It's time to start off Milan the panel discussion one of the best panel discussions that we are going to have I know have built it up so much but there is a reason due to which I've built it up so much we have. I really have to say this, we have 11 different luminaries from 10 different countries and nine different time zones. We are joining us today for Milan the panel discussion Milan is a very powerful word in Hindi in Sanskrit to very popular Indian languages. It means the union, it means the coming together and today we have the coming together of some of the most enlightened experienced and minds full of perspective, joining us today from all across the world, and we are going to be addressing a very important topic. And the topic is nurturing the 21st century global citizen. Now when I came up with this topic I realized that each one of these words is loaded. Right. We are talking about nurturing. We are talking about 21st century and we're talking about a global citizen. All of these words in many different ways are fluid, as all of us educators would definitely concur with. And we're talking about nurturing global citizens in the 21st century, and honestly considering we have so many individuals from different cultures from different countries. I'm sure we'll get a range of perspectives on this particular question. So without much ado, I am not going to steal the thunder of our wonderful panelists. I'm just a mere moderator. So I am going to introduce each and every one of them to you. We have 11 different panelists, and we will start off with one of our dearest panelists of course all of you are extremely dear to us, but one of the panelists who's most dear to us and for someone who has the deepest respect and gratitude is Lord Baron Evans of Watford Baron Evans of Watford. He's a British publisher and an entrepreneur and philanthropist as a member of the House of Lords, the UK he sits as a labour peer, and also holds a number of chairmanship that span across printing business consultancy charity and healthcare. He also serves as the senior advisor to several organizations and individuals across the world. He's also an advisor to Elpro International School Pune as well. Honestly, if I start talking about Baron Evans of Watford, we probably have to spend a lot more time getting into these introductions but thank you so much thank you so much Lord Evans for joining us he's joining us all the way from Barberos. You also obliged us with a wonderful interview for the curtain razor of Panjia. I'm so glad so that you agreed to join us for this panel discussion. Would you like to say something before we move on. Thank you so much that was an amazing introduction. Exaggerated but amazing. It's my great pleasure to be here amongst friends as I see it, friends and colleagues who are doing such a great job for the children they teach and for the parents who may be watching. I'm so delighted that you chose to send your children to the schools represented by the educators here. It's a great pleasure to be here I look forward to answering questions and thank you very much for your hospitality and great organization Thank you. Thank you so much Lord Evans. We move on to Angela French. Angela French is an educational professional with over 40 years of rich and wide ranging experience in both the state and private sectors. She has a master of education and educational assessment from the University of Bristol and an MA in educational assessment from the University of Cambridge a certificate in education and a diploma in TEFL RSA as well. She is an advisor to numerous institutions across the globe and is also a dear advisor to Elpro International School Pune. Angela thank you so much for joining us today. It's an absolute pleasure. Would you like to say share a few words before we move on. To unmute there. Yes, for me as well this has been absolutely wonderful from the address from Claire and from the performances of the children it was a magical start to this conference. What's particularly special for me is that I don't know many people who are on this network. I know a few of you but through those few that I am aware of the network has just spread and it's so easy to spread a network. You just need to know one or two people and then it can become what we have today which is quite phenomenal and I really congratulate all of those people who've been involved in the administration and the management of this event because it's really very impressive. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Angela. We'll be hearing a lot more from you very shortly. A third guest of honor for today Monir Koshani joining us all the way from Afghanistan. Monir is an engineer by profession and a social entrepreneur by choice and he is currently serving as the founding president of the youth thinker society in Afghanistan. YTS or the youth thinker society is an NGO focusing on leadership development and capacity building of youth through active engagement and participation. YTS under the leadership of Monir Koshani also organized the first model UN conference in Afghanistan under the patronage of the president and first lady of Afghanistan. Monir is a dear friend of mine somebody I know from since his times in India. I'm so glad you're joining us from Afghanistan. Thank you so much for joining us Monir. Is there something that you'd like to share with us before we move on? Hello and good afternoon and good evening everyone. This is Monir Koshani joining from Afghanistan. I'm very much happy that I'm in this panel and I would share something from Afghanistan, a country that is quite popular in the news for different perspective. Thank you Anand for inviting me at this conference. Thank you so much. I look forward to it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Monir. Moving on. We have principals and school leaders from different schools across the globe. Starting off with Mr. Niraj Bhargav, a legend in the field of education, principal of Abu Dhabi Indian school. He has over 37 years of experience in the field of education and has served as a principal for over 16 years. He is a dedicated resourceful and innovative educationist having extensive experience with reputed Indian and international schools. Mr. Bhargav is a keen strategist, adapted creating innovative strategies and formulating administrative policies for accelerated growth of institutions. Mr. Niraj Bhargav, thank you so much for joining us today.  Thank you Anj. Next on, we have Ms. Nargish Kanbata, principal and CEO of GEMS Modern Academy, and vice president of GEMS Education. She is the recipient of the first ever GEMS exceptional head of school award with a master's degree in microbiology. She made the transition from teaching to educational leadership, having spent over 32 years in the field of education. Mrs. Kanbata was the convener of the three CISC schools of Dubai from April 2014 to March 2018. A passionate educator, her simple educational philosophy is all children deserve to be given ample opportunity to discover their worth, their interest and their passion in a secure and happy environment for them to grow into confident young adults with a sound intellectual and moral compass to guide them to their goals. Mrs. Nargish Kanbata, thank you so much for joining us today, ma'am. My pleasure. Thank you very much Anj. And thank you to the organizers. I think it's always a pleasure to talk to like-minded people with children's interest at heart. Thank you so much ma'am. Thank you so much. In fact, GEMS Modern Academy is another proud school who is joining us for the event today. I think there was a small errata in the beginning of the event. We forgot to mention GEMS Modern Academy. Our sincere apologies for that. Moving on, we have Diretora Svetlana. Svetlana Hof is a trained neuroscientist, trainer for Montessori teachers. Today she's the academic director of the IEDA school in Brazil, a primary school in the state of Minas. Geras, I'm sorry if I've mispronounced this. Our school, the school works in areas of neuroscience and active methodologies. Svetlana has also been one of the keyness supporters, propagators and motivators for this entire event from the very beginning. We are so happy to see the level of enthusiasm that you have shown. Thank you so much for joining us today, Svetlana. Thank you so much. I'm humbled as well as honored to be here, to have been invited. And it's an absolute dream come true to see such a wonderful opportunity being created for our students all over the world. And thank you very much for inviting us. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Svetlana. We'll be hearing a lot more from you. We also have with us Nicholas Dahlstrom, the headmaster of Kunskapskolan Warburg in Sweden. He started off as a teacher in 1986 and has worked as a teacher for 15 years after which he became the headmaster. He's been a headmaster for over 20 years now, a very renowned educator. He's been the headmaster of Kunskapskolan for 14 years. He has experience of teaching and headteaching both at primary school levels and upper secondary school levels in different parts of Sweden. And at this point in time, he is situated in Warburg, where in Kunskapskolan school, there are over 360 students from grades four to nine studying in the institution. Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you very much. And I'm very honored to be here in this event today. Thank you very much. Thank you Nicholas. We now move on to Ernst George Schwann, who is the vice principal of Indian school Alwadi Al Kabir, and the sultanate of Oman. Mr. Schwann has been working with the Indian school Wadi Al Kabir for the last two decades and took over as the vice principal in 2013. He currently heads the kindergarten and primary sections of the school and has taught subjects ranging from English, mathematics, science to social studies in the primary and even taught the middle and high school levels. He has also been awarded the coveted Navin Asharkazi Award for excellence in teaching in 2016 in Oman. Mr. Schwann, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, Ernst. It's a pleasure to be here and I must say in fact it's an honor to be amongst such deputed people. And it's a real pleasure looking forward to contribute and above all, learn more. Because I don't believe I know everything. I'm here to learn a lot from all of you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We now move on to Mr. Gary Nelson, the proud proud head teacher of whopping high school in central London. Gary brings with him a successful career and headship and an unyielding determination to provide the very best education possible for students. He shares a passion for providing first class learning opportunities for all students, leading to outstanding outcomes which help open doors to open to very happy and successful lives. A little wonder then that he is actually the co-host for Pangea, the global village, and has been an active participant in its entire organization. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Ernst. You know, it is amazing actually to have so many people here from everywhere all over the world. It's just absolutely terrific. And again, I just want to echo what Claire Ward talked about, about this great opportunity we have in front of us. I feel a bit guilty being the co-host here when clearly Sagandra and yourself and other colleagues there at Elpro have done such an amazing job bringing this all together. Just exciting times. I just want to share this with colleagues just very briefly, if you don't mind. There's a message on the chat here. And we're talking about joining people together and the challenger in the pandemic of getting kids to have joy again in their learning and connections. And there's a message here from Munan. You've probably seen it as well on the chat, everyone. It says, I want to say that when I'm at house and I'm not doing anything, I feel like I could some fun things, do some fun things in school with that time. It hurts. So it's really, really important that we connect kids together because I know talking to my own students have been messaging me directly throughout this meeting today, and they really do need us to do a good job. So I'm really looking forward to this. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Gary. And last but definitely not the least, I would like to say probably one of the chief instigators of this event and definitely the biggest source of support for everybody who has been a part of organizing this event. I'm Dr. Amrita Vora, Principal Alpro International School with a PhD in education psychology, a master's in education and botany. Dr. Vora has a rich academic experience spanning over three decades, where a dynamic leadership has helped a lot of schools across India incorporate a healthy teaching learning environment. She was recently recognized as a future 50 leaders shaping success by Fortune India. She has also been felicitated with the leader spillers in education award for making a difference in the field of education. Additionally, she was awarded as the best international principal by the Science Olympiad Foundation for three consecutive years and is an honorary recipient of the Uttarakhand Ratan Award, which was presented to her by Principles Progressive Schools Association Uttarakhand in collaboration with the Times of India. Dr. Vora, thank you so much for being our biggest source of encouragement and inspiration, and for joining us today. Ma'am, you're muted. My apologies. Yes. Thank you, Anush. And then looking forward to this discussion. I can see Angela there and Gary and all my colleagues. Very, very looking forward to it. I'm very concerned. I must have forced me for being able to co-host this kind of event. Thank you so much, ma'am. Thank you so much. Let's quickly jump into this panel discussion today. I have a range of questions that I will be posing turn by turn to different members of the panel. I would request you to probably keep your answers slightly brief so that we can move forward with as many questions as possible. We have a great set of individuals who have joined us and I'm sure everybody would like to share their perspectives. The topic, of course, is nurturing the 21st century global citizen. There's a lot that's talked about with respect to 21st century skills in education across the world. Some of the most common things that we talk about include the four C's, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication. We then talk about financial literacy, leadership skills, technological skills, and an entire gamut of skills, apart from the standard foundational literacy skills that are essential for everyone. I'm talking about global citizenship and nurturing global citizenship. In this regard, I would like to ask a very pertinent question and I would like to start off with Mrs. Kambhata. Ma'am, I would like to ask you, how would you define an ideal 21st century global citizen in the context of your educational system and culture? Thank you, Anansha. I think that's really an interesting question and being an opening batsman. I think, you know, I'm taking the liberty of putting perspective to this. So, to my mind, if you develop a hundred 21st century skills, I'm always amazed that we talk about 21st century skills when we're already in 2021. But I just want to say that, you know, you can give children all the skills that's in the world, but if you don't create, sorry, create is the wrong word. If you don't, you know, have students who are open minded and who really understand the complexities of the world we live in, then all has failed. To my mind, an ideal 21st century global citizen is one who really is open minded, understands and reflects in an agile and very empathetic manner to what he or she experiences around him in our complex world today. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mrs. Kambhata, for sharing your views on this. Nicholas, would you like to share your views? What do you think really entails a global citizen or 21st century global citizen? Thank you very much. I'm very fond of metacognition. So I would like to combine the three parameters, knowledge, math, language and so on and skills like creativity and collaboration and character like leadership and mindfulness in the metacognition dimension. In Sweden, we are talking about the importance of metacognition. It leads the process of self reflection and learning how to learn as well as the building of knowledge, skills and character. Basic is critical thinking. You can't do without it. It's more important than ever. And I would like to say that the Swedish school system supports both critical thinking and the metacognition perspective. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your views, Nicholas. In fact, I'd like to pose this question to a very interesting member of the panel today. We have Monir joining us from Afghanistan. And Afghanistan has been a nation. It's a gifted nation. It's a blessed nation. But unfortunately, it has been ravaged by war over different decades over different centuries too. And in recent times, there has been a lot of unfortunate incidents taking place in the country. In general, when we talk about education, it has been impacted. I had a recent interview with Monir where we were talking about this too. Monir, in the frame of reference of Afghanistan, what would an ideal 21st century global citizen be? Thank you, Anand. I believe the situation in Afghanistan is quite different from the rest of the country. So, say, for example, the U.S., Europe, or even for India, an ideal person in the 21st century would be different. But for us, because we live in a totally different environment, a totally different region, and with different characteristics, it's different. And for us, at the moment, what we are looking in a person of the 21st century, or someone in that, we are actually looking if the person is updated with the knowledge of the world, if the person is actually someone who is an open-minded or someone is flexible to changes that is coming in the world. Because Afghanistan also being a very conservative society. So these are the things that we actually look forward or see in that 21st century person. And then I think those are the ideas for the Afghans at the moment, because, yeah. Thank you so much, Monir. Thank you so much for that perspective. Thank you for asking this question to one last member of the panel, Director Svetlana. You know, we talk about 21st century skills. Honestly, if you ask me, it's the inward in education, at least in Asia. We keep talking about the importance of 21st century skills. And as Mrs. Kambatta very correctly mentioned, we are already in the 21st century in many ways.  In words, and we always have these phases are 21st century skills, given the same level of importance in Brazil and what is a 21st century global citizen in your opinion. Thank you so much for the question, Nash. I think it's, I agree very much so with what Nicholas and Monir have said, in regards to keeping an open mind and developing self critical skills, critical thinking skills. One of the aspects I think that develops in these very large nations as the one that I work in in Brazil here right now is the sense of for better of a lack of a better expression I would say self absorption, because we are such a large country, and we are such a large and diverse itself, a culturally diverse country that we very much tend to stay within our country borders, a lot of times. One very important aspect, I think to this and that indicates this is this is definitely a cultural aspect for us is the fact that we still struggle to teach English in our schools, English language in our schools. And that alone is such a huge border for us to actually cultivate this, this, this collaboration mind with other parts of the world. This is one of the reasons why I think a project such as Pangea is so important for us. And also, for us to take education in our own hands, as far as citizens, I think I speak as as as an educator, not to wait for governmental laws and all bureaucratic aspects that we have which are so complex and so difficult to be resolved into actually think about solutions which will impact the, the majority of our population, such as the initiative of a school has provided to the market, which is a private school, but it tends to the lower classes, working parents that can actually afford and actually look, those of us who can look for real solutions of pedagogical sound content and different kinds of, of way of thinking and way of doing the methodologies and different kinds of way of applying our knowledge and bringing back and and and combining all all this richness that we all have as educators that have been had, have, have had the privilege to travel to different parts of the world. So I think this is one of the most important aspects that we have to develop in our, in our youngsters is the opportunity to actually get to know other parts of the world, even though we can have opportunities here, but it is simply enriching to broaden our horizons and to look for other ways of doing things as well so it, it even though Brazil is not such a conservative society. I think we share very much so the, the, the positions that money has has put here, which is we have to really get rid of these way of thinking that you know, we are here, and why should I do this or that because we are living in different ways and I think the pandemic has helped us see through our borders as well because we have finally broken a huge barrier which was the tech tech tools inside schools, and this is a great opportunity for us to keep developing in this in this direction. Thank you. Thank you so much, Svetlana. Let's move this entire conversation forward. Talking about 21st century skills, the ideal global citizen in this era, there are a range of different skills that exist and we are very best to impart them irrespective of the country and educational system. Mr. Bhargav, if I was to ask you, what are the five most important skills in this era, what would your answer be what do you think are the five most important skills that any individual needs to possess today. Good afternoon, good morning and good evening once again. Yes, I have been hearing about the first part, the 21st century skills, but very important is there are certain other aspects which we really need to teach the children, besides what we have talked about. A very important one is respect for the differences. Very important is that we need to make them understand and respect and value the diversity, which is very important in today's time. We need to teach them that there are all people who are equal. There is no difference. And very important is empathy. Of course, besides that, we need to have curiosity and a desire to learn, learn about others, learn about the other culture. And of course, very important part is to understand that there are people with difference. Along with it, of course, the most important one is talking about the sustainability environment. We need to take, you know, raise strongly, tell them about this part, a part in the curriculum in education. This is very important that we need to make them understand the environment and sustainability, very important for them. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for shedding light on a very important point, the ability to respect and appreciate differences that exist, differences with respect to culture, differences in opinion, something that is becoming slightly more difficult at times across the world today. And I think that's a very important skill that all of us need to possess, the importance of environmental sustainability among a range of others. I would like to pose the same question to Dr. Vora from Elpro International School Pune. Ma'am, in your opinion, what are the five most important skills that you concur with Mr. Bhargav, of course, and I'm sure you'd also have your take on this question. Thank you, Anish. So yes, if I start listening, the five most important skills that come to my mind, number one would be empathy. As the world merges in the global community, global empathy is emerging as a necessary skill, you know, like in India. It is requested to be closer to the laptop. I think you're having a slight audio issue. My apologies. Okay, can you hear me now? Perfect. Right. So what I'm saying is empathy would come number one for me because as the world merges and creates a global community, you know, empathy will go along in making us more profitable. Ma'am, my sincerest apologies, but I think there is an audio issue. I'll come back to you, ma'am. I think there is a slight audio issue at your end, ma'am. Sure. And mute and unmute yourself. I think that might help. My apologies, ma'am. Can you hear me now? Yes, ma'am. You're audible. You're audible. Yes. I'll wait for my turn. I think you can just proceed. Sure, ma'am. In fact, Mr. Schwann, what would your views be on this? What do you think are the most important skills? And of course, being a part of Oman, I believe that you would also be meeting students of a range of different cultures and countries. And I'm sure they come from different perspectives in such an environment. What do you think are the different skills that are essential? Thank you for that question, Aranj. First of all, my apologies. I have not been able to really meet very many students. I have interacted with quite a few Omani students, though, and their perspective is a little different. At the same time, I would say they are the group that actually, you know, strive to very loving by nature, I must say, the entire Omani people. But because we are in Indian school and we are here, one of the 21 Indian schools and the second largest, we have quite a prominent role to play and we are leaders in many ways. But like I said at the start, when you introduced me, I'm here to learn a lot. But at the same time, since you pose this question of skills, I would basically put them under three broad headings, you know, we're talking about learning skills, literacy skills and the life skills is what I would categorize them broadly. And as Mr. Neeraj had said very clearly, empathy is very, very important there. And you're talking about the fact that life skills are kind of, you know, we really cannot teach them that out of a book.  And this very fact that, you know, this event has brought so many of us together. We are here sharing of views and thoughts on the common platform is really encouraging. And yes, these are some of the so-called, you know, skills that I would be always looking forward to and encouraging our students to probably kind of, you know, pick up and kind of, you know, brush up. So we're looking at, like I said, the three broad headings. Technology would be another one. I would put forward as a very important thing today. Without technology, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing right now. You need that very much, you know, and so along with some very important life skills, technology, and of course, like the four C's we were talking about, you know, critical thinking, being creative and innovative to be able to collaborate and communicate. Those are the most important skills for me. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Sean. Dr. Vora is your internet better. Ma'am, would you like to answer this question you were answering? And I apologize.  I can try my luck. I don't know whether you can hear me. I can hear you perfectly now. So empathy is number one for me because, you know, like, I was telling you that if you've had some difficult conversations, whenever somebody starts with, oh, I can understand how you feel, but, and that first bit of the sentence put you at ease. So definitely empathy is much needed than lifelong learning because in the new technological development, new academic practices which emerge in the market and in the education at a very, very high speed. I feel that, you know, like a person needs to completely reinvent and relearn whatever one has learned all the way. So that's the second thing that I would put across. What would be problem solving? Why? Because, you know, I think we be confront problems all the time. And if we teach students, you know, like how to put your points across, you know, like, and then kind of eliminate what works and doesn't work one by one, right? At the right kind of situations, problem solving is very important. Fourth, I would say would be resilience and who would understand resilience more now, you know, like we've seen very fine times in the past few months. So yes, in trying times like today's resilience is a well-appreciated skill and that helps one adapt oneself to any kind of adversity or problems. And fifth one, the last one I would say, opportunity leverages through technology and I'm putting four things together. One is making use of the opportunities, very, very important and using technology to do that because say what are we doing? We are trying to connect, we are trying to collaborate, we are trying to come together with the help of technology. And then, then COVID to on one side and we're putting on the other. So this is what we're doing is that technology is very, very important. We have to have the kind of skill in spoons where they quickly use technology to overcome any hurdle, any problem that they come across. So quickly I've listed five skills for you and incidentally, Incidentally, empathy is E and Elpro starts with E, life from learning is L, that is the second better than trouble solving is the P there, resilience is the R and O is for opportunity which we can leverage through technology. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Hora that was so succinctly summarized for us through Elpro and Elpro keeps bringing these kinds of opportunities and we are so grateful for them. We have talked about Elpro as an acronym for five important skills for Dr. Vora, Dr. Mr. Schwann spoke about the importance of technology and the importance of adaptability. Mr. Bhargav talked about something very important, the ability to appreciate differences, the ability to understand the importance of environmental sustainability. So we have had a range of skills that have been spoken about and now like to talk about another very important point of nurturing a 21st century global citizen. At the end of the day, if we are to nurture global citizens that has to be integration taking place among educational systems that needs to be, you know, a cohesion in what is being taught to students in Brazil and what is being taught to students in India and across the world. And while there are many such steps effectively being taken by governments by educational institutions, some of which are seated right here today. I'd like to ask you that if we really were to take this to a much larger scale. What are the ways in which we can promote integration of educational systems across the world and in fact further student integration. I would like to ask this question to a legendary education is seated with us.  I'm sure you've seen the differences. If you could shed light on some of these differences and how you believe we can cause further integration that'll be great. I'm not sure I can give you answers about how they can be integrated. It's a huge question because of course we have so many different cultural backgrounds historical backgrounds we have different government views and they change every four years and so on and so but I think one of the interesting things that came across from Claire's talk was how you can make a difference when you're really very young. And I think the opportunity that you have set out here is giving people that chance because sitting in isolation whether you're in Brazil or you're in Oman or wherever you are, you have a very limited perspective of life. As a young person, probably you're in the best place possible to get a sense of what is going on in other countries because you lack the inhibitions, and perhaps some of the social niceties that adults are forced to take, because you just get on with it. When you talk to each other, you have fun with each other and you learn about differences that perhaps you didn't realize existed. I remember asking the question of some students about where they would like to study and they said, Oh, Britain and America and then I asked them and have any of you been there or seen a film about it and none of them had. And I did they just had a bit of a perception a dream of what this other place was like, but this opportunity is giving them the chance to see what real children are like in other countries, and that they have the same issues and they have the same anxieties and they have the same aspirations as other people do. And from that, perhaps they will begin to shape the decision makers whether it's through the school or eventually through Claire and through the political parties, they will make the changes. I don't think it's going to come top down. I think it's going to come bottom up from the children realizing what is available and how they would like to shape their futures. That's a very different take we're talking about a bottom up approach and actually allowing students to define their trajectories with of course a lot of focused approaches being provided by school leaders educators and global leaders to carry what are your views on this. You have been working on a lot of opportunities for integration I know there is a collaboration that exists even between Elpro International School Pune and whopping high school. I know that you have done a lot to get a lot of these global educators together today. What do you believe are steps that can be taken to further integration. I'm glad you've asked me this. And actually Angela, it's no surprise to me that we would completely and immediately aligned you know we, I totally agree that it's a bottom up approaches best really politicians aren't best place to decide what's best for the future to be young people I don't think they are it's about communities and and those young people have voices and they tell their parents some of which are MPs as we heard from Claire before and that's how we find out about what amazing things are going on and it's leaders putting them in those positions which create those opportunities which leads to that giant voice everywhere. I just want to give you an example of what I've done at my school. And other schools do around the world is that we have a wonderful organization in Britain called the British Council, who have been absolutely super friends to whopping high school my school and they actually fully funded a trip to New York for about 12 of my year eight students supported by staff. And up to that, you know, sadly the journey didn't happen because of COVID but the money's in the bank waiting for it to actually happen in the future. But what's come from that partnerships between children. It's not about me connecting to the principal over there in Manhattan. It's actually more about the children sharing their projects and they're learning together. Which is really, really exciting and Elpro and ourselves and your cells and ourselves. We've been starting to do that already and that's what this will lead on to. So there are opportunities as Angela, you know, says that we can take now to get that, you know, first taste of what it's like beyond their own context, beyond their town, their village, their city. And that's super exciting. And we need to listen to them and we need to take the opportunities which come from things like social media and the press generally and tell our stories everywhere.  And you could be, you know, if you're cynical, you could say that's great marketing for us, but it's not marketing. It's just saying the right things to the right people and hopefully getting that message out there. Now I'm glad, and I shall say it again that you asked me this particular question, you know, the opportunities today are fast and we need to make sure we take them. Thank you so much, Gary. I guess questions attract the right people to so I guess both of us are blessed with that you made my job easier. Let's move on to another very important part of this topic. In fact, let's talk about this event we named this event and I'm very proud of the name actually. The name of the event is Panjia, which is a figurative concept, which hasn't been scientifically proven, but is believed to have existed about 1000 years or so back. We're talking about a uniform landmass thousands of years ago in fact, talking about a uniform landmass unity in many ways, you know, promoting the themes of compassion and collaboration and building a double village. You know, the short span of my life of 30 years I am quite certain that growing up, you know, there was a discourse and I think political discourse goes through its cycles. There was this discourse of globalization growing up. I remember the importance being given to globalization during my first few years in school and college being excessive at times you know we actually used to make fun of the word globalization in some of the classes that we had because we just heard that moving forward in today's times you know when we talk about political discourse, it's become a little bit more about nation first across the West and for that matter even across Asia. And I'm sure that irrespective of what we are doing as educators, some of the discourse that exists in society has an indelible mark leaves an indelible mark on students. Lord David, how do you believe we can promote this theme of compassion and collaboration among our students without externalities political externalities coloring their mindsets. Thank you very much. Well, young people are in a context where they are saturated and unindated with issues from around the world with new technologies with multiplying media, etc. So I think it's up to us as educators to teach them cross cultural awareness for example, which some of the panel have covered before. I think that's really important to understand all of the religions in detail so that you can appreciate and respect other cultures. I think that's very important. I also think that it's important that our children have the opportunity to study abroad. In the UK we have just under half a million international students studying in the United Kingdom. Now isn't that fantastic? Maybe because we have some of the best universities in the world, but nevertheless, the idea of children being able to study abroad. I think is such an important context to becoming a global citizen, to experience different cultures, different, I'm afraid, education methodology, which really helps us understand the world and make it much easier when we grow up to be able to communicate, to deal with, and be involved with different cultures, different countries. So as a brief summary, I think that's very important. You've covered all these skills that are necessary to become a global citizen and that has to be part of the curriculum that we teach in education these days. Thank you so much, Lord David. I'd like to pose this question to Angela as well. Angela, what are your views as an educator on this question? What are the things that educators can do and ensure that polarization and some of the political externalities do not affect the globalised characteristics of students? I'm struggling with the question a little bit actually. I think... Nobody's. We'll come back to you. We'll come back to you Angela. That's perfectly fine. Svetlana, I would like to ask you. There are a lot of different educational systems and practices that we see across the world. What are some of the very unique educational practices which are culturally oriented in Brazil that you would like to share with the rest of the panel and probably believe that can be integrated into specific cultural systems and educational systems in their countries too? Well, I think one of the things which is very present in our culture, which I was very happy to also see the students in India share the same, is music. The presence of music is always something very positive. Music in our country has represented several political movements throughout the decades, the past decades. Brazilians have actually created something very unique during the 60s and 70s. We had dictatorship in our political system and through music there was some kind of a dialect that was developed using typical Brazilian Portuguese language words to actually mean other things.  And it was such a great political protest movement. I admire this so greatly because the politicians during that time there was a list of words, for example, which were not permitted to be used in certain music that were being composed. So the art movement, the artists of our country, they got together and they developed their own dialect using simple words, which definitely meant different things. So this is just one example of how music has been present in our educational system to mean different things. And also throughout music there has been several movements of sensitizes the society to different kinds of needs that we need to put together. A few years ago during the 80s and 90s, we had a great shortage of rain in the northeast of Brazil. It was throughout music that we made it available to all kinds of people and a huge movement was made as well in order for us to help this area of the country. Music has been something very present also in the last few years as political voices as well of the youngsters from slums in Rio de Janeiro very using various kinds of languages, which I, you know, it's not a matter of whether one particularly agrees to the way it's being done or not, but it has to be recognized that it reflects what's been going on in our society. So I would think one very unique aspect would be music. Of course, it's a very complex country and different and other aspects also have influence, but that would be one thing that I think, and we fully intend to use it inside Ayadeh school as well in order to bring positive outcomes as well. Thank you so much that Lana that's very interesting and how music has inspired so many different movements politically and otherwise to I think that's very interesting and how it's being integrated into education. Yes, I know growing up in India, music has played an integral role in the diversity of music to but I think it's very important when we talk about 21st century skills when we talk about multiple intelligences. Nicholas, I'd like to ask you the same question in fact very curious to know about certain educational practices in Sweden which are unique and which the rest of the world can learn from. I think when it comes to education, you must know that one size doesn't fit all every student is unique and you have to cater for that insight. It's easy to say but it's hard to handle that comes from school on this is one of the key elements. This is the spectacles every teacher needs to wear in our school. Sometimes people say you have to treat every student the same way. If you don't you are unfair for me it's the other way around. When you treat every child in the same way, then it's when you start to act unfairly. So for too many years the educational system has been on the school organizations to go now it's time to organize education for the students to agree. I think this is an insight that we have in Sweden that you should actually take care of each and every plant and really care for them. Thank you so much Nicholas I think that's a very deep thought a very important thought one size doesn't fit all I think the importance of personalized student attention and education is going to go a long way in ensuring that we have the well nurtured 21st century global citizens. Let's move this discussion to a different viewpoint now and like to ask Mrs. Kambhata we've talked about all of these 21st century skills that are important. We've talked about integration. Let's talk about some of the skills or trades that we'd like to keep students away from Mrs. Kambhata if I ask you you know there are of course a lot of things that we focus on keeping students away from. But if we really want to make them the ideal 21st century global citizens. What do you think are the skills that we really need to keep them away from today. Thank you that's a very very interesting question not one I certainly hadn't thought about absolutely love what Nicholas and Sweat Lana Sweat Lana yeah absolutely absolutely echo those thoughts. What would I keep students away from I think the one thing that they get distracted by very very easily is falling trapped to the vagaries of social media if I may say that. And therefore you know to equip them with that self self of that sense of self management where they know enough is enough or that's not a rabbit hole I want to go down. I think to my mind that's really really important I think that's a skill we don't we don't explicitly teach self management because if they understand the skill of self management then they know how to regulate themselves. And then whether it's social media or the you know anything else that they want to avoid. I think that's that's really key. I also want to make the distinction between values and skills here. And I think you know we live in a land where the value system here is very akin to that back home. So the Arabs and the Indians both have very very high family values and a sense of respect. And I think that and service learning services built into our culture and that comes easily to us. But I think Sheikh Mohammed said it very rightly when he said and that's something I really would keep children away from. In one of his latest books he said very very well said he says my ancestors, you know, brought in the back of a camera. I drive with Cadillac or Mercedes, but I wouldn't be surprised if my grandchildren are back on the camel again. He says because they're having it too easy. And he says, I would definitely want my children not to fall into that trap, you know, of having everything so easy that they don't understand so resilience Amrita's are for resilience in Elbrough. I think the grit Angela Duckworth's work on body of work on grit and resilience I think is worth inculcating in our children and keeping them away from that trap of easy easy come easy go luxury. And all the rest of it. It's so easy to get sucked into that kind of lifestyle and how do we allow them to enjoy it and yet be mindful that you know it's not a role. We don't live in. I mean this is not going to last forever if we don't take care of it. So to need a just point of sustainability. I think these are really key things to be to enable them to you know understand what's really important piece to self manage and to identify, you know, the grain from the from the chef. It's so much Mrs. combata for such an articulate answer. She talked about the importance of ensuring students don't miss use privilege, don't misuse the concept of entitlement, the importance of making them aware of the vagaries of social media so that technology is used really. And as far as this is concerned, you know one of the things that I was very strongly thinking about when I was coming up with questions for this panel discussion is the diversity in educators and educational systems across the globe and one of the aspects when we talk about diversity is the volumes. So when we talk about number of students in schools, especially in places like the Abu Dhabi Indian School or Gems Modern Academy or Elpro International School Pune, I can say with utmost conviction that it's relatively higher than some of the schools in Europe and South America too. So I'd like to ask you Mr. Bhargava and I'll pose the same question to Mr. Schwann thereafter. So when we talk about 21st century skills, the importance of personalized attention personalized student attention it is definitely more of a mammoth task in schools with these kinds of volumes and diversity. Come from one of the best schools in Middle East and Asia too. So how is it that we work on it? How is it that we ensure the level of personalization while ensuring we get it to such a large mass of students? That's a big challenge and a question put to me. Yes, I have a huge number. I have 5000 children in the school with 320 teachers.  Yes, to cater to the requirement of each child. The foremost thing is the staff should be well trained to understand. You see the delegation of the work and empowering the teachers to take care as an individual for each of those children who are under them. It's very important. The staff has to be sensitized for the requirement of the children. Yes, they do take some time to learn but they learn by dealing with them day to day and of course because the class size is not all that big. You see the class size still remains the number may be big. It's a challenge for as a head to control 5000 but as a teacher they still have 30 in the class of 25 or 20 depending upon the sections. So the work of the teacher is still the same but very important is that we need to empower them to understand very importantly that what is the requirement of each child. And fortunately the staff or my school has been well trained and they really take care and that is the collective effort of everybody. The result is what we are today or what the school stands for. That's my dig. Thank you so much Mr. Bargav. I can definitely vouch for that and I'm sure that you know the importance of man management when we are talking about schools that are almost as big as townships in certain parts of the world. I think it's very important the importance of understanding the needs of students and of course ensuring that teachers and staff are well trained to understand the requirements to Mr. What would you like to say in this regard? Excuse me. I would agree with what Mr. Neeraj just said. We are a school with 6000 students and like I said at the start we are the second largest school in Oman and with 360 staff. We have the principal we have four vice principals and each one of us you know has our own share. So the thing is our staff have been trained to kind of ensure you know as far as possible that we try and identify children who are in the room during the lesson. We don't you know so to say frequently ask the same child the questions over and over again. Yes teaching is a part of you know interaction but that interaction shouldn't only happen with one child. We range it right across you know. Secondly what happens is during the class when they are given a certain task and they are doing it the teacher ensures that she moves around or he moves around and then each and every child is picked up. End of the class again those left over I said call the side you don't have to wait for the child to come to you the teacher calls them aside. It may not happen in every class but yes we do do this on a periodic you know away from time to time and the children do feel that there is a connection. There used to be a time when we used to kind of hear from parents saying my child is not getting the attention sir and so and so is happening. He's feeling neglected. He's feeling demoralized wants to answer questions all these kind of things you know so we began to rethink looked at it and we started this practice and believe me it works. But yes as Mr. Neeraj said we have big classroom 4045 in the room and to do that it's not easy but like I said in every lesson it may not happen but the teacher keeps a check. She keeps a note and so it moves in that way and it's been pretty successful for us. Thank you so much. Monir if you're there I'd like to ask you one question actually. We have often talked about Afghanistan and we have talked about you know there are a lot of different countries across the globe which unfortunately are you know facing certain economic upheavals. Afghanistan is one of those countries that actually is heavily dependent on foreign aid especially for furthering educational motivations of the country. There are often a lot of situations where students when we talk about 21st century skills a very important skill that we talk about is capacity building at the youth thinker society you're talking about capacity building you're trying to develop this among students. How is it that you go about this process with students from extremely backward sections of society. Monir. Yeah hi sorry I'm missing some issues with my internet. So what happens in Afghanistan is that currently the donor countries they have invested hugely on education apart from the military. They have hugely invested in education among them are the countries like USA UK Japan. The World Bank Asian Development Bank and some other European countries including India. In Pakistan they have invested a lot in the education sector as per them and as per the reports when in 2001 there were like very few girls in the school but right now they have more than 3 million girls in the school. That's an achievement for the government and the donors when it comes to capacity building. So what most of the donor countries are doing which I am one of the beneficiaries. They provide different scholarships to students of high school so that they can continue their education in other country like India is sponsoring more than 1000 students annually. They study their bachelor's degree, their master's degree and their PhD in India likewise in Pakistan and also through the Fulbright program in the US. They are providing more than 60 scholarships annually and in the same case it is happening with a lot of other countries that are there. UK have achievement scholarship and some other scholarships that are happening in Afghanistan. So when it comes to the remote areas of Afghanistan we don't talk about the cities because in the cities people have access to learning English or learning some other skills in order to make them eligible for this scholarship. Because every scholarship comes with a requirement for them to be able to be eligible for this concept. They have to equip themselves with that knowledge say English, mathematics and other subjects. But then it comes to the rural part of the country where I have travelled so many times in order to train them for some specific skills. When you travel them it's very difficult for them to speak in English so you have to actually design the program or the curriculum in such a way that is in their local languages for the schools or for the international partners or for the international donors. For them to reach those places or those rural parts of Afghanistan first they have to actually establish a learning center in English and then they can actually invest in other scholarships. It is quite difficult but slowly and it's taking so much time for those who are in far places to get equipped with the English or just to make sure that they can communicate with these things. And there are some certain scholarships that they will be in their own language like in Russia, they study in Russia, in Kazakhstan or in Central Asia. They study in Russian or in Turkey and so many universities they study in Turkey. So what they do is that they take the students from here and they provide like one year study in local language and then they send them for the university. And also in so many universities in Central Asia as well as in India, in Pakistan what they do is that they take the students in those countries and they give them a one year course in English and then they start the actual degree. So these are the ways that international partners can actually join in helping the students because it's a good opportunity that I may say this that because I see a lot of school principals here and those who are managing education. It would be nice if there could be platforms or there could be ways where students can go for exchange programs in school students if they can go for exchange programs in India or any other country. For them it would be quite a nice experience and they could come back. For instance, we had once an experience through youth thinker society where we have sent around a batch of seven batches of seven people who were all students to different countries. So that program was to attend a model year conference, which is also a learning experience so they actually learn a lot from what's happening in the globally different countries when they came back to Afghanistan they actually brought that knowledge back and now we're seeing a lot of activities in different universities. So these are the ways that different schools can help from around the country. We definitely work on that. I'm sure a lot of schools would love to collaborate with you on these pointers as well and we'll definitely talk about that in due course. We have actually overshot time by close to 20 minutes but you know we've had such amazing discussions with school leaders and we probably have time for two to three more questions before we move on to the ask me anything with educators from across the globe. My sincerest apologies to all of you for the delay in starting this event but we've just had such an amazing discussion and we've had so many leaders joining us it would be injustice to not get their views on a range of questions. Gary, would you like to add to what money was saying I see your hand. Thank you and I just want to follow on from the near there. You know I'm sure everybody feels the same you know the challenges Afghanistan is facing. We all want to support and find ways to connect and give opportunities to students in Afghanistan and in all the colleagues countries I'm sure that I can speak for everybody confidently there. I just want to point you know my own you know kind of connection to you now and say I would love to personally connect to you and look at opportunities how you could connect to my school in the centre of London, because I think there's a brilliant opportunity for my students to learn from yours and the children that you connected to learn from ours and we will talk about exchange and I mentioned earlier mania about the British Council, they've been magnificent in terms of funding and so on so let's talk please. Thank you so much Gary I think that really means a lot to money and will definitely connect both of you to take this forward. One question that I'd like to ask considering we are talking about English and languages.  How important do you think is it not to simply learn English but there are a lot of these languages that are globally spoken. How have you seen students transform through the learnings in different languages, specifically English in your case. Yes, I can only speak about specifically English and what's really important for me with language and the, as long as I've been in communication and communication through language, the more I realize that what you say isn't often what people here. The most important message is to listen. And if you don't understand to have the humility to ask. So that's my strongest message about communication. Make sure you really understand what somebody is saying. And if you don't think you've got it right, ask again. I have seen in terms of change and it's not so much with students it's more to do with teachers actually around the world there's a huge number of teachers who are obliged to teach English or another language but they don't actually have the skills themselves to do it. And they feel threatened because they don't feel skilled up to do it. And especially these days with technological advances and then being asked to use some new system that they are not only challenged linguistically but also technologically. And that has a huge impact on their confidence. So one of the things that I have noticed when you get teachers involved in learning whichever language it happens to be within a very short space of time, they begin to realize they can do it. And that has a huge impact on their confidence and that confidence then of course is translated through the classrooms to the teacher to the children. It's absolutely essential that you invest in your teachers to make sure that they have the confidence to carry things forward. And also it's absolutely essential that you make sure that the children realize the power of good communication. It's interesting Nicholas early and several people have said how important the skill of critical thinking is. And I think in the past critical thinking used to be applied to problem solving engineering and so on. But these days actually critical thinking is applied to communication and being able to read the messages and to read what is a genuine message and what is misinformation. So communication these days has gone completely wild in terms of what is out there and how it's being delivered and whether it's true or it isn't. But to be able to see into the truth, you have to be able to be a master of the language as well, even your own language. Thank you so much, Angela. I think that's a very deep and thought provoking statement that you have made. You know, it's very important to understand different aspects of what you have said. Sweatlana I think wants to add and we have time for a very quick comment before we go to Dr. Vora to conclude this entire panel discussion. Thank you so much, Anesh. I'll just be very, very brief and saying that you know I at Angela is is heads a project with the which is a perfect example of what can be done, you know, with a cats which is this English language learning course that we brought to Brazil. We have created opportunities here, which can't be measured. I'll give you a very good example that we had here today. We have Francisco Romano, who has been a student of this program that was actually a very generous donation from from CMEDT from the UK to a program that we are running here in Brazil. He has recently graduated his English skills have improved so much that he was able to visit Angela in Cambridge last year. And today he works with us. He is actually participating in the Pandia project. He is one of the coordinators there. And this is a great example of how important these these initiatives are. Yeah, so I just want to register that as as a solid example of what can be done and is actually being done. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing that Svetlana. I'm sure Angela has been doing a tremendous work across the globe and she's deeply respected at Elpa International School, India too. Thank you so much everyone once again.


Boys basketball tonight's playoff action in Esco as they hosted the peers pioneers second half Esco leading and Trevor Spindler adds a tray He led with 37 points peers later Michael lean frost and Brett Schilling both with buckets But the pie but Esco is too much tonight to make it look easy. The esco is taken at home 83 to 60 If you enjoyed this segment of lakeland news Please consider making a tax deductible contribution to lakeland pbs


Hello, I'm MC2 Domestico and welcome to a conversation with a shipmate. I'm here with the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenit and the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Mike Stevens. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks, Petty Officer Domestico. It's good to be here. Thank you.  Today, however, I'd like to focus on your most recent position report in which you talked about where we are in the Navy today and the importance of presence and operating forward in the future. My first question for you is, we've heard you loud and clear when you said that presence is our mandate. Moving into 2014, what is the key to maintaining a global presence? In 2014 and really beyond, the key to forward presence is to have a rotational force forward such as carrier strike groups out of east-west coast, amphibious ready groups east-west coast, but there's another element that's very important and we need to develop it properly and that is non-rotational presence forward. And it's about places such as road to Spain where we'll have four destroyers by 2016, such as Singapore where we'll have four literal combat ships operating forward out of Singapore, continuing to develop our forces in the, we call the Forward Deployed Naval Force in Japan and the Darwin option. The government of Australia has offered us to forward deploy Marines and we'll provide the lift for that out of Darwin, Australia. These non-rotational places are really the key to getting the most out of our forward forces. Thank you, sir. Sir, how does the current budget situation in Washington affect the Navy's ability to operate forward? Well, it's a heck of a challenge. The key to this is to be able to plan properly and that's difficult when you have a continuing resolution and to have enough money and sequestration really limits our operating budget. But the deal is we have to get enough ships into maintenance so that they are ready to go when it's their turn to deploy forward and that's a real challenge. We've been able to work through it, but it hasn't been the most efficient effort. The second piece is to get our forces trained so that when they deploy they have all their skill sets, all their what we call essential task lists complete. So that maintenance and that training for deployment are the two key challenges. How will these realities of sequestration affect deployment lengths? Yeah, that's a good question and I understand that. Listen, the next three carrier strike group deployments are looking to be close to nine months and that's a factor of just how the sequencing of maintenance for carriers predominantly took place once sequestration went into effect in January of 2013. But after these next three deployments, which will take us through 2014 into 2015, we'll probably migrate to about eight months in our carriers for op-tempo length, for deployment length, if you will. Our amphibious ready groups, they'll be around seven and a half months. Our submarines about six months and so we'll be stabilized in a few years but it'll take those few years to get through this impact of sequestration. And so do you anticipate those deployment lengths changing after a few years? I do. I will migrate to about eight months for our carrier strike groups, about seven months, maybe a week, seven months a week with our amphibious ready groups, cruisers and destroyers, about seven months. Somewhere right in around there is where I think things will be. I think we have to keep in mind though, as they say, the world gets a vote and we're a responsive force and as the common Marine Corps and I like to say, we become the 9-1-1 force. So we'll just have to see how the stabilization of the world takes place here. Yes, sir. My next question is for you, McPon. How does all of this impact morale, not just for sailors but for their families as well? I'll tell you, our sailors and their families never cease to amaze us. Their ability to continue to deploy and go forward as we need them in this high op tempo has been nothing short of amazing. But we cannot fool ourselves. We have to understand that this has taken a toll and will continue to take a toll on our sailors and their families, which is why we need to take a hard look, a close look at how we're deploying and how often we're deploying. One of the things we're doing right now is we're engaged fully in tracking op tempo to find out how long are our sailors out there so that we have the big picture? So we can better understand what we need to do in the future and how we need to manage those deployments. Thank you, McPon. Thank you, Admiral. You've talked about the quality of service formula. Can you describe that for us a little and tell us what you'd like sailors to take away from that? Sure. You know, I think of our sailors' environment in two parts, like you mentioned. Their quality of life and their quality of work. And that defines, I think, the quality of the service that they provide. We do polls every two years to see how do our sailors feel about, for example, their quality of life, are they properly compensated, et cetera. And they say they are. They say we feel like we're being paid properly. Our benefits are effective. But where we need some work is quality of work. That's the predictability of their schedule. We've got to do better. That's having the right kind of leadership in place. We've got to do better. Get rid of gaps at sea. Make sure they have spare parts. Make sure their training is done professionally and personally, that they have those opportunities. That's an element that I think we need to work on. So we're better in balance with that quality of service in between quality of life and quality of work. Thank you, sir. Back to you, McPon. I'd like to talk a little about what's on the minds of sailors, both at sea and ashore. In regards to Navy advancement exams, with our Navy being as technologically advanced as it is, how do you explain that it still takes two to three months to get exam results? And is there any way that we could improve that process? That's a great question. You would think in the 21st century that we could streamline this and do it a lot faster, right? But the reality of it is the structure that we have in place requires both pencil and paper, data entry, and then computer generation. So it takes time to process all this data to get the results to our sailors. I have this, if you want to call it a dream, that one day a sailor will go to boot camp and we'll be able to issue them a smart tablet device. And on that smart tablet device, we can push things like advancement exams to them so they could log on and securely take that exam and then send it electronically to wherever it needs to go so that it can be electronically scored and then published. And who knows, within a matter of days or weeks, we can have the advancement exam results published for the whole Navy. We're working on things like that right now. I've submitted a proposal to our N8, our money people, and to our information folks in N2 and N6 to take a look at this and see what we can do. But I recognize that it's going to take time as we work through this and it may not happen on my watch, but I feel obligated to at least start that ball rolling and see where it takes us. Well, I look forward to seeing some of that progress in the future. Thank you, McPump. Back to you, CNO. In recent testimony to Congress, you mentioned the possibility of having to make changes to personnel entitlements. Can you describe for us what that means and tell us where you think we need to strike a balance between pay and services to sailors and their families? Sure. Well, I think we have a situation we just have to come to grips with. And I think we need to do it in the near term. And the next few years have not this year alone. And that is the fact is that this year, as we're here today, 50% of every Department of Defense dollar is spent on compensation. So we have to figure, can we continue this growth in compensation in a declining budget environment? And I think we have to come to grips with that. Is it the appropriate time to slow pay raises? Is it the appropriate time to look at BAH, to look at our health care predominantly for our retirees when I talk about health care? So no matter what, however we approach this, we have to be transparent. And we will in the Navy. We'll talk to our people and show them what we mean, why we mean that, and we'll get the feedback. But the fact of the matter is it's getting quite expensive, this compensation. And we have to balance that with what we buy to operate. And we're in charge of the security of our country. And we have to organize, train, equip, and man appropriately, in balance. Thank you, sir. Back to you, McPon. I know that the topic of uniforms is a big one for you. Can you give us an update? What can we expect in the near future in regards to changes to our uniforms? I think the goal right now is to not create a lot of uniform chaos or churn. We have a responsibility to always look at ways that we can make improvement to the uniforms that we have. Can we change the way they fit to make them more comfortable? Can we change the properties of those uniforms to make them more safe? And those sorts of things. What we have in work right now are a couple of big items that I'll share with you. We just recently approved and are beginning to release the fire-resistant or flame-resistant coveralls. We're going to release these coveralls to those units that are just now getting ready to deploy, because it takes time to manufacture them. And we've got to buy them and get them on the shelf so we can issue them to sailors. But we have a responsibility to ensure that we're providing a uniform, especially a work uniform, that allows our sailors to operate safely. So we're doing that. Also what we're doing right now is we're doing some wear testing, getting ready to do some wear testing on what we call the lightweight NWU type 1. We've got a lot of feedback from the fleet. They said that the type 1 uniform can be very hot in the summertime and warm climates. And they wanted to know if there's something we could do about it. So we were working with Uniform Matters Office and others to field this NWU type 1 lightweight. And we'll see what the fleet comes back and tells us, because really they're going to be the judge of what we do next. McPon, what is the new normal for receiving PCS orders? I understand that the Navy's goal is six months. However, in 2013, the average was about four months. And now we're looking at three months or less. How should sailors prepare themselves and their families to make these moves with significantly lower lead time? Well, let me start by saying, we don't like what sailors are calling the new normal. We don't like it any more than they do. But much of this is driven by our budget situation that we're in right now. What I'd like to share with sailors and families is work closely with fleet and family services, work closely with our folks that handle our PCS moves, with our career counselors, and other leaders within their command to take control of those things that they own that are not necessarily attached to the orders that don't cost money, but things that they can do to prepare themselves for what we are now seeing as quick turns on orders. And hopefully, in the very near future, we can get back to that five and six month advance notice for PCS orders. That's our goal. That's what we're shooting for, because we don't like these short term orders either. Sir, before we wrap, I'd like to go back to your recent position report. And in it, your focus areas are the Arctic, EM cyber, and in particular, Navy and Marine Corps integration. Can you tell us what we can expect in regards to Navy and Marine Corps integration in the coming year? Sure. Well, you can expect more collaboration, if you will, in synchronization with our Marine brothers and sisters. They're done being ashore as much. They're coming back to sea and being more expeditionary. So there's two really key elements, I think. Number one, the introduction of new platforms. The literal combat ship has an expedition capability to it. The joint high speed vessel, the mobile landing platform, and the afloat forward staging base. These are all kind of ship types, if you will. That will provide a good expeditionary capability. We need to synchronize and decide what concept of operations will take place in these. But I think the biggest challenge in the nearer term will be to understand our command and control together. While the Marines were involved in these land campaigns, they developed and adapted some improved command and control programs, bringing those into the amphibious ready group, into our amphibious ships, and then integrating them into those ship types that I just described. That'll be the key to the future. But we're ready to go. We both want to do this. We've had a great exercise called bold alligator that showed us our way ahead, and we'll take it from there. And Sino, can you tell us why is this integration between Marines and sailors so important to our Navy? Well, because in the future, I think, due to the instability of the world around the world, small skirmishes, instability, and all theaters, it's going to be fast response that'll be key. Nobody is more fast. Nobody is more effective than the Navy Marine Corps team in this regard. And it's not just about big deck amphibious ships. It's about smaller, hacky forces that can move quickly, get to the fight, be where it matters, when it matters. That's what the Navy Marine Corps brings, and nobody is better than that. Well, thank you, sir. You're welcome. Do either of you have anything you'd like to add? Well, I'd like to say thank you to all those that are serving at it. Here we are on the Truman on deployment with a Gettysburg behind us. These are folks that are getting it done on the front. We talked a little bit about longer deployments. This carrier strike group is on a nine-month deployment. And you wouldn't know it. These are the most motivated folks I've come across. And they know what they're doing. They are at the tip of the spear getting it done. And I thank them very much for that on this Thanksgiving day. Thank you, sir. Quick one? As well, I would like to echo what the Sino just said. Thank you to our sailors. Thank you to our families for the tremendous sacrifice they make in the service of our Navy and our nation for the great work that they're doing every single day. We think about them. We care about them. And every one of them matters. Thank you. Admiral McPawn, I want to thank you both for sitting down with us and talking to us today on our conversation with a shipmate. I look forward to hearing from both of you as we move ahead. I'd like to wish you both a happy holidays, and thank you for being with us. Thanks, Peter, for Domestico's great being here. Thank you, sir. And thank you. I'm MC2 Domestico, aboard the USS Harry S. Truman, currently deployed to the Middle East. Thanks for watching.


Ukrainians break through minefield toward city of Tokmak. US officials told CBS News that the Ukrainian military appears to have made progress in its offensive against the Russian-occupied town of Tokmak, an important barrier city between Ukrainian forces and the city of Militopol in Zaporizia Oblast. The US official told CBS News that Ukrainian troops have broken through a Russian minefield north of Tokmak and are now fighting the first line of Russian defence holding the city. The media states that recapturing towns like Tokmak and then advancing to Militopol will be a challenge for the Ukrainian counter-offensive which has made gradual gains since the beginning of the summer. However, Militopol is the gateway to the annexed Crimea and the vital Russian transit hub. Militopol is critical to Ukraine's counter-offensive because it is considered the gateway to Crimea. The city is at the intersection of two important highways and a railroad line that allow Russia to move military personnel and equipment from the peninsula to the occupied territories in southern Ukraine. Ukraine launched the counter-offensive in early June, hoping to replicate its stunning success in last fall's push through the Kharkiv region. Kyiv has recently dedicated more reserves to the front, including striker and challenger units. Ukrainian officials have said privately that timing depends on how quickly forces can penetrate the minefields, a difficult process that has strained the military's mine clearing resources across a wide swathe of territory.


I remember my 10th. She was great. She really was. Anyway, that's the end of there. Yes, so congratulations to Blackstuff for 10 fantastic years, and they are fabulous, and this to another 100 years, or at least quite like them. Where's the cake?


You'll have three talks addressing attacks in those area. The first talk is given by Cesar Pereira, which has a research interest in on-site channel attack and cache timing attacks, and is about cache timing attacks on RSA key generation. Cesar? Thanks for the introduction and sorry for the technical problems. So this is research done in collaboration with Alejandro Cabrera, Luis Manuel Alvarez, from Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana in Cuba, and my supervisor, Billy Bob Bromley. So this is the contents of my presentation. I'll quickly go through introduction, what it is about, and then site channel leakage finding methodology, and until we develop to find the flaws that we exploit in this work, then we analyze the leakage and the attack that we perform, and finally we conclude with some lessons learned. So for the introduction, so what we did is a single trace cache timing attack on the binary extended Euclidean algorithm for GCD during RSA key generation. So by targeting this algorithm, we managed to recover RSA private keys using a single trace, which was a bit complicated. Why did we manage, why did we target this? Sorry. Our motivation was cloud services, and where users are collocated. So one user can spy on the other. It's getting more common and common. On top of that, we have let's encrypt that makes RSA key generation a semi predictable operation. In addition to that, micro-architecture attacks have been quite common lately. Under meltdown and specter, there's been a lot of research into this field. And additionally, RSA key generation has been neglected on the software side. So on the hardware side has been protected, and there's been a lot of research in that area. But on the software side, it's always been assumed that it's not vulnerable, mainly because you only have one chance to capture a trace. So the key is generated only once, and never again. After that, you can use the key, but during the generation, it only happens once. And how did we do this? So we developed a new methodology to help us detect insecure code parts in OpenSSL. And then during the attack, we use a flush and reload technique, which might be known for some of you. Then we borrow some signal processing techniques from physical side channels and perform a lattice attack to recover the private keys. Okay, so now about leakage finding. Before I talk about the leakage finding, I have to talk about the BN flag constant time that it's used in OpenSSL. So OpenSSL relies on this flag to protect against timing attacks. The way this flag works is that it is set on BN big numbers, and every time that some computation needs to be done on these big numbers, which can be scholars or non-says or private values, the function checks. At the top of the function, there's a check to see if it's set. And if it's set, it takes an early exit to a different version of the same function that it's constant time. And if it's not set, then it continues performing a variable time version of the function. This is done because OpenSSL prioritizes performance and security because they assume that most of the operations are public key operations, so we only need to mark the cases where private information is used. Unfortunately, this flag gives a lot of room for mistakes because programmers need to know how it works and where exactly they need to put this flag. And as a proof of that, there's been several flaws that have been exploited because of the mismanagement of this flag. Either they forgot to set it or they set it on the wrong big num. So it's been a big issue in OpenSSL. And so we decided to take all this information from the CVEs and the research that has been done and then we thought, okay, what can we do with this? We came up with a new methodology that allows us to check for flaws in OpenSSL. So what we do is we take this list of vulnerabilities that are known and we use a debugger. And the debugger, we program it to automatically set breakpoints to lines of code that should be unreachable. This means after the early exits, we put breakpoints there so we can see if they continue with the variable time execution or not. And once that we have the debugger and then we have the breakpoints, we run several security-critical operations, such as RSA key generation, encryption, digital signing. And if any of these breakpoints is reached, then we generate a report of that. After the report is generated, we can manually investigate the root cause of that. Sometimes there might be false positives. But every now and then we get real vulnerabilities, like in this case. So for that, we developed a tool that takes the binary, this case OpenSSL, and takes a file with all the triggers, the points of interest that we are interested in the function that we run. In this case, it's RSA key generation using OpenSSL. As you can see from the image, we have three insecure codepads. So we have one in the modular exponentiation that happens during the Montgomery setup. We have a code to the GCD function and then we have a modular, insecure modular inversion during the Miller-Ravin primality test. So out of these three, we decided to attack the BNGCD function because it was the one that was leaking the most information and it was easier to attack. On the side note, the tool was expanded and it was transformed into a continuous integration tool that is called trigger flow by some people from our research group. You can go and check it out in there. It's a really nice tool. Okay, so once that we found the flaws, we have to check into them where it's exactly the flaws or the leakage happening. So for that, we went to the OpenSSL RSA key generation algorithm and in there we checked that after generating the prime values, either P or Q, it performs GCD computation on P-1 and Q-1 and the public exponent E, which in OpenSSL it defaults to the 16 plus one and then checks the coprimality between the prime minus one and the public exponent and if it's coprime, then it proceeds with the computation of the rest of the parameters. If it's not coprime, then it generates a new prime value and repeats the test. So this GCD computation is done using a variable time algorithm, which is the one that we exploited. The rest of the parameters, they don't matter for our attack. They are just for completeness. Now the binary GCD is very dependent on its inputs. I'm not going to explain all of it, but some important things to say is that we can track two pieces of code in here, two blocks of code, so we can track the U loop or V loop in one side and in the other side we can track the sub-step. So these run interchangeably between the two input values, but interestingly, during Eraseki generation what happens is that the input values, one is the public exponent E, which is 16-bit value and the other one is the prime value, which is 1,024-bits. So that means that for the very, let's say, 1,000 iterations it runs only on the prime value. It only reduces the prime value and then when they are about the same size they start to run interchangeably the public exponent and the rest of the prime value. So after considering that, we know that we can just track the sequence of write sheeps or divisions by two on the U loop, V loop, and the subtractions that have been down there. So if we can track that sequence of operations, we can reverse back and get the bits from the prime value. And according to the work by Kopersmith, we know that if we know at least half of the prime value we can factorize N and recover the private key. So that's in theory, of course, in practice it was a little bit more difficult. Okay, so quickly just a reminder for those who are not familiar, we have cache timing attacks because the computer memory hierarchy depends on how close they are to the CPU. So registers and caches are really fast compared to RAM and main memory. And even the caches like the first level cache, second level cache are faster than third level cache. So this difference in time they make possible to perform cache timing attacks. And there are different techniques to perform cache timing attacks. In this work we use what is called flush and reload by Yuval Jaram and Faulkner. And basically this is how it works. So the big team executes some process filling the cache and then the attacker flushes the cache, the same cache line. And then the victim may or may not access that piece of code for that cache line during the waiting period. And then after some waiting period the attacker reloads data. And if the data is there then it's going to be a fast reload. If it's not then it has to go and fetch it from main memory and it's going to take more time. So all these variations in time make possible a cache timing attack. And on the other hand the performant degradation attack is basically just what it's a step to in there. The attacker can just in a loop continuously flush certain memory addresses which are used continuously by the big team. So effectively slowing down the execution of the big team. Okay so after saying that the attack scenario is like this. We have a big team in one core. We have a flush and reload attacker in another core. And a performant degradation attacker in a third core. And they all share OpenSSL. OpenSSL is compiled as a shared library. So they all have access to the same code. And after that basically we have a huge trace that looks similar to what you see on the top. From there we create some templates. And we use the templates to run the Pearson correlation to find the specific parts that we want in these huge traces. Once that we have the parts that we're interested in we run a low pass filter and perform horizontal analysis to recover a sequence of operations similar to what it looks on the bottom. So the L's represent right shifts and the S's represent subtractions. So we always have at least one shift between subtractions. After we have the sequence of operations we need to convert that to sequence of bits. So for that we used and improved expand and prune algorithm which corrects the errors on the sequence of operations. And in general it works that it creates candidates in a tree like it shows in there and then starts creating more and more candidates that fulfill certain rules. The ones that do not fulfill these rules they get pruned. And at the end we end up with a list of candidates of the possible prime value. This list it gets ranked and it is put into a lattice problem. We put the lattice we create several instances of the lattice problem and we put them in a cluster. And the cluster runs for four hours. We let it run for four hours. This is chosen arbitrarily because it represents a good time an attacker can wait for hours. And after those four hours the success rate was 27%. We did this for 10,000 traces and the success rate was around 27%. Okay so that was the attack. After that a summary. So we developed the methodology we used this methodology and the tool to found flaws in OpenSSL. After we found some flaws we went there. We investigate the leakage. The leakage was in GCD algorithm and then we exploit the GCD algorithm with a flush and reload attack. We used signal processing techniques error correction algorithms and lattices to recover the private keys with a success rate of 27%. After these we performed responsible disclosure with OpenSSL. They assigned a CVE to our work and they confirmed that all 110 and 102 branches were affected at the time of the disclosure. OpenSSL 111 which is the latest version did not exist. And they took our patches. So it's fixed now. It's been fixed for some time already. And two important lessons to take from our work is that we need to take a secure by default approach. I think like security libraries should take this approach. Some of them do. Some of them they don't. But I think in general we should strive for that. And we should adopt constant time algorithms like the one presented two days ago. The GCD in constant time. And also we should make sure that the knowledge is transferred. So chess is a nice conference because we have engineers, we have cryptographers, industry, academia together. But it's not always the case. So sometimes that makes not doesn't make possible for the results from academy to permeate to the real world. So we need to find this midpoint and make sure that the security is well implemented. And after that, thank you for listening. And I take questions. Questions for Cesar. No question. I do have one quick question. Can you go back on slide eight? Can you go back on slide eight? Eight, yes. Yes. And a bit more time on how do you select the point of interest? Okay. So to select the point of interest that we use the information that we gather from all these CVs. So in the CVs there, we went to the code in OpenSSL and we saw where the flow was. And then most of the cases the flow was because of the flag was not set. That meant that the secret operations didn't take the early exit to the constant time versions. So in many cases what we did is just chose the points of interest as soon as the check was done. So if the check was not successful and it didn't jump, then it would continue to perform this non-constant time function. And that's how we chose most of the points of interest. Any other questions for Cesar? If not, let's thank Cesar again.


Good morning folks. Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of a very pleasant and sunny Delray Beach, Florida. This year 11 M update and we've got a mixed bag out there. The mix goes like this. You got the Dow off 220 points, about six tenths percent. S&P's down two tenths or 11 points up on the upside. You've got the Nasdaq 100 three tenths percent, 59 points there. Six tenths for the S the socks. The some eyes there up 29 points. The trainees are up 39. The Russell's off four points. As I said, we've got a mixed bag out there. You've got gold that's trading up eight bucks and Silver's down 12 cents. Light's recruiters off a buck. Natural gas is down eight pennies. 30 or Treasury off 11 ticks printed out at one 15 oh seven. Let's try to figure out what all that means by looking at that nine panel market update chart. We begin up the left hand side. The ES mini did close below the bottom of its daily profile yesterday. A second closed below it today. It being 52 19 would give you a profile change in trend signal. I'd say that have some real meaning. If in fact the spot fault tenants can close with that descending trend line. That is its resistance point out there. If you take a look at the end queue, the end queue's got a TD nine count bottom yesterday's price to move downside tested that rejected that also closed above the bottom of its daily profile. Key level here is 18 0 51 50. The case, the US dollar index looks like it's on a rampage. It's got an A to B equal CD pattern of the upside. 106.53 is its price target. We'll take a look at the Euro during the trader's edge show, but that looks to be failing at this stage here. If we take a look at the gold, gold is held up pretty well. Does have a new profile that it is attempting to form. We were at this point yesterday. That profile never did form. We have a new one that is back. The resistance zone is between 23 49 and 23 84. That says watch 23 49. Why? Because of price closed below that. Typically sellers can push price down to the bottom of the profile. That's at the 22 78 level. The case of a silver silver is going to complete. It formed a TD nine count top yesterday. It's completed today. Also attempting to form a new profile supported 26 57 resistance at 28 65. In the case of lights, we crude a consolidation with inside its daily profile. It's got a TD nine count top. The consolidation range between 80 409 and 87 63. In the case of natural gas, it's got a road meant to indicator bottom, but it has failed to take out a prior swing point at 1.906. It's failed to it's right now training back inside its daily profile out there. It is at a support area, which is 1.793. The support zone or the buy zone is between 1.750 1.793. The 30 year treasury set the 1.272 expansion of its C to D leg. Really have the A to B leg out there. Just waiting for a bullish reversal candidate to identify a bottom. Folks, stay tuned for the Traders Ed show, if you will. And if you're off to start your Thursday, have a terrific one. Thanks for joining us. We'll look forward to speaking with you again soon. Take care now.