afternoons to provide that equity for those kids that have to work after school or to do their sports. You know, Lisa, can you talk, I was hoping Ridgewood could talk a little bit about this because that's one of the things I really like about the way you've structured it. And one of the challenges that we have faced is in the creation of the pathways. Your organization of essentially two pathways is opposed to even the seven from 16 is helpful. The state of Illinois has gone to the seven endorsement areas but I really like how you have structured it. And so there's two. Could you talk a little bit about that? Oh, okay. So how we did our two pathways and then everything falls underneath it. So our career endorsements though are still, we still base it on the state, you realize that. But that work came from the fact that we took all those clusters and we said, where did they bust it in?  So we knew we couldn't provide all the offerings. So by doing that, we can generalize our electives and say, if you're on that arts and sciences pathway, these are the electives that would be good for you. If you're on the business and talk pathway, these are the ones that would be good for you. We can share our presentation of what our breakdowns look like if you'd like. I can send that to you. Yeah, that would be great because that's one of the challenges, you know, when we started early college and I talked about how we felt we had capstones for the core areas in AP, but you know, what about a student engineering or business? And so we built in the dual credits there. But then when we started thinking about pathways, it became a lot more complicated in terms of thinking about, well, how do the core curriculum classes fit with the electives to create these pathways because there's so many variables. And that's why I really wanted to point out the work that you've done, because it feels like that's really a good way to go because if you create fewer pathways in a sense, it becomes easier for students and guidance counselors to help support those choices because sometimes it's like a analysis, you know, paralysis because there's just so many potential pathways there. How do you figure it out? It's too much. One of the ways we did that too is our integrated math and science model. So on integrated science, we do have like a more health science related one. And then we have a foods and cultures one. So kind of breaking it down that way, which is also of course separated from our distinguished scholars pathway. We still do the traditional honors and AP, you know, a pathway. We will send you all those things I see in the chat. People want to get ahold of those. We are more than happy to share with you. I really appreciate that. And yeah, just to kind of circle back to one of Jason's questions. The part, if you haven't reached out to your partner community college, that would be one of the first things I would recommend is because they are going to be really instrumental in helping you navigate teacher certification credentialing as well as your HR department and your division heads and the teachers themselves will let you know what credentials they have and are able to teach dual credit. And there is a difference between CTE and core. So I look, talking to your community college partner about those credentials and needs are just going to be really important. I'm going to jump, go ahead, Eric. Sorry. I'm going to say in the hiring practice, we changed probably about five years ago where we wanted to make sure we want, like all our business teachers are dual credit or computer science teacher has master in dual credit. So it's really too about your hiring practice and you're looking to hire. Great point. So as everybody can see, there's a lot wrapped up in just this dual credit piece. And this is certainly a place where districts can get started.  One question that popped in that's a little bit related to this because I think so much of our traditional middle school and high school math curriculum has been related to actually either what students need or the perception of what students need in a four year university setting. And so Amy Jo's question is, how has the pathways impacted your traditional math pathway? And if it hasn't at this point, are there, I'm going to add, are there conversations about it impacting your traditional math pathway? It has. And we, you know, it really comes down to now with the three different transitional math courses, which one, you know, by freshman software year, we almost try to figure out where is there any goal in which direction do they need to go in? So some of the students that maybe struggle with math a little bit more, we realize, all right, here's where they're starting, here's where they need to end in order to get into the career pathway of their choice. So that is actually having those transitional math options, the STEM, quantitative literacy stats and attack has really helped us to develop math pathways for each of those careers. What about, what about for a student who is performing well or very well in math, who traditionally was going to have that capstone of maybe an AP calculus, AB or an AP calculus, BC? Has this had an impact on maybe what their math sequence has looked like? And if not now, is there conversation around that? No, like the ones, the way you look at it, if the students going through that pathway and they're taking calculus, they're gonna learn whatever the math they need for that career. So those students, I feel like, no, we're not gonna really touch those, we're gonna let them go. We may say, oh, you might wanna be taking computers, maybe an AP computer science course along with a calculus, but it's more of those students that, they don't really like, you could tell that the math takes a little bit more time for them to get. So, and instead of putting them into a second intervention to get in that math support, we'd rather have that second class be a class that they enjoy, a class that they're passionate about that's gonna lead to their pathway. Great, thank you. Lake Sirke, did you guys have anything you wanted to add to that? Well, it's interesting because Susan, I had an opportunity to go be sharks for our MX Inc. students in middle school. And one of the big takeaways was how unprepared students were to do the mathematics in, as it relates to pricing and the percentages based on a profit and things like that. And we've had some beginning conversations about how that kind of work can inform mathematics instruction in the sequence of a student's education. Yeah, we've also recognized the need for those solid foundational skills starting at the elementary level. So we are starting in the fall with bringing in PLTW, the computer science strand. We're going to be bringing that into kindergarten for second and third and fourth grade to really start and understanding computer science at the basic level and then they transitioning into middle and high school. So we're really looking at pathways while the pathway endorsements live at the high school, we're really looking at strands that go all the way from elementary, middle and high to make sure that our students have that foundation so that they don't get stuck in the situation that we just saw last week in Mix Inc. where it was taking them, they felt they had to slow everything down to build that foundation of understanding the mathematics behind it. So we're also in the process of a math curriculum review right now where we will be taking all of these lessons learned and things and working backwards to make sure that we adopt the right resource and we provide our teachers with the right training to really ensure that our students are ready to go. So before I got back to Joe's question about kind of the backend keeping track of everything we're doing and student information systems, other pieces of software, different departments within a district, et cetera. I wanna ask this question because it relates to stuff that Eric, Zach and Susie have all talked about in the last couple of minutes. And that's the question we'll sometimes hear from parents in particular and actually at times from teachers as well. Wait, wait, wait. You want students to pick what they're gonna do when they're 14 years old. How do you respond to that question given some of what we've just talked about with middle school students and ninth and 10th graders? What does that look like in your district and how do you communicate proactively if you have to try and prevent that question or to answer it really ahead of time, and not prevent it? What do you think? New things, I can start to answer that one. Career exploration, right? We use some of our Perkins money to help our middle schools and start the Manzello that was formerly career cruising to start the career exploration much earlier. But when they come to their freshman year that whole year is based on career exploration. So they do a large project-based learning, a research project. They have a supplemental one in sophomore year, junior year, and again in senior year. So the career exploration never stops. The answer to your question, though, is yes, that question comes. It does come often, which is one of the reasons why we like the two broad career pathways. By having those broad career pathways, we are not essentially asking a kid to pick a career. Let's be honest, we don't know what some of these careers are going to be when they graduate high school. What we're asking them to do is think about an area. And as you also well know, sometimes them finding out what they don't wanna do is also about a return on investment. So we use that argument as well. And then- So that's, go ahead, sorry. As I say, that's the message to our parents is we want them to pick when they're 14 and they can experience it without them cost-scanning money rather than trying to pick it when they're 18 and now it's starting to cost them a lot more. And then to answer one of the questions in the chat, we use our advisory, all our students in our advisory when they do the career exploration. And then it is an English one project in early December where now they actually will do the research on that pathway and they actually do a presentation in their English class. And then in their integrated math class, they actually do a project as well that looks at return on investment and how many years of education, what is it gonna cost? What are the salaries? So they actually it's embedded in a few different areas freshman year. And if they pick up a dual credit or two along the way that transfers into the school they wanna go to all the better. Yeah, one of the things we keep talking about in conversations I'm in both at the district level and at the state level is the notion that measuring this accurately, the impact, the success of career pathway endorsements is actually really complicated. On the one hand, the easy part is the data I gave everybody at the beginning. This is how many students have earned endorsements. This is what areas they've earned endorsements in and I think and hope we'll be able to watch that go up. The tricky part is when we have a student who decides before their internship they've had enough work-based learning experiences they've had enough course experiences that were really good and they like them but they do not wanna do this for a career. And that is a success as well because we're helping that student hopefully giving them opportunities to explore something else or at least have conversations about that. But that's a hard success to measure, to quantify as we move forward. And so it's important that all of us that are advocating for these things are continuing to bring that up as well. Before we move on, I wanna hit one of Joe's questions and that is how are you celebrating the students who earn career pathway endorsements? Lake Zurich, this is more about what are you thinking that's gonna look like Ridgewood? Obviously we've had two unusual end of senior years so far for this. So you may have different ideas about what this will look like in the future. We've also, I wanna acknowledge how the situation where is be has been figuring out their own systems and they've made a lot of progress with that. I mean, last year, it wasn't until mid to late April that school districts could enter their information for who was gonna earn an endorsement. That's already open now and so that's available. And once you've entered it, while you have to update that information every year with what your team-based challenges are where your students are doing internships, it really is not a reapplication process for a school district for an existing already approved endorsement. It's an updating process to keep the data that ISB has up to date. So that's gonna look a lot different on ISB side of things as well as they work through things on their end. So with that said, what is celebrating students who earn endorsements look like for you guys? Ridgewood, do you guys wanna jump us off on that one? Yeah, three things we do. We announce them at our senior award banquet at the end of the year. They get a cord that they wear at graduation and then they are all listed on our website. So if you go to our score website, you'll see all the names of the kids that earn endorsements. Awesome. Lakezerk, do you have any ideas about that? Well, we just started this conversation during our CNI and BLT meeting with the high school.  But we really think it's very important we do celebrate these students. So we did throw around the idea of having a cord for graduation. I love the way that you put them on your website, Ridgewood. We've taken a look at that. I think that that's a great way to really promote those students, but we're still in the conversations. So we're definitely open to ideas of how to share, but we're gonna work with our high school to really try to think of a good way that works with our district. Zach, what do you think? I'll just echo what you said there and also parallel however school districts recognize students who earn the seal of biliteracy. I think this will probably take a very similar path. That's awesome, Zach. Thank you for making that comparison. When I start conversations with people who are unfamiliar with the career pathway endorsements and some of you have heard me say this before, I almost always started with the seal of biliteracy. And so I think that's reasonable. I did just drop in the chat a link to a tweet from Jerry Cook from a week ago, I guess already. Jerry's the principal at Wheeling High School and they put up a new board each year and they're not actually putting up the endorsements I don't believe specifically on there, but they are putting up industry credentials on that board along with, I mean, they've always had a high honors graduate space. And when I say always, I mean literally going back to the 60s in the building. And so this is another idea that's similar and certainly what they have on the left or they could shrink the middle and certainly start putting up their students earning pathway endorsements in addition to the industry credentials. So I wanna hit on a couple of other things that have come up in the chat. First of all, we had the other question from Joe which is how are you keeping track of this? And I'm gonna work hard to keep my mouth shut because I have a lot of ideas about this after 10 years of leading instruction and technology and doing a lot with assessment about what I think are the most efficient, easiest ways to do this. But Ridgewood and Lake Zurich, can you guys jump in and tell us how do you keep track of this and manage students kind of the collection of data through the career pathway endorsement process, please. We use a really sophisticated program called Excel to document. Right now where we're at is just recording what students have completed in terms of their classwork, their internship hours and then the team-based challenges. There's the tool that the state has provided that Excel spreadsheet also allows for a little more detail as you upload information to the portal. But then I would also say that whatever tool schools are using for CCRI reporting because if students earn the pathway endorsement then they're automatically college and career ready independent of all the other metrics on that reporting tool. Ridgewood for now is doing the same. We've invested a lot of time and money in other platforms that promised us they'd be able to track this and it turns out they can't. I don't want to say anything positive or negative but we are exploring other places to try to find that. So one- Eric, can you share which platforms you sort of have looked at? Just because I have been in discussions with at least one and it sounds amazing. I'm just interested on where people are going. We have 26,000 students K-12. So when we do release this I gotta have a plan moving forward for when this gets bigger and having 20 students a year when we start is gonna be okay but when it's a thousand plus it's gonna be a nightmare. So let me jump in and say this so that to take Eric off the spot because we can certainly have and I've been wanting to do this for two years to have separate conversations around just this topic and it would be great to have all of you with EdTech and data folks also at conversations like that. Couple of things. First of all, starting with instruction. I think when we do the team-based challenges as part of courses it's got a couple of benefits. Number one benefit is in courses that maybe are not as authentic and particularly as we get outside of CTE and into some of the core areas when we do move into those spaces having teachers and students together experience what a team-based challenge or a problem-based learning unit can really look like can be pretty transformational for instruction and assessment broadly within our schools. And so that to me is a great benefit. There are certainly co-curricular activities that can fulfill the requirements of a team-based challenge and there's nothing wrong with doing it but from an equity perspective if I've got students moving through a course sequence already having them do the team-based challenge as part of the courses is awesome. Number one and number two, again if it can further improve instruction and move our building further towards authentic learning that's a benefit. Number three, coming back to Joe's question if I know all the students who have completed that course successfully have participated in that team-based challenge I have one less thing to keep track of. I do believe that most of the keeping track of this can be done within our student information systems. And I'm going to call out three here particularly given the number of school districts in Illinois using either Skyward Infinite Campus or Power School it starts to make it easier to support solutions within those three student information systems. Now, not everybody's using those three and that's okay but I think in most given my experience with most student information systems that's placed to start there are a lot of products out there promising to do a lot of things in this space. And those may be options also we're certainly not at a point where we're where we're promoting any particular product but this is a great conversation that we can offer support to having more of. So we'll loop some people together including you Joe and we'll follow up with that for some upcoming additional conversations around that. With that said, I want to give a shout out to IWIN and we've also done videos on specifically on building partnerships for work-based learning. And if you're not familiar with IWIN we'll include a link when we share a follow-up from today so that you can take advantage of that IWIN is the Illinois Work-Based Learning Innovation Network so specifically focused on work-based learning topics real quickly on this one from both districts what have been the keys to establishing partnerships within your communities? But what are the quick things you would say to help get people started and I'll just establish if a district can afford to hire someone like Beth who is responsible for that that's always a great way to do it and Lisa certainly take advantage of that Beth's keeping herself very busy. So beyond hiring a position what are some other keys to create those partnerships? One thing that we found we don't have anybody designated to this. We found that going to those chamber of commerce lunches actually helped us establish some partnerships. Another big one when for us was the Rotary Club. We were able to establish partnerships that way from there, we not worked. We cold call, we email, we invite them to see our facility we invite them to have donuts and coffee and talk about what we wanna do and it's worked. It's worked. We are now ready to launch our health science pathway next semester as the pilot based on just the way we've done it. It was the same for manufacturing. It was the same for education. And I guess for Lake Zurich we are lucky enough to have Beth in the role that she is in. She goes out of her way day in and day out to network get to know members of the community, chamber, the Rotary, all sorts of events and cold calling, emailing, dropping off flyers anything to connect with community members. And I know that not many districts have that opportunity to hire somebody in that position but we do definitely see as this process goes on how even more needed that position is to manage all of this work because her work goes beyond internships now and it's much, much bigger. So we are very lucky to have you, Beth. Thank you for all you do. I would just add too, I'm just gonna ask Beth if it's okay Jason to talk about the consortium that she's invited people to because I think that's been a really good place for conversation and maybe anybody here interested who wants to join that conversation as well. Beth, can you talk about that? Sure, so I basically invited Lake County, excuse me, area district representatives to come together. We meet monthly the first Friday of the month and really too we started kicking this off with focusing on specifically that internship piece best practices how just anything and everything around what we're currently doing, idea sharing, forms. So we have a Google drive where we share documents. We've expanded that to all college and career readiness indicators and looking at how we're doing data collection what that kind of forward facing report looks like how we can impact those numbers really just a great group effort. We've got probably at least I'd say 10 area districts participating the more the merrier. So if you'd like to join us our next meeting will be December the third it's gonna be hosted at Mundelein High School. So we're gonna rotate within the district's hosting and we all build the agenda items together take notes and just share and collaborate. And I think one of the reasons it's valuable is because just as we're having this conversation every district is in a different position and as it relates to internships they've got a different process they use the scheduling is different. And so just a place to talk through that and understand what's best practice is really valuable. One of the things I'll jump in and add we're so lucky to have people from across the state here today and we have some other people that I know are gonna be watching this video early next week as soon as it's on YouTube who are not here today from literally end to end across the state north to south and east to west. And so if you're hearing what Beth's talking about and you're like, hey, we're hours and hours and hours away from Lake County we're not coming to join that meeting but we wanna start something like that here that's a conversation that we're happy to help facilitate that's central to the idea of the Illinois P-Twin Network. So feel free to contact me after we can connect you with Beth to also have some conversation there about starting it and we can certainly help you think about how you organize that and try and support that in a bunch of different ways for you regionally. So thank you Beth for sharing that. So I'm gonna shift gears now and ask Ridgewood a couple of questions. I'm actually gonna add a third. So first of all, Eric and Lisa what would you say has been one of the secrets to your success thus far with regards to the career pathway endorsements? I think when we started the really one of the main key to our success is we start out with being a competency school and I see Mary Reynolds on this call and without her we never got that far she guide us to that. But then as we realized and we, by going to a lot of professional development on companies education we realized that career pathway and that's when we started seeing Jason at a lot of conferences and John Furrer and hearing them talk and realize well this ties into it. And then instead of saying that we are a competency education school we said no we're a PWR school. They all go together if you wanna give our students the best future and that's sort of how we now branded ourselves. So I'm gonna go back to something from Ridgewood that you talked about earlier and that's the schedule. Can you talk to everybody a little bit because that's something I brag about is what Ridgewood does with their schedule because we know how hard it is especially in an equitable way to work in work-based learning experiences for students. And the schedule alone is not the only barrier to work-based learning experiences but it's a big one for most high schools and most school districts. Can you talk to us a little bit more about what your schedule actually looks like so people watching this can understand oh this is what a day in the life of a Ridgewood student or teacher might look like and that's different than what it looks like here maybe in our own school district. It looks a lot different Jason and I have to be honest with you we are still selling it to a lot of our teachers so I don't want you to think it's easy by any means to change something like this. We're not heroes, we're just, we're pioneers like the rest of you. So what we do is we have an alternating block schedule so the kids receive their block hour long classes in the mornings from eight till 12 and it rotates every other day. And then in the afternoons, we have a flip of flex time and lunch. Flex time is a time where students are able to get enrichment activities, things like robotics. They are able to get remediation time, differentiate for math, for English, for whatever they need, whatever their needs are and then or they can actually have time to maybe explore a new hobby. For example, if teachers are willing to give that. In the afternoon's done, we have these skinny periods where teachers can use it for extended AP time, they could use it for a Socratic seminar time, that kind of thing. But it also then allows us the afternoons for these internships, for these classes at Triton that are on campus classes, for these extended classes at Triton like autos that takes hours for the kids to go to the grade schools and do their observations. So those afternoons, a kid can be gone from 12 to three o'clock based on our schedule if that's what they need. So it's really different. So that is, and I really appreciate Lisa talking about how hard it is because I don't wanna pretend like any of this work is easy. All change work in schools is hard and takes a lot of time and we'll have setbacks along the way. So that's a great call out, but it's also really great to be able to plant a flag at certain places and say, well, this is what this can look like and how it can benefit students. Are there benefits for teachers, Lisa or Eric, would you say in that schedule? Eric doesn't wanna say. I think there are benefits for teachers. And some of our teachers have said so. They like having extended time with their kids in the afternoon. Our math teachers, especially champion this, they use that time to reach their students that need extra help. They also use it for project-based learning time. So a teacher might not actually be teaching. They would just be facilitating time for kids to collaborate and work in groups. I know our engineering teachers are loving it because they have all this time now to actually finish projects that kids wanna do choice projects. They can do their laser printing at that time. They could do their 3D printing. So a lot of teachers are loving this. Some, not so much, but we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. Well, I think that's a topic that we could dive into separately because schedules are so, time is such a A, a tradition in our schools and B, really creates some parameters. How many times have we all probably experienced as students a science lab that took place over two days when there was no instructional reason for that, it was because that was just how long it took. And so these are really thorny issues. Last question for Ridgwood in this little section and then we're gonna bop over to Lake Zurich before we finish up. What's one thing you would do differently based on what you know now when you look back a couple of years with your initial implementations with the career pathway endorsements? So, as we're learning new things or we're seeing different ways to do it, we talk about these platforms and stuff. We're seeing so many more newer ideas and how we can really, it's really about evolving around experiences for students and how we could integrate. We feel like we need to have a little bit more integration of like our English and math courses with a lot of these pathways works. So while we had some stuff in place and then we started doing career pathway work, it might have been nice, and you can't really, we have some great stuff in place. You don't wanna get rid of it. So it's really just rethinking how we have the whole day set up and maybe doing a little bit more cohorts, especially with our freshmen, maybe starting the having them pick careers maybe in seventh, eighth grade and now freshman year is more of a cohort year where all the math, the English, the science is related to their pathway work and then they can choose to stay in it or they can move to a different one. So that's sort of like the direction we're hoping to move and maybe we wish we were to start with. Awesome, thank you. And Lake Zurich, less than a year ago, I don't know that you were really talking about this.  I think you're about 10 months into these conversations and you've got team-based challenges happening and internships happening. What supports have been most helpful to you in your initial work and implementation of the career pathway endorsements? Well, I can just kick that off. Honestly, the partnership with you, Jason, has been absolutely instrumental. We had some ideas. We were looking around at other districts, but many districts were doing things differently. Some of them had pathways outlined, but they weren't directly tied to an ISB pathway endorsement. So really understanding what the pathway endorsement entailed, working alongside Jason, has been absolutely instrumental. It was really good for our teachers to see an outside entity come in and speak with them as well. For some reason, I think that they just, they see somebody from the outside as they really have that background. Jason has done this with quite a few districts. So the trust was already there. And really working with us through this process in our initial year, helping us to make sure that we weren't making missteps. And while it's still very fresh, and I'm sure that the way that we started wasn't the way that if we, in retrospect, that we would do that again. It's definitely been helpful, just having somebody to pick up the phone and ask a question. Are we on the right track? Did we look at this in the right way? So that was really important. Anything else to add, Zach, with things that help? I will just echo what you said about Jason without a doubt. Being able to work with a really collaborative group, starting with P20, and then seeing the work that Ridgewood has done has been super helpful. The one thing I would also add is we began our process based on the existing courses that we had. One thing, if we were gonna start from scratch, I might, and this would probably help with internships, is look around the community for industry needs. What does our community really need? And so I think that that would help in terms of the creation of pathways and career pathway endorsements and internship partners and things like that. And that's, I think we did that in a, after the fact, where we didn't start with that, may have been helpful. Yeah, and I think that we did what we had to do. So we knew that once we found that they were students that were so incredibly close, we didn't have the luxury of waiting, and nor did we want to. Our kids deserved this, and so we had to speed up that process. But as we're moving forward, now we can take a look at that, right? Once we were able to slow things down after we get through the next two, I think that that's really gonna become quite a big part of the way that we begin this process. Finally, finishing up for either of both districts, any of you, five years from now, what do you either think or hope career pathway endorsements or career pathways work will look like in high schools in Illinois? Well, I'll answer because I've thought about this a lot. When I got to like Zirk, there was no seal of biliteracy. Process and nor were there any dual credits, right? And so the seal of biliteracy framework and foundation had already been established in the state. It's recognized by colleges and universities and also employers as a real and a valuable credential or identifier for a student on their transcript. And I really believe in five years we'll see something similar with the pathway endorsement and that may even carry a little more weight in terms of employability than the seal will. And I would like to see it grow also in terms of recognition for post-secondary work for students too. I think that's where it's the trajectory. Thanks, Zach, anybody else? Yeah, in five years, here's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping that these conversations are just as exciting as when we say what colleges our kids are going to. I wanna also see t-shirts that show what career pathway endorsement that they've achieved because I think that's where the celebration needs to come in. And for us at Ridgewood in five years, I'm hoping we could say that 100% of our seniors have at least one career pathway endorsement. I know that's been Eric and I, that's our goal. Five years, we could do it in five years, Eric. We got enough left in us. And I think it becomes more of a heightened issue for college-bound students as well. Well, now maybe this is a requirement to get into certain colleges as you must have this endorsement and this experience. Yeah, and even beyond universities and colleges, I would really like to see industries and businesses instantly see that they have this stamp on their diploma and they already know what competencies these students are coming to them with and that they recognize it and promote that. Oh, we're looking for students that have this. I know that some of our families, they're wondering what's in it, what is in it? What do they get out of this at this point? And I hope that that won't even be a question in five years. I hope that everyone will just know what these students are bringing to the table and they will be considered first for jobs, possibly entry into different universities and college programs. So, yeah, I have high hopes. Well, I wanna thank all of our panelists and everybody else who joined us live. There's so much going on around the state. And again, it is early days. This is not a race. Please don't say to yourself as we finish this up, oh, why aren't we here yet? But rather say to yourself, okay, what's our next step here? And we've heard a lot of different options for next steps. We've certainly given me a little bit of additional homework and we look forward to continuing to engage everyone across Illinois in this conversation. And the most exciting days, of course, for some of us personally are the days that we're able to be in schools, seeing this actually happening and we can't wait to be in each of your schools. So thank you to our panelists and thank you to all of you who are here with us today.


is that good? Cool. Let's get started. I'm Jason Peele, Network Architect, work for Network Thought Co. That's pretty much it. We're going to talk about Cypherpunk grade covert network channels and we'll start off with the scenario here. Let's say that MI6 in the UK is developing a new clandestine messaging system and they've got field agents out, you know, secret ops say in China and they want to take advantage of the power of the internet instead of every time you know, risking someone's life to sneak a suitcase out to somebody or you know, micro fish inside a cigarette to exchange messages, they want to use the internet. But they need secrecy beyond plausible deniability that this person is even interacting in this network. This attempts to provide something like that. In principle, this idea sounds impossible, you know, okay. We have to assume that we've got a very well resourced Eve who has full access to all network traffic both between these two hosts that are trying to communicate as well as behind them if they're routers or something like this and they can launch passive attacks, active attacks, whatever. But it turns out there may be ways that we can still entirely covertly exchange data between these two parties. This presentation is about an idea that's still very much a work in progress. It's a library implementation. Lots of proof of concept code has already been generated but there's still a lot of things that need to be worked out or agreed on. So I'm going to make this kind of informal. I want to have plenty of time for question and answers afterwards. So you can hit me with your hardest questions and I'll try to answer them and maybe not. And we might take it offline and we might make the implementation better. So here it goes. What Cloak and Dagger is, that's what this is called, it's called Cloak and Dagger. It's a library implementation that can be used by privacy applications such as Nutella I mean it's peer-to-peer, but in a mojo nation, PGPnet, FreeNet, Crowds, MixMaster, what have you, CryptoBox. And it's to be used as a glue such that if these applications wanted to integrate Cloak and Dagger functionality into it, the user could turn on something like Ultra Paranoid mode and all traffic between two parties using this would be entirely undetectable that these two parties were even communicating clandestinely. We want these parties to not even be identifiable as using CryptoBox or whatever. Essentially, all such privacy application traffic looks just like it mimics identically other less, you know, more sensor acceptable protocols. Just agree on a couple of terms here. Generally, the phrase cypherpunk grade generally means that the thing that it describes is extreme.  Okay. This implementation is not yet cypherpunk grade, just to, you know, belay here the extremists are going to say, you're calling this cypherpunk grade. It's not cypherpunk grade yet. We're eventually hoping that we can claim that for real. But it's getting close. Okay. So we've got an MI6 agent out in China. He's undercover, very undercover. He's already suspect. He's already being watched very, very closely. All of his network traffic is being monitored, et cetera. Okay. The first step is via traditional means, whatever that is in the spy business. We get him or her or whatever.  Very much ideally for this to work bandwidth efficiently, for this not to be incredibly slow, that box needs to be sitting where it's got access to a lot of local network traffic, a lot of like, you know, in a colo, as a router, something like this. Otherwise there's not going to be enough stuff for it to manipulate and hide within. We're assuming some fundamental things about the operating system that this is sitting on. It's got to be secured. For example, it needs to have anti-promisc detection, such that, you know, we're going to be sniffing traffic. I mean, not to be able to have it be detected that it's doing that. We also have to assume that it can't be compromised. Yeah. Okay. Basic assumptions. So our MI6 agent gets this box with this application on it. He brings it up in this environment that we specified. And what happens is local traffic sampling begins immediately. What we're doing is we're trying to find traffic patterns. We're looking for protocols used, who's using them, the distributions of their usage, just traffic patterns in general. We're also looking for analyzing, keeping track of payload language data. If our payloads all around us are in Chinese, we don't want to start using payloads in Russian or English or something like this. The sites that are visited, websites, things like that. If we're somewhere where certain sites would be forbidden to be visited, we don't want our application payload data to be visiting these sites. So if we're in Malaysia, we want to be visiting sites like pc.jarring.my, not something in Russian or something like that. Just basic sense stuff. So we start sampling local traffic immediately, and we also immediately generate our PK pair. Each side has generated a PK pair at this point. Once we've determined that we've sampled enough local traffic for it to be statistically significant, we've got patterns built, and we think that that's enough to begin action. We need to exchange our PK pair. For this initial exchange, the symmetric key, this can basically be a one-time pad. Well, it's not, it's a symmetric key, but we have to assume the security that's shared between the two pairs you're going to be communicating there. The symmetric key is used as input to a hash function that determines from a list of protocols that we've, protocol forms that we've determined that we think are ubiquitous. So if we think that ICMP traffic or certain forms of talent traffic are ubiquitous, that no matter what network environment we're in, those are safe. There's going to be a much more limited number of protocol forms, not just protocols, but what fields we use within those protocols, the kind of data that can be in the payloads. There's going to be a much more limited list of what those protocol forms can be. But from that list that are ubiquitous, we've got a hash function keyed to those protocols. The symmetric key is used as input to that. And what it outputs is the protocols, fields, sentinel values, and timing information that we're going to use for our initial exchange. I'll go into that more later. For this exchange, the symmetric key is also used to encrypt the public key, so that even if they were to determine what these positions were, we're still encrypting the public key. Obviously, we have to show the security of that. It's public, public. In this case, it's not really public. It's just public to our shared peer. Using the information generated from the aforementioned hash, the contact is initiated with a peering host. Public keys are exchanged. Each peer, okay, okay, hold on. The way that public keys are exchanged is we've got these protocol forms and there are certain fields that we've identified as being manipulatable. We can change things there. Okay, for example, we've done this local traffic sampling and we know that within an IP header TOS field, there's certain values that are statistically distributed certain ways. We can use those fields in the statistical distribution that we've determined and shared key, here's another function of the shared key. The shared key is broken up into blocks. Say we haven't determined what these block size will be. Say 100 characters, whatever per block. When it's input into the hash function, and this is the initial hash function here that's just used for the exchange of PK keys and then local traffic data, when it's input into the hash function, the hash function, and this is shared, realize, so both sides are doing this at the same time. The hash function outputs what protocols are going to be used next, what fields we can use with them, those protocols, what sentinel values are going to be used for each instance of using those fields, what timing information, how long we should delay, which ones we should pad, which ones we should chop, that sort of thing. And because both sides are in tune to the same information, they're generating the same thing from the same, they've got the same hash function, they've got the same symmetric key, both sides are going to be in tune to this data, so I can use that to generate traffic and they're going to be listing on that to pick it up. Okay. The next thing we have to do is we have to exchange traffic pattern data. We've exchanged keys. Okay, question. Because symmetric key is only going to be used initially to, the symmetric key isn't generally used for encryption. We use it initially just to encrypt the public keys, but thereafter the symmetric key is used just to generate the hash or as an input to the hash to generate the next protocols and templates to the next protocol forms that we're going to be using. It's possible that we could use the same thing, but in various discussions we decided that it was more secure this way. I don't know. We could talk about it offline. So we have to exchange traffic pattern data. Both sides have been doing this local traffic sampling now for X amount of time. It might be a week, it might be a month, it might be a year. We're not going to stop, we're not going to move on to the next step until we've determined that we've got enough traffic that we can go ahead and start communicating securely. We know what patterns around us look like. So now I compress all this data down to the most important bits, the traffic pattern data that my side has generated and I send it to my peer. He does the same to me using the same system that we've just discussed for exchanging the PK keys. Each side then diffs the other peer's copy of their local traffic data and my copy and we decide on lowest common denominator and then that's what we're going to use initially for that's going to be an input to a separate hash function, very similar but a separate hash function that determines at any given time what protocols we're actually going to use and what timing information. Question. We're only at this point using protocols that we think are ubiquitous. Right, so we might only be using a very small number of forms but at this point we don't have a lot of data exchanged so it's fine at this point. So anyway, we then diff the two traffic pattern sets, decide on lowest common denominator, now that's the input for a new hash function and now we're ready to begin actually exchanging messages. Okay. Okay. Sure. Arp spoof it, use Mac off, something, you're going to have to get that's going to be noticed. Yeah, that's why it's set up as a rule that you've got to be somewhere. That's generally not advisable. We want this to be as passive as possible because anything like that could then be detected. So we're making it, it's an assumption that has to be there already that we're sitting where we can see a lot of traffic without doing anything special. That might be a hard assumption but that's really the only way that this is going to work. We'll stay passive, that's the thing, we'll stay, right, we don't want to do anything active there to get more traffic, we really don't. So we're on switch environment or as a router where we've got a lot of things going past us. Okay. So here's how it works. Now that we've got this new, okay, sure, I'll do that. Okay, question. To get symmetric keys sent back to them, well, that's possible if we could exchange pk out of bound, that would be ideal. Does that answer your question? Sorry, I didn't even repeat the question. But yes, okay. Here's how we hide data within the protocols. With this other hash function that we've tuned to our lowest common denominator traffic pattern data, we bring in symmetric keys input and both sides are doing this and we determine, say, okay, the next packet that's going to go out is going to be RDP and we're going to, these are the possible fields that we can manipulate and we can possibly change and it'll still be fine, it'll be normal within our traffic distributions. And this is the timing information, this is how long we want to stay, this is how much, you know, where we want to chop this message. These are the sentinel values for each field and each iteration, again, based on the hash value, will determine a new sentinel value. So for example, again, going back to the TOS field in the IP header. On a particular iteration, we might determine that it's an 8-bit field out of the last four bits, only one can be set at any given time to one. So we might say the last four bits are 0100 and that's our sentinel value for that iteration, for that field. So we've determined these things. So I start going through the possible fields that I can manipulate and I come to the first one, I pull off a byte off my queue, the first byte that I'm trying to send, you know, sending the secret word and if I can put it in that field and there'll be a valid value within our local traffic patterns, then I'll go ahead and put it there. If I can't, I place the sentinel value there. Both sides are keyed to the same thing, so the other side can look and if there's that sentinel value there, it just skips over to the next possible field that I can use. This should be really obvious, or it should start to be becoming obvious, but this is like bandwidth intensive, I mean, for every couple of megs we send across, we're just sending a couple of bytes across that we're actually going to... So this is intended only for the algebra, this is only intended for the extreme case where you use this medium and you absolutely cannot afford to be detected, you know, you might die, you might get killed, whatever. And we're not going to send traffic across, you know, again, until we feel that it's safe to do so. We're going to match local distributions, we don't want to significantly affect local traffic pattern distributions. Another thing, we're completing full sessions here, like we don't want to just, you know, send a send and then we move on to another protocol, whatever. Every time we complete full sessions within the protocol we're emulating. And we're also fully authenticating and handshaking and checking the data that we do send across. They're going to send it back to us, verify it or send checksums or something like that. That hasn't been decided on, those are all implementation details that we'd easily figure out later. But there are full handshakes, full sessions are completed every time. And then we move to a different protocol. And so basically, we might be, if we're in an environment where there's a lot of traffic going through and we might, you know, every millisecond we're switching to a different protocol, finishing a session. That session might take a long time to finish, like, you know, we'll already moved on to a different protocol but we're still finishing the first one, things like that. And the other side is key to the exact same data so they know where to be, where to receive the next bits, they know what fields we're going to be manipulating and they can pull those bits off. But otherwise it's going to be like a normal session of that protocol type. Here's a little, a little ugly thing where it makes this implementation really tough to do. And this stuff I haven't implemented yet and it's going to take forever. It's going to make this application massive. The thing is, okay, one, we've got to speak all these protocols. But two, an active attacker could say, well, okay, you're speaking, you're speaking RDP, let me try to talk RDP to you. So you have to be able to talk RDP to you. So all of a sudden you've got to have full implementations of every protocol that you want to use. That gets really massive. Otherwise the other option I guess would be act like you've got a firewall in place, some sort of filtering, you know, apple set such that you're only doing RDP with this IP address. But what if the attacker spoofed that IP address then you've still got to talk RDP with them. So that makes it really tough. There's one other little gotcha here. The one noticeable thing is that people monitoring traffic would all of a sudden see these two hosts who either weren't communicating at all before or, you know, very little, are all of a sudden communicating on all these protocols a whole lot just between these two hosts. That's certainly an anomaly. There's not a really easy solution to that except wait a long time before you send more data to that host so it really isn't that much more, you know. Or, I mean, you could always spoof traffic that you send and then spoof it to you and you'd sniff it off the wire or you'd spoof it sending it to an address that isn't your peer but that they can sniff off the wire. But again, that could be detectable. That could be detected by a well-resourced because if they could compromise the hosts that you spoofed it to and determine that they didn't really pick that up or that they didn't initiate the connection then that could be detected. So that's not really recommended either. We're looking into doing some sort of, you know, crowds-like system to where there's actually a whole chain of remixing that's happening. So you don't always have to communicate with the same host but you communicate with other hosts and then they eventually forward the traffic back. But right now we don't have a good way to do that. If we do it, if we just did that at face value, like something like what Mixmaster might do or something like that, then somewhere these centralized remixing hosts are going to have to have the IP addresses of us and then therefore they would know that we're communicating we're part of this client as a network and we can't. We can't work under that. That's not set for among great assurances. So we have to assume that these other hosts might be compromised or rogue hosts might come up or something like that. That's pretty much it. I mean basically this is stored forward messaging. It might take forever to get messages delivered. This is nowhere near real-time. Question. No. We're not using the same symmetric key for the lifetime of the session. What happens? Thanks for bringing that up because I didn't mention that. What he asked was are we using the same symmetric key for deciding where we're going to... What protocols we're going to use forever for the entire time period? Good morning. So I'd interrupt. Some jackass is walking around with a reject hacker exploitation fight back pamphlet advocating violence and damage to the hotel. I strongly encourage you not to do that unless you really, really want to see the Metro County jail here in Las Vegas. If you do see him or her please encourage her to stop. It's not funny. It's causing problems. We've been kicked out of every other hotel on the strip. We don't want to get kicked out of this one. They kind of like us here, but stuff like this makes them not like us very much because they really don't understand what we do. So I would strongly encourage you, like I said, to report this or at least encourage them not to do this. I'm not advocating violence so please don't misunderstand me. But we would like to see this stopped. Which brings me to another point.  So far we've had someone steal the majority of the lights along the main row by the swimming pools. I realize we're 13-year-olds of all ages here, but I would strongly encourage you to do if you have the lights or if you have other property in the hotel like the soap dispensers from the bathrooms.  So if we have a general amnesty, if you have them, no questions asked, return them to the knock. For those of you who don't know where the knock is, the knock is at the very end of the building on this side. It's labeled. You can't miss it. It's where the speaker's area is. Like I said, please bring whatever fanilia you have that belongs to the hotel that you really shouldn't have and you know who you are and I'm sure you have friends who you know who they are. So please pass the message.  Because you're acting like chimps. So like I said, I realized we're 13-year-olds of all ages that however it's not excused, lame-ass pranks, excuse me, like taking the lights. Had you hacked the PBX, I'd applaud you. You stole the lights. My 4-year-old niece can steal the lights. Are there any questions? Yes sir, stand up. I cannot condone drunken disorderly behavior. Myself being an Irish Catholic, I'm usually smashed by about 5. Myself also being a Jesuit priest. That means I really get drunk by 6. Accidents happen, we understand that. The problem is we had some people teeing up and playing golf with the lights and then walking away with the lights. Vegas has some wonderful golf courses.  Don't use the lights. If you find the lights, if you could please turn them in. Like you say, if you see them broken or something like that, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, bring them down to the knock, tell us that they were broken and you're returning it to us. Don't set fire to the tent upstairs. That's a very bad thing. Once again, my 4-year-old niece can do that. We expect better. This is the uber-hacker track. So if you're running scripts, then you probably should be at the other room over there where the newbies are. So like I said, if anyone wants to come talk to me personally about it, that's fine. Like I said, you have general amnesty. We will not prosecute you.  We just want to make sure the property gets returned to the hotel so we can come back so you all can come back next year. Unless you don't want to come back. Who does not want to come back? Any other questions? Anyone else have any questions? No questions. Very good. I'll turn you back to your questions. Cool. Brief interlude. There are two FBI agents. One of them looks like John Denver because that's a little bigger. And he's wearing a DEF CON 5 shirt.  And we can steal the lamps. So I've got to make it easy. Just yell. Okay, back. Addressing the question of if we're going to use the same symmetric key for the entire duration of the session, for eternity between these two hosts? No. With the messages that we're sending across, like I briefly mentioned, we're chopping them up, adding padding, adding all kinds of bits of entropy, just definitely not sending them as soon as the messages arrive, things like that. Well, also to fill in the gaps and just add a little more confusion. When we're not needing to send in messages across, when we're just wanting to fill in space, we're changing more data for adding onto the symmetric key or parts of new symmetric keys. So that changeover is constant. Right here in the black. Okay, the question here is since the whole point of this is to get as many bits through without detection as possible, he says my method is very slow compared to other methods that are out there. Well, in looking at everything else that's out there, this is the only way that we feel that we can assure security and assure secrecy. And it's not a concern how slow it is. We want to make it as slow as possible to make it secure. He had a question, green shirt. Yes, the question is, and I just mentioned that a little bit earlier, but just look for, as an anomaly, the fact that all of a sudden these two hosts are communicating on a lot of protocols, a lot of stuff that they weren't communicating before. Yeah, and that's something we're working to address. I briefly mentioned that a little while ago. A white shirt. Can you give more information? Yeah, the question here is that instead of trying to emulate all the protocols that we find there that we can get a lowest common denominator over that might look like quite anomaly, how about if we identify one host or a couple hosts and then take some features that all seem in common and just use those as a host profile. That's a pretty good idea and we very much might implement something like that. The only problem with that is would have to increase the amount of traffic that we're using over those protocols that much more in order to ever get significant amounts of bits across. Other questions? The question is how about just spoofing traffic from other hosts and then have it sniffed off the wire on the other end and then it'd be dropped at the host that it actually ended up at because it didn't match something they sent. Yeah, I mentioned that actually and we can't really do that because if an attacker compromised the receiving host and determined and compared the messages that they've sent and the messages actually sent in between and the messages received at the end and they didn't match then you'd be able to determine that these other hosts were doing something in the middle. What if we do this with an array of hosts? The interesting idea there would be if we had a whole array of sending hosts and receiving hosts and the sending hosts and the receiving hosts kept state amongst themselves and then use each other that would help some, but this is detectable so we don't want to use it. Back there, Beard, he says how about using packet radio? That's certainly a possibility. We're trying to limit ourselves to the wire. Man, we've got right there. Yes.  People work very well but there are other systems that are working on doing something like this or something that does this so this would just be something else to add to the arsenal. Straight ahead there. Yes. He's talking about this is all state oriented. What if we need... Can you say that a little louder? You could watch it anyway and keep state even with connectionless protocols. Right here, question. Noise level, floor level. Total traffic. Right. The question here is because we rely on there being a bit of ambient traffic around us have we thought of increasing the amount of ambient traffic around us, manipulating it? That's possible. We'd have to be really careful about doing that because then that could be detected as well.  We might do that but I don't know. Lots of questions. Very good question. If the sentinel value is the same as the data we want to send across then the sentinel value stays and we move on to the next field and we use the next field which will have a different sentinel value. Every field has its own sentinel value signed so we move on to the next one and use that position. That's a good idea. He says why don't we start a bit earlier and begin to create some of the distribution that we're looking for? I don't know that necessarily would create the distribution we're looking for but just have our two hosts begin communicating a bit earlier before they're doing any sort of traffic that might be detectable. That need to be very changeable because then someone might be able to look for that. Before I take any other questions one other thing I want to add here we're fast that makes this implementation even bigger. Not only do we have to emulate all these other protocols but we have to emulate all these other languages because we don't know where this is going to be used. We have to put valid looking payload data in this packet. It's realized right now we're only sneaking stuff through in headers. Just a little bit of stuff. If we're sending an SMTV message we've got to send a piece of email and that piece of email can be analyzed. It can't be any words that are in our application. We have to assume that our attacker can get access to our application. That's a hard problem and that's like a linguistics problem. We've got to be able to determine what the local languages are and pull words and put together sentences that make sense and all that kind of stuff. Same thing for lots... No. Are we planning on doing any manipulation of the source MAC address? Generally not. We don't want it to look like it's actually spoofed because then they'd be able to check that and see that that's not actually our MAC address. If we were spoofing, yes we would and would spoof the MAC address of the IP we're spoofing as well but we don't want to do that. We wouldn't be placing this in a governmental facility and we might be using existing equipment but sure, sure. Absolutely. He's saying what if we take this machine into some place and we place it there where it's going to be noticed. This new MAC address, that sort of thing. We're not even talking about going and compromising PacBell or something and sticking your machine in there. That's outside of the realm of what we're talking about here. The question is have we considered using steganographic techniques to hide stuff within the payload itself? Maybe later on, working with this right now, we're just working with the header. Eventually we'd like to be able to generate graphical images and all kinds of stuff, generate email and using hidden, basically agreed upon words. Apple actually means the NSA and all this stuff and things that would change based on a one-time path. Eventually we could add in things like that but we're not looking at that right now. Reger. The question is if the sentiment value for each field changes on every iteration, every protocol form how does a receiving host know what sentiment value to look for? That's generated as part of the hash. It's also generating sentiment values for every field that we're manipulating. So that's agreed on and both sides too. They're both generating it from the same symmetric key. They both have access to that. Other questions? Yes. He says, should we constantly sampling the network to adapt? Yes, we're going to continue sampling at all times and we can do later exchanges of traffic data and we might not change it until it's statistically significant. If 13% of this pattern changes then we'll begin slowly, randomly to begin changing our patterns to match what it looks like around. Another question of follow-up. The question is, do we do any error checking of the data that we're transferring across? Yes, in the shared we're completing every session and also within that we'll probably end up doing something like FEC forward error correcting code, something like that in order to check out there. Oh, if this space or the amount of transfer that we're going to... No, probably we'll do summarization as we capture traffic. The question was how much disk space are we thinking of having to need in order to keep all the sampled data around? We'll do summarization just like an application like MRTG does. It summarizes everything that goes along and reduces it down and so we could easily implement something like that. Other questions? Right there. That's a good idea. Hopefully everyone heard that. There's a couple ideas presented there. The one was instead of implementing this as a library that we need to add the functionality to access from whatever, eternity servers or something like that, just implement this as a kernel mod or as part of the kernel we'd have to then do that for lots of operating systems. But such that all traffic destined for our peer host automatically goes to these... We could certainly do something like that. Okay. Right here. Can you clarify? No. The question is, is there any attempt within this architecture to take advantage of asymmetric bandwidth schemes where we've got a big pipe going in one direction hopefully towards the client destined covert op and a small pipe leading back away where we can just single bits mean a whole lot. I'm standing here and I wink and depending on the context that one quote bit of data actually means a whole lot. There's nothing currently built into the system like that but that's something very much to consider. Other questions? Right here. Yes. Very good idea. His suggestion is in the case of something like MI6 or a well-resourced government that's putting this into place wouldn't it be a very good idea to put this on a router where there is a lot of traffic? That's a very good idea. If we could guarantee something like that in place where we can actually guarantee because it's controlled by the very people in charge of the system that Eve isn't going to have access to the host behind it and we put it on a router where it's got thousands of domains coming, lots of subnets, all these things that works beautifully. Other questions? The question is, couldn't we compromise a bunch of host systems and then use them to filter out and not just be communicating to one host but communicate to lots of hosts and we could do that but that could be detectable. You could detect at the host and you'd detect who is sending stuff to it and we kind of don't want to go that route right now. But we have to assume a well-resourced attacker could determine that. His point is with listening or what are called like number stations there's already an infrastructure in place to transmit MI6 out to the agents. We would just need to implement something for the agents to talk back to MI6 via this mechanism. That's certainly a point but although I'm using as an example MI6 here that's not really what we're thinking about. We're thinking about more the persecuted political person who's hiding freedom fighters who doesn't have this sort of resources. There aren't number stations set up for them. That works in the case of NSA using this or somebody but yeah. Other questions, yellow. The question is how often are we going to be changing sentinel values? But I don't think that it quite makes sense but basically sentinel values are different, are unique for every single field position in every single protocol form that we use. Basically you're saying that they're going to be able to detect the sentinel values themselves that they are an anomaly? No, we're generating these sentinel values from what we determined to be statistically significant portions within our payload data and so it's going to look like traffic around us and in the same distribution of traffic around us. Anyway, I think that's it. Last question, we're now doing spot the FUD. If you want to talk to me, ask me more questions offline, we're doing spot the FUD.


Sharing small video of few important paradigm X-rays in day-to-day practice, some are like a squadron and some for the learning purposes. Case No. 1 – 30-Weaker Newborn with a Respiratory Distaste Obviously it is a X-ray of Hyaline Membrane Disease or Respiratory Distaste Syndrome or surfactant deficiency, all are synonyms. What are the X-ray findings here? Ground-glass aprons to the both lung fields, symmetrical reticulonodular opacities, air pankograms, blurring of the cardiac, and diaphragmatic margins. Few important things, it is caused by surfactant deficiency, common in neonates less than 36 weeks, more of the prematurity, more of the severity of HMD, surfactant is produced by type 2 nemocytes. What is the role of surfactant? It lowers the surface tension of aloe lye, and efficiency of surfactant in aloe lye. They lose their compliance, meaning that they remain collapse, and clinically RDS present immediately after the birth. Grading of RDS is important for clinical management. This slide shows all four grades of RDS, film in the centre is normal, X-ray chased. Grade 1, subtle ground-glass aprons, minimal reticulonodular shadows, no much hypoventilation, diaphragmatic and cardiac margins are well seen. Grade 2, significant ground-glass aprons, but still the lungs are fairly ventilated. Air bronchograms seen in the region of the heart and not seen in the lateral aspect of the lung pills. Cardiac and diaphragmatic margins are obscured. Grade 3, findings are same as in Grade 2, but air bronchogram also seen in the lateral part of the lungs. Cardiac and diaphragmatic margins are significantly obscure, get throat, almost opaque lung pills with or without air bronchogram, heart and diaphragmatic margins are not seen at all. Grade 1 and 2 RDS do not need any intubation, no need of ventilatory support and more important, surfactant therapy is not required. They do well just with a oxygen support, whereas in Grade 3 and Grade 4 HMD they need intubation, they need ventilatory support and more important, they need surfactant therapy, which is a magic drug. As I said surfactant is a magic drug. This is the x-ray of the child showing Grade 4 HMD, surfactant was given through the adductracheal tube and have a look at the x-ray which was taken just after the 3 hours of surfactant therapy where both lungs are well expanded, diaphragmatic and cardiac margins are well seen, both lungs are fairly good ventilated. Here, let us go through the causes of respiratory pneumonial distress. Causes can be medical or causes can be surgical. Amongst the medical causes, transient tachypnea of newborn, meconium aspiration, pneumonial pneumonia and more important respiratory distress syndrome or surfactant deficiency among the surgical causes, congenital diaphragmatic hernia, congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation, congelital lobar emphysema or sequestration. In Case number 2, I will like to demonstrate variety of thymic appearances in periodic x-ray chest. One should be familiar with the appearance of the thymus and before that let us see few thymic signs, sail sign where you will see the lateral sharp border as the thymus is medestinal organ and lower margin of the thymus is sharp giving the appearance of the sail of port. Thymic wave sign, it can be seen on right as well as on the left. We all know thymus is located in the superior medestinum anteriorly. It is very soft organ seen on the x-ray up to three years of age. Thymic shadow should not be visible up to three years of age. When its lateral border is indented by anterior ends of ribs, which use undulation to the lateral margin causing a typical wave sign, when inferior border of the thymus interrupts with the cardiac shield out, giving a typical notch, we call it as a notch sign. Notch sign can be seen on the right or the left. Whenever you see both loops of thymus are elevated upwards and laterally we call this as a spinnaker sail sign and this is a sign of pneumo medestinum. There is a complete spectrum of normal appearance of the thymus on x-ray chest. Figure no 1 shows the typical sail sign on right. 2 shows thymus on either side dominantly on the left side with oblatation of the left heart-border. Figure no 3 shows thymus on either side with typical not sign on right. Figure no 4 shows thymus on either side with a typical sail sign on right and figure no 5 shows thymus dominantly seen with the oblatation of left-heart border. This was again a new born, baby had some respiratory distress, someone thought it is a large thymic shadow on left but distress continued on day 2 and baby was sent to us for opinion what we thought a large opacity on left dispensing heart and trachea. As I said normally thymus is very soft organ and do not cause any displacement of normal anatomical mark. In addition there was a small air crescent at the left of diaphragm, we thought some SOL, we took baby for ultrasound where two large cystic lesions were noted consistent with secant type 1 and CT showed two large cysts on left suggestive of secant type 1 which is the most common type where cysts are more than 2 cm size. In secant type 2 cysts are usually less than 2 cm. In secant type 3 macroscopic cysts are seen giving solid most on chest x-ray. 35 wicker baby born to villager complaining of frothing since last 2 days. Pinnacle suspicion of tracheoisophageal picella was made with typical coiling of the riles tube seen in the upper isophagus. Periodic surgeon wanted to confirm before taking for the surgery so diet study was advised we use 1 to 2 cc of non-eulic contrast media which confirms upper blind end and there is a gaseous stomach and bowel loof. So this is the common type of TOF seen in almost 86% of the cases where upper end is blind and lower end is connected to bronchus. This slide shows various combination and permutations of TOF. Both esophageal ends can be blind, upper end connected to trachea and lower end is blind. Upper end is blind and lower end is connected to trachea which is the commonest type which we have seen. Both the ends can be connected to trachea and H-type of picella where small tract of esophagus is connected to trachea. Another new born with a severe respiratory distress ultrasound study was not available. Any obvious case of bobtalic type of congenital diachromatic hernia where we see many cysts like shadows of the bowel loofs with a marked medial senile seep is very distinct because of ifselectral and counter-electral hypoplastic lung. Ifselectral site is collapsed by herniated bowel loofs and counter-electral lung is hypoplastic because of marked medial senile seep. We all know we can alternately diagnose bobtalic type of hernia by identifying herniated stomach in the thorax with a marked medial senile seep.  X-ray shows herniated bowel loofs mostly colon mainly on right, so this is a mortgage type of congenital diachromatic hernia where defect is on right in the entire medial aspect of the diaphragm and commonly colon and momentum are the organs to herniate through this defect. 6. 2 years child presented with a cuff and mild respiratory distress since last 2 days. X-ray shows increased translucency on left, mild medial still shift to right, lowering of leftum of diaphragm, spaling of vessels on left. All these observations are consistent with partial body obstruction in left bronchus, typical ball-hole type of obstruction where air can go in but cannot come out and trap in the lungs. Friends, we cannot afford to miss diagnosis in a given case. This is absolutely life-saving. Pill must be taken without any rotation, both the clavicle must be projected symmetrically on the pill. Sometimes, foreign body obstruction can be complete obstruction giving you appearance of the complete collapse of the lung or loathe with a medial still shift to the same site. Complete obstruction is rare. 7. 2 days old baby had severe respiratory distress and now where is the pathology on this pill? Of course, on left, where you see lot of air in the left neural cavity without any lung marking with a marked medial still shift to right, consistent with tension pneumothorax on left. Here is another case of pneumothorax on right with a typical lateral border of collapsed lung and mild medial still shift to left. You see this sort of a line especially in neonates giving you pseudo appearance of the collapse of lung but look carefully, this line is going below the dome of diaphragm and lung marking are visible lateral to this line also so this is a case of just skin fold causing illusion of pneumothorax. 8. 1 year old child presented with a high grade fever and curbs since last 3 days showing large patches in right upper lobe and both lower lobes fall off x-ray after 2 days shows cavity religions in these opacities here we are dealing with a stapelococcal pneumonia with typical pneumatocyles we should pick up precisely and report because antibiotics for stapelococcal pneumonia are slightly different and moreover other complications of rupture of these pneumatocyles with pneumothorax or hydroneumothorax or amperma are quite frequent. 9. New born child with respiratory distress x-ray shows opaque left upper lobe with marked medial still shift to right x-ray of same child after 10 days shows over expanded left upper lobe with a medial still shift to right so we are for sure dealing with a congenital loba amperma we know this is common in left upper lobe, right middle lobe and right upper lobe and usually not seen in lower lobes. 10. New born child with mild respiratory distress x-ray shows heart on right and liver shadow also on right stomach on left so this is a isolated dextrocardia with cytosolitis. In this situation congenital heart defects are quite frequent if you get dextrocardia with cytos inverses meaning liver on left and stomach on right here heart can be absolutely normal without any CHD.