yn y bobl yng Nghaerdydd, yn y gawith. Yn ymdudio'r cyffredin�� l designers i'w gweld fel yma, eich ddweud yn ym mhwanol byddai, i fynd ar ystod i'r unigion. Wrth gwrs ym nid oedd ymddangos a'r gwbl i'ch dod ymddangos ymddangos a'r unigion, ac ydw i'n ddweud ymddangos a'r ysgol yw'n ddweud am fyw ddweud i gwaeth yr unigion yn y prynsibl humaidd ac yn ddweud hon am y dyde. Rhaid i'w ddisgrifennu. Yn ystod y university, mae gennym, mae gennym, mae gennym'n allan i'w ffacultau ac mae'n bwysig i'w ddechrau i'r gwrs, ond ar ychydig yn ymwelwch, mae'r cymdeithas i'r cyfunol hwn. Chris yw'r ymddiol i'r lleoli, yn ymddangos i'r iawn i'r newid, ac yn ymddangos i'r IT yma. Rwy'n gweithio i'w ddweud, rwy'n gweithio i'w ddweud eich model sy'n cyflwyno. Chris help to work out what sort of moodle system we should build and go out and get users using it well. I want to have a map, but you can't really draw the open university on a map because we're a distance education institution. All our students study from wherever they happen to be in the UK or beyond. The one thing you can draw on the map is the main campus in Milton Keynes, it's where Chris and I work and it's where the moodle servers are hosted, so that's quite important. We're quite a big place. Typical OU, so OU study is modular and this kind of thing to take away is modules are quite big things. They're several hundred hours of learning and they run for six or nine months student study than part time. I said student study wherever they are, now they're not completely on their own, they're in a group with maybe about 16 other students and an assigned tutor. The other thing to know is really we prepare our courses up front which might take a year or two and then those courses get presented with only minor modifications for whatever their natural life is that might be average seven years but could be more or less. We have a very nice campus that is actually in the middle of Milton Keynes, it's a very nicely designed town with lots of parkland and we've been using moodle for about 11 years now since moodle 1.6. We've contributed a lot to the community in that time and we think that's important and our main moodle site's pretty big. There's just a quick graph showing our use of quiz over the years. First it took off a lot, you could ask what happened in 2012 and in 2012 we had a government that didn't really believe in paying for higher education and that hurt our student numbers and what's happened most recently actually is that sort of badged open courses have taken off on our open learn platform. Just quickly we use the quiz a lot, do our students like it, do they think it's helpful and so this is just some survey data from one course but it's pretty typical. So yes students think they think it helps them learn and even they think it can be a fun activity. So that's just a bit of background to the OU. Now Chris is going to talk about what goes into making one particular quiz and then I'll talk about how quizzes fit into the overall course. So over to Chris. Thanks Tim. Yes so very complicated, you can spend as little as five minutes or as much as five months quite easily and I could talk about this for an hour. But just to get a OU-ism out of the way, what we call an online test is made up of unassessed quizzes and assessed ICMAs or interactive computer marked assessments. So there's a lot of considerations when designing a online test and it depends a lot on the assessment strategy where it fits into our modules, what the online test is trying to achieve and ultimately obviously the questions that the module team would like to ask the students and therefore what sort of question types best fit that question itself. So here's some stats that we recently ran and one of the big things that I hope you can see on the pie chart is that multiple choice accounts for almost 40% of all answered question types at the OU. Good reason for this, it's very straightforward, it's accessible and it's easy to mark. One less obvious thing and it's to do with colour in here is that the green segments they represent the selected response type. So that's essentially where the options are presented and the student only has to select a response. Obviously there are some issues around this, for example a student might simply recognise one of the responses or they'll work out which one's the wrong and then just take a random guess. So maybe it's not always the best method to use for testing. The blue segment is the constructed responses and these are where the student will construct essentially their response. It's open-ended and this is where you'll see the typed essays, the short answers and pattern match for example. It's generally characterised by a blank input area with no clues but these questions can be much harder to plan, design, implement and test as well as mark. So moving on, the next consideration is usually whether or not to draw randomly from a large question bank say 10 questions in the online test and there's 50 that will randomly be drawn from the larger question bank. Whether or not there will be set questions and those set questions will have variants within it or right down to the very simple design where there are just simply say 10 set questions. And then there's also the behaviours. So interactive with multiple tries is where a student will answer one question at one time, submit it and then they will be given some hints if it's wrong and given some feedback which will allow them to try again and the possible marks will be adjusted. The alternative is deferred feedback and we tend to use this mostly in our assessed ICMAs and that's where students can go through the entire online test, answer every single question and then amend their responses prior to the final submission. And once that is submitted the feedback is in provided either immediately if it's formative or after a cut off date if it's summative. So there are a couple of best practice points that I'd like to highlight here and the big one for us is to always clearly communicate to students in advance the online test availability, what it's testing and its scope so whether or not it's the first unit or the entire module and then how the online test will behave. So if a student gets one variant and another student gets another and there's a question then there might be some confusion because not everyone was getting exactly the same question. What will happen after completion is very important especially if for example it's a diagnostic quiz and that might feed into a tutorial later on. So if there's an area that all the students in the tutor group didn't do too well on then you can actually have that as a tutorial segment. What I'd really like to press home though is the use, review and improve for next time especially if it's assessed. So that's some of our key points and now over to Tim to discuss use in practice. Thanks Chris. So yes that's the considerations for building one quiz and then how do quizzes fit into the overall learning design of your module. So this is some more of the data analysis we did when preparing this talk and I was quite surprised by this one. This is the number of different quizzes in courses that use the quiz and I was expecting to find that like if you're going to use the quiz you probably have half a dozen across your module. But actually if you're using a quiz the most common number to use is one so let's look at why people use different number of quizzes. So turns out there's no particular reason why people use one quiz it just turns out that somewhere in this module you need a particular learning activity and quiz fits the bill. So at the top you've got there's just been a tutorial on data analysis in a sort of nursing course or something and after that tutorial there's a chance to come back and do a practice quiz to consolidate your knowledge. The next one's similar they've just had a session online about team working online and this is a sort of quiz that I suppose is meant to prompt reflection a whole bunch of true false things to think about. If you were doing group work face to face you'd do this is this relevant in an online setting. So those are sort of formative uses at the bottom we have a summative use a module I studied was the introduction to social science which obviously you might expect is mostly assessed by essays. But towards the end again they had a data analysis bit that they needed to assess and they did that with a Moodle quiz because it fitted the bill and that's the only quiz in the course. But what is kind of I would say more typical for a course that's using big use of the quiz. So here's one of our level one maths courses. The course is split into 12 units each takes two weeks and at the end of every two week block there's a practice quiz so you can see if you've taken in what you meant to have learnt. And then you have some for assessed quizzes throughout the course and the strategy here it is that OK so we hope the students will do the assessed quizzes because there are marks up for grabs. And then because they have to do the assessed quizzes hopefully that will drive them to do all the practice quizzes to sort of consolidate their learning first. And then there's a written quiz again so let's have a look at does that actually work. Here's some data about that. Slightly complicated graph which I apologise I stole it from one of my academic colleagues. So the first four bars show the assessed quizzes and what you can see is that there's a drop off through the life of the module which is a bit regrettable. But the red the red line shows the equivalent sort of handwritten assignments that the tutor marks and there's also a drop off. And it turns out that if you're doing open entry maths courses that's quite hard and you do lose students and we'll come back that in a minute. And then the other bars of the practice quizzes and you can see there's quite a lot of use of practice quizzes that does also drop off. And with the practice quizzes there can be multiple attempts which is why the bars are stacked up. It's also very interesting to look at the when students do the quiz which is what this is showing. And you can see very clearly guess where the deadlines for the assessed quizzes are. But what you can see there when you have a spike for one of the assessed quizzes also the lines for all the corresponding practice quizzes dip up as well. So it seems like that assessment strategy is actually working the idea that the assessed quizzes will drive use of the practice quizzes. And of course at the end you can see look where the exam revision is. So again that's sort of what not unsurprising when you look. So I said open access is difficult and the thing is trouble is open access is absolutely fundamental to the DNA of the open university. So really the issue is how can we prevent students from kind of biting off more like they can chew and sort of committing themselves to a personal mistake. And it's a big worry so they've tried various things but the sort of summary is of all the things they tried the thing that was most sort of effective was to get students to do a diagnostic quiz before they sign up for this course. And then based on the mark they get on the diagnostic quiz we might try and direct them to sign up for a more appropriate introductory course first. And it's not correlation but students who did the diagnostic quiz and acted on it, if they go on to the course they're about 60% chance of passing whereas 40% of students who didn't. So that's another use of the quiz. The previous graph of how many quizzes in a course was cut off at 20. So what is the most quizzes in an OU course? The answer is 114. Our Beginner's Chinese course is a 36 week course and every week there are three practice quizzes quite short. Wow but you know it's not just this one all the beginners language courses do this it's an effective pattern that's worked for them. I was short of time so I'm afraid I'm going to skip this but this is basically this was a quiz without a hard deadline. This is when they put in a hard deadline you must do it by the deadline or you can't do it later and total completions went up. And this is just very quickly all our different subject areas and whether they use quiz and in the past it was kind of only stem but now really all subject areas use the quiz in some way. This is formative when it's summative it's still not all faculties but even now like W is law the law faculties jumped on board with assessed quizzes. So now back to Chris to talk about some of the practical issues of running the quiz at scale. Thanks Tim. So just another warning this is another oversimplified diagram. Essentially we use a workflow system and the amount of use depends on whether it's a brand new online test if it's being viewed or if it's an older test that is simply rolled forward with every module presentation. But essentially we have the academic author or authors who will devise and create the questions and then other members of the academic team will test it and they'll be backed up with editors who will help proofread the questions. And responses and our online services colleagues who help administer. Once it's approved it's then copied across to a live site. And then when it comes to administration of in this case assessed ICMA the main point is that it requires a human expert who must always check the score in practice should always be continuous improvement after the online test is closed. There should be a view of the actual responses given and general improvements to the question hints and feedback made if and as necessary. Finally it's always worth adding new questions dependent on form feedback or areas the cohort may have struggled with in the other assessments. Now back to Tim to wrap up. Right thanks Chris. So this is not an academic presentation so we shouldn't really have done references but actually some of our colleagues. I mean all this talk is based on things that have been found out by teachers around the OU and some of them have written it up in papers and they are really quite interesting papers if you're an assessment geek like us. So we're not expecting you to write this down. We'll put the slides on slide share and you can follow the references if you're interested. So just to wrap up there is no one right answer for how to use quiz. It really what the right thing to do is depends on what you're trying to achieve educationally. However it does seem to be the case. I mean effective education often it's as simple as time on task and then active learning is better than passive learning and you know quizzes are a good way to scaffold some active learning time for your students. So basically give it a go you're unlikely to do any harm for your students unless you build something that's just a complete waste of time. But also don't expect and don't worry about getting it right first time. After your students have done it have a look at what happened and you can probably adjust it and make it better. I said there's no general advice but actually generally I would say little and often or even little and once in a course is probably all you need. Just you know you don't have to build huge quizzes no one will enjoy that. And finally sort of summarising use at the OU it seems it's much more it's not really about the marks. All these quizzes really are about the learning they inspire even if they happen to be marks floating around. So that's it. Thank you very much.


Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back, we're live here in San Francisco, California, VMworld 2014. I'm John Furrier, my co-host for the segment, Stu Miniman, and our next guest is Rex Walters, VP of Technology at Tintree, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We're all getting our second win, I got coffee, day two, wall-to-wall coverage, Tintree, you guys have been a big player in the ecosystem for a while, great company, great success story, give us a take on what's going on with storage, and you guys here at VMworld real quick. Well, the amazing thing is this has kind of become, I mean, in my opinion, this is the storage show now, right, if you go out on the floor, it's just amazing the number of storage companies that are out there. I think it's a part and parcel with cloud virtualization is what the consumer of storage, right, you're running your apps inside of a cloud device of some sort, that's what's generating the data that's filling up your storage. Dave Vellante, we started theCUBE, it's our fifth year, I was EMC World 2010, and Dave said, oh, it used to be called Snorage, now it's the hottest thing, back then we're like, oh, it's going to be really hot with the cloud, Snorage being kind of boring, but now, since then, it's just the gift that keeps giving, you know, the innovation around storage, it's the engine around it because the confluence of the different trends, big data, you got Internet of Things, cloud, obviously changing architecturally, new with Flash, so it's been a massive upheaval in transformation, and it feels like it's just getting started, so give us your take on that. I mean, obviously, all those things kind of are happening, but where are we now, and how much more can this go? Is it a bubble? Is it real? What's going on? No, it's definitely real, but I think the biggest thing is people are demanding the same level of agility with their applications, with their other infrastructure, with servers and with networking, they need it with their storage as well, and people want to consume it as simply as possible, they want, I need this much capacity, I want the infrastructure to just take care of it, make sure it's delivering the user experience and quality of service that I need. So, customers really are also kind of in mid-flight of this transformation too, so I got to ask you the customer question, because the other ones on the ground have to deal with the, you know, V-Valls we're hearing about, things like that, we're hearing about Lons again, and automation clearly is the new thing, we had Carl Hatcher about saying they're in the data center automation business, but when you automate, you're basically doing a few things, you're abstracting complexity, but you're also eliminating things, so are people losing their jobs? Are they shifting? But this is what's happening, things are going away, functions are going away, what do you see there in the customer environment? What's being abstracted away? What are the key value things that are positive for the customers? I just want to, you triggered a thought, which is I remember you'd walk into a data center, you'd walk into an IT shop, and you would see the voice guys on one side of the room, and the data guys on the, excuse me, the data guys on another side of the room, and they couldn't really communicate, right? You had the voice guys knew all this arcane knowledge about trunking protocols, and arcane knowledge about tell switches and whatnot, and you know, they're not around anymore, they've all become data guys, data is everything, and I would actually not to put too fine a point on it, I think that the storage guys are kind of the new voice guys, right? I think everything is converging to this cloud model of being able to deploy your applications as quickly and agile as possible. At the same time, it's made it hard, right? It's not an easy thing to do when you've got more running on less, you've got to make sure it works. If I wonder if I can ping a night, that's a pretty bold statement, because you know, when I've talked to, I spent most of my career networking, I actually told Telcom Gear back in the 90s, and we- He was offended by the voice comments too, it's okay. No, no, no, but we looked back, and one of the things they said, oh, we can just put voice over IP, and that'll be real easy, and we look back and we say, wow, those voice guys were actually doing some things that we like lost. And for storage, storage is a critical component. I mean, if I lose my data, I'm out of business. If I have corruption, I could really mess up some really bad things. So, storage is a critical component. What's that transition? Storage roles change, we think, but does that role go away and merge into a virtualization of the cloud? Adminagely, what can you talk? Yeah, obviously it's an overstatement to say storage guys are no longer necessary, that's certainly not the case. There was a George Gilder quote a million years ago about things, convergence not meaning so much things combining into new, it's the new kind of utterly destroys the old. Open systems kind of replace mainframes, but we still have mainframes and we still have mainframe experience out there today. Automobiles replace horses, we still use mounted police. No, but the big points too, great point, I think that's a good point. Voice never went away, but PBX remember they were around, digital, the whole unified communication, it's just never happened, right? So like the bets were wrong, but the functionality never went away, right? So it still has voice mail, it's still phones and no, but now. No, no, but to John, it was specifically the administrators of the voice stuff. If we just eliminated that role, we lost something in our environment. Well, don't you think it shifts those two? So the guys that were doing the voice stuff to the point, right? If they clung on and said, no, I'm going to stay here, I'm going to stay peaked on voice stuff, they're basically out of work, right? The smart money said, hey, I need to get retrained. John, I'm with you a thousand percent, it's retraining, it's cross training, it's getting people involved. I just, right, as we're saying, we're not getting rid of the storage expertise, it is going to change the functionality. Hopefully your storage guys aren't going to be creating and managing lones, because we don't need to do that anymore, so it is a maturation and a change, but some storage management is still going to need to be somewhere. It's where you're applying the knowledge, right? I mean, ultimately now, all infrastructure exists to support your applications, it's all about the apps, your apps are seeing what they perceive as locally attached, direct attached storage, and that's where your different quality of service needs are, right? If you've got something that's doing nothing but sequential writes, you want to do something different for it than something that's got a very scattered random read-write max. And I think the thing that's changed is everybody making their policy decisions on a per VM, per virtual volume basis. Yeah, right, Rick, so that per VM, I think when Tintree first came out, it was, you know, VM aware storage, and what I kind of smile at this show is virtual volumes or V-Vols is coming out soon, and in many ways, the promise of it is what you guys are delivering. So what's your take on V-Vols and how does that affect Tintree and your mission? So we're, very bluntly, we think the first step to being able to deliver this cloud-like storage is having that granularity of per virtual volume being able to deliver a different user experience to be able to tune and optimize on a per virtual volume basis. What used to be virtual disks are now virtual volumes. We're looking forward to it becoming much more real here as in beta currently, and we're expecting to see it come out here shortly. And when it does, we can start comparing the degree that we believe supporting very large numbers of virtual volumes is going to be incredibly important. Being able to truly deliver different tuning, different on a per virtual volume basis, I think is going to be difficult for some vendors to implement. So we're looking forward to being able to compete on the implementation of the idea rather than just the IDP and the only guys out there.  So Rex, some of the other big themes, it's not just a VM world anymore when it comes to virtualization, it's a multi-hypervisor world, cloud of course is impacting everything. So what's Tintry's role in a multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud world? We have to support it. I mean, that's the nature of a cloud, especially the way companies grow as they acquire other companies and sometimes it's not the same infrastructure you're going to deal with something else. We think both supporting multiple hypervisors as well as being able to convert between multiple hypervisor formats is very important. It is the applications that are driving the storage, it's focusing on how those applications are running, it's not about the infrastructure. Rex, I got to ask you about, obviously the EVO rail announcement, how that ties in here, because some of our analysis is clearly showing that it's actually pure validation for you guys, right? I mean, what that actually says is purpose-built or hyper-converged, essentially just a word for packaging is the way and the software stack really becomes a critical aspect of it. So I want you to comment, do you believe that to be true? Do you see EVO rails announcement validating the consumption from customers is not about either approach, appliances are okay, but really it's a software piece and the software stack in particular. Can you comment on that? Yeah, well I think ultimately again, it's the apps and apps are being developed in a different way. I mean, we're kind of seeing this primacy of dev ops as the buzzword these days and what it really means is we're kind of going back to the mainframe days of having the IS organization where you're developing custom apps and especially as we have these cloud-like approaches to delivering your applications where you've got multiple machines delivering the same service, I think that model of having new software stacks using things like object storage and using, there's lots of different- That changes the game of manageability, scalability, right? Exactly. So those guys doing that stuff could move into different functions, not like there's not enough work to do. I mean, you mentioned the mainframes, we were commenting yesterday on our closing segment that we're seeing a rise of the developer in-house. Exactly. You really haven't seen that. Even in client-server, it was outsourced to the consultants, PC was shrink-wrapped, web was the web, but back in the mainframe days, you had guys in-house called spaghetti code guys like writing all that code. So now we're back there, right? So people are building more developers, more data science, more aspect. Does that change the management piece of it? Do you guys enable that? I guess that's my question. Do you guys enable that growth? We believe we do, certainly. And in fact, the nature of using some of these new storage protocols and using some of these new approaches requires you to re-architect and redesign your app. And I think all of it is a sign of the desire for more agility to be able to move things more quickly and not be kind of stone walled by, oh, we carve off our lones this way, this is the way it's always going to be. They need to be able to deploy things in a new way. So Rex, you've been in the storage industry for quite a while. One of the interesting trends we've been watching is moving beyond the storage of data in our storage. It's things like data management, of course, does that data gravity come out with what they're doing to kind of do some analytics on top of that? What's Tintree's view on that? Well, I mean, to be brutally honest, we try to stay away from what's inside, right? That we consider to be the application's responsibility. We recognize we are an infrastructure product. So we try, in our company, not to know more about what's inside too much, other than, again, the multi-hypervisor thing, we need to know how to convert between them. But we do see the need for it. That makes total sense to us, because that ultimately becomes a type of application. People do want to know more about their data. And we're seeing people deploying things inside of VMs to deliver storage services. To us, that's fascinating. That's something that we very much like to support. So if we talk about VMs, the workloads are changing a lot. There are plenty of applications that are still running on bare metal. Of course, Docker's been a big discussion at this point. Is Tintree reliant on the VM? Can we do some bare metal? Can we do containers? How does that all fit into your environment? To us, our whole point, when we say we're VM aware storage, what we really mean is applications that are talking to software pretending it's hardware. How that's done, we really don't care. It's that abstraction model of having virtual disk, virtual volumes, virtual machines, whether it's running in a Docker container or whether it's running in a traditional boot. So if Docker takes over the world, you guys aren't out of this. Absolutely, yeah, 100%. Thank goodness. Chris, here's the update on the company that's going on. Tintree, obviously, VentureVac from NEA. I think Pete's on the scene, he's on the board. Friend of ours, we had him on theCUBE this morning. Also an investor in our new crowd chat engagement container being called the docker of social media here at the show. Certainly a great investor. What's going on at the company for you guys? What's the status on headcount, engineering? What are you guys doing? What's the key milestones? We're growing very rapidly, which is a good thing. We've literally just moved. This VM world is obviously a very big show for us. Never fails, everything happens at the same time. We literally just moved into a new facility about a couple times by large than where we were before. I believe, what time is it? Last time I checked, I think we're about 280, 290 employees currently. And fortunately, things are moving up into the right. What's the product engineering culture like at Tintree? What do you guys really obsess about? We obsess about cloud. We really do. Private cloud, the cloud approach to doing things, the new styles of developing apps for object based storage versus the traditional file NAS type approach. We want to see where things are going, get to where the puck's going to be kind of a thing. But to us, it's all about how people are deploying their applications. And big customer changes for you guys in terms of adoption. What are you guys seeing for big trending, mega trends that you're riding in terms of customer on the customer front? That's the really fun thing about what we're doing right now. As we're seeing this quick uptake when somebody actually deploys one of our systems and sees how it can work, they're scaling very rapidly in their own environment. So we have some very large deployments now where people have started with initial, very focused use case, and then they've gone and said, this is so easy to scale. I'm not having to deal with my infrastructure. It's just taking it into the form. Yeah, very horizontally scalable. That's very DevOps oriented. Exactly. They kick the tires and then they go, let's move this out. It's all about agility. Is the value of the management side or scalable? It's ultimately, if you really distill it down, it's all about simplicity, but it's not simplicity as in lack of functionality. It's simplicity as in the infrastructure is dynamically adapting to stuff rather than the human administrators having to predict where you're going. Yeah, so Rex, since the last time we had Tintry on theCUBE, went through some management change, went through a complete rebranding. Now red seems as the new color there. You know, there's so many companies out there pushing SDS and SDDC and the various things. How does Tintry differentiate itself in the marketplace? So we, again, in our world, ultimately it's the end users and what they're doing. And what we're seeing is at least half of our customer base is moving to at least half of their business being outsourced cloud service provider oriented businesses. It may not be all of their applications, but it's some of them. We very much are approaching both markets. That's exactly where we're going. Whether you call it private cloud, SDDC, softwares of service, P-A-S-I-A-S, all of those things are kind of the same thing. It's all about VMs and containers and that method of deploying your apps. So there's always a disruption conversation. So I got to ask you who you're disrupting. We, on theCUBE, like to say, there's three levels of disruption. There's the disruptors, like Tintry, Nutanix, you guys, the new school, punching upstream if you will. The people who are being disrupted fall in two categories. The series C or D funded companies are trying to go public from many years ago and then fully the incumbents, the public companies, NetApp, EMC. So who are you guys? You guys are asking in the disruption phase, who are you nibbling at the lunch and dinner of? Is it EMC? Is it more NetApp? Some say you're taking some share from NetApp. Were you guys winning? Who are you agitating out there in the market with your product? You hit the right companies.  I know each one. Top break amount, top three. I would say top one, two and three would be NetApp, potentially EMC. It's basically the traditional disk storage guys. There's, in addition to the big shift to cloud-based approaches to doing things, solid-state storage and flash is definitely making a big approach and you're having to do that. So when you're having to re-architect a product line versus starting from scratch like we did, it can be a challenge. It can be very difficult to make that reasonable. So I don't think it's a solely temporary that would say the same thing. But we... Yeah, Nutanix certainly doing well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, to us, just saying we have Flash therefore we're fast is not even interesting, right? That's not an interesting thing. Servers and storage in a box is not what we believe is converging. What's converging is the approach to how you deliver your application. This new approach to the modern era. We love talking about the modern enterprise. Rex, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Tintry, hot startup growing really rapidly. Eating the lunch of the incumbents soon to be dinner. If you guys keep it up, congratulations. Rex Walters, VP of technology at Tintry. It's theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.


OK, next up is tell us something about OpenACC and GCC and how that helps with very much the carry-on of GCC. OK, thanks for joining me here in this presentation. I guess the first compiler talk today in here and the last probably. But anyway, and I hope not everybody is asleep yet and then the second day of FOSSTEM afternoon. But I have a lot of stuff to present here, so that should keep you awake, I hope. So this project of adding OpenACC support to GCC is something that I've been working on for a little bit more than five years now in our group at the company, a handful of people. So a short introduction agenda, which is basically what we've read on the talk list. So GCC doesn't need much introduction, I guess. OpenACC I will introduce briefly. Of course, in this 25 minutes, everything I can just introduce briefly. So that would be a lot more to talk about maybe in some later FOSSTEM instances. Who knows? OK, and then I will show briefly the implementation status, some examples, some performance results, and a live demo at the end. And of course, live demos, you always hope that everything will work out. But yeah. OK, so GCC, the GNU compiler collection. Just put the link there. Louder, OK. I will try to speak up louder. So that's a quote from Wikipedia. GNU compiler collection, compiler system produced by the GNU project, supporting various programming languages, key component of the GNU tool chain, and standard compiler for most Unix-like operating system. Of course, there's now also LLVM and research compilers and some proprietary compilers. But GCC still plays a very big role in what's being used, even for high performance computing, which you might assume that maybe some of the proprietary vendor compilers play a bigger role. So I'm not reading through all of this. This is just some motivation. Up there, you see a survey that has been done a few years ago from some high performance compute center about the usage of compilers on that system, what users are actually using there. And the GNU compilers, G++ for C++ GCC and G Fortran, make about more than 70% of all the compiler invocations there. Of course, that's just one data point and other data centers. There will be other results when other systems are used and so on. But that's just for motivation, why we are still talking about GCC, that old dinosaur which is just not going away. So then we're adding OpenACC support. OpenACC is to use the compute power that you have in accelerator devices such as GPUs. So I should briefly cover the GPU architecture. That's a block diagram of a years old, five or six years, I think, NVIDIA GPU Kepler K20. Of course it's old, but the general concepts are still the same now and also for other GPU vendors such as AMD for example. I'm talking a lot about NVIDIA GPUs here because that's what we initially did this project with. So that's what I'm personally most familiar with. So you'll see this 15 or something blocks here which they call streaming multiprocessors and in each of them there are yet more smaller blocks. So the green ones here are your actual compute cores. So that's basically processors that can do simple arithmetic instructions, memory access and that kind of things. Each of these bigger blocks has its own private data and of course there's a big GPU global memory space of several gigabytes or whatever you have. And then in one system you can have several GPUs and then you can construct huge systems which are then used for weather forecast computations and simulations, stuff like that. And our job now is to take some big computation that we have in CEC++ Fortran in this case and somehow map all the loop iterations that you have mapped onto all these many compute cores to keep them busy and harness the compute power that you got there. More abstractly, the GPUs look like this. You have several multiprocessors in each of them. You have some shared memory, local memory, whatever you call it. Then you have a huge register set and these several processors in there. Then OpenACC, that's an open standard. How many of you are familiar with OpenACC in any way? Raise your hands, please. Okay, a bunch. And how many with OpenMP? Okay, a lot more. Which makes sense because OpenMP has been around much longer. So OpenACC is conceptually and also mostly semantically or builds on OpenMP. It also uses the directives that you're seeing in OpenMP. And the principle is the same. You take your existing source code, your Fortran 77 code from the 70s, add some pragmas, some directives in there and can run that code as you did before, but it will just run much faster. That's what I say here to mark up regions for parallel vector loops. You have to do some memory management. As I said, GPUs typically have separate memory spaces from the host from the CPU. So you have to copy your data back and forth. You have some more special things, reduction operations and a lot more, of course. And all these directives and stuff are hints to the compiler or instructions to the compiler how to apply your source code to these many compute cores that you have on the GPU or another accelerator. So the language tries to be abstract enough or OpenACC is not a language, it's an extension to C, C++ and Fortran. And it tries to be abstract enough so that it applies to basically all the parallel accelerators that are out there. So one example, quick one matrix multiplication, you may have seen that before. And of course, that's just a simple example. So that's your original serial code, which works, which has been tested for decades. Then you have several compute constructs available in OpenACC. One is the parallel construct. So the red lines are what I'm adding here to run this with OpenACC parallel construct. In this example, it's a lot that I have to add, but this is just showing the one hot loop. All the rest of your existing program could not be touched by the OpenACC annotations. So just going over this briefly, you start with pragmaACC parallel, which says that the following region, so a structured block in C, C++, is to be offloaded to some accelerator and something is to be run in parallel in there. And then you have all these three pragmaACC loop nested inside each other, according to the for loops that you have. And that's because in OpenACC you have several levels of parallelism which map to the several building blocks that you have in the GPU architecture. So for example, the outer gang level would map to queuing these computations to several of the bigger compute blocks that you have on the GPU. The most inner one, the vector loop is just a, or similar to a CPU vector, just that the vector width is much bigger. So in NVIDIA GPUs, for example, it's 32 size vectors. And in between you have the worker parallelism level, which is essentially a group of vectors. Okay, so that's a lot you have to add in this example, but again, this is just showing the one hot computation loop that you have in your program. All the rest will just stay as it is before. All right, and you have the data copy clauses up there. Copy in A and B arrays and copy out the C array. Obviously C is where the results are being stored that doesn't need to be copied to the GPU because everything will be overwritten. And A and B arrays are only read inside this region so they don't need to be copied back from the GPU to the host after this loop executes. Then we have the open ACC kernels construct, which is an alternative compute construct to the parallel construct. You'll see that here I have not put in all this ACC loop directives, you don't need them in the kernels construct. Here it's the job of the compiler to figure out which loops can be run in parallel, how they should be parallelized, so which level of gang well covector parallelism to apply, and well the hardest job to figure out if they can be parallelized at all or if there are any data dependencies and stuff like that. So that of course needs more intelligence from the compiler as I'm writing here GCC does some things work but in general there's more work for us to be done there. So if you want to go for performance you should for now use the parallel construct with GCC. So then the status in GCC upstream. Five years ago we started with the 2.0 open ACC specification and then a few years later 2.5 came out which is mostly supported in upstream GCC. 2.6 is in our development branch and 2.7 has just been released a few months ago at the supercomputing conference. We have not yet started working on that. We have not implemented all of the open ACC specification. There are some features in there that users are evidently not using very much and instead of spending time on these just to claim complete support for the specification we rather than focus on performance tuning of the stuff that users are actually using. So we support code of loading to NVIDIA GPUs as I mentioned that's what this whole project started with and while the maintainer of the NVPTX back end is actually in the room here, Tom Defriis now working at SUSE then we have AMD GPU support that was recently done as a separate project very much building on top of the stuff that we did before. So they literally had to write a new back end in GCC for AMD GCN code generation. They had to write some of the run time library code that talks to the GPU compute stack so how to get the code to the GPU so that you can launch it there and do the memory mapping setup and that kind of things but that's basically all they had to do. Others could be done as well including multi-threaded CPU which some other OpenACC Compiler support for example. What we've done is very generic, not specific to a specific host system so we can support anything mostly that has drivers to talk to some accelerator device. Self-through testing on x86 and PowerPC64, little Indian. Right, and if you're interested in helping just send patches I'm the maintainer of the OpenACC support in GCC so I will review them hopefully or talk to us if you need services support stuff like that. So we're a services company so I'm mentioning this. It's difficult to sell a compiler that is available as free software but of course you're all familiar with that problem I suppose. Okay, then on to some project that we did last year. The Alice Dalton application, chemistry, simulation, calculation of molecular properties. That's about all I know about it. I have not looked into it much at the level what it's actually doing I just have been given or we as a group have been given this application with the goal to tune that for the performance that you get with GCC OpenACC with NVIDIA GPUs by comparing to the PGI compiler which is kind of the standard you would use with NVIDIA GPUs. The PGI compiler Portland group has been acquired by NVIDIA a while ago so they have all the in-house knowledge. Right, and well I made this comment earlier about Fortran 77 so here we have it the history of Dalton application starts in fall of 1983 when I was one year old and still a lot of the actual simulation code is I guess from that age and it's Fortran. A lot of the scientific simulation code is in Fortran still. Okay, so that's just a quick overview of what we're talking about here Alice Dalton just look at the yellow line. It's 800,000 source lines of code for comparison GCC without all the test suite has about three and a half million lines but still it's a huge application. So no way we're going to work through all of that. Includes several external sub-modules has a non-trivial build system as you would guess from an application of that size works with the PGI compiler obviously also works with GCC but it does has some problems to path through all the well this one command line flag dash F OpenACC which you have to specify to enable OpenACC processing so we had to figure out how to do that. Then we replaced some of the code in the application agreeing with our customer because we want to do an apples to apples comparison and as I said the kernels construct support in GCC is not just as good as for a parallel construct yet so we replaced these regions and the Alice Dalton build system did something clever and that is to link against optimized vendor libraries for mathematical computations only for the PGI compiler because that's what this has been set up for we replaced these by the source code of these blast functions and annotated these with OpenACC directive so that's in a way similar to this matrix multiplication example that I showed earlier and there was some strange OpenACC directive usage which apparently other compilers supported or ignored or whatever so we replaced these and then we had several cycles of profiling analyzing tuning tuning here means not to change the Alice Dalton source code any further but to teach GCC to do more clever things and we reported a very few issues to NVIDIA so PTX is what we're targeting PTX is an intermediate language which at runtime gets just in time compiled to the actual GPU hardware that we have and you see here the baseline GCC execution time if this one example that we tuned here is around 230 seconds and PGI compiler a little bit more than 100 seconds so much better obviously but again we're in the same region here so it's not an order of magnitude that we are slower and after several tuning cycles of GCC's code generation we were equal to the PGI compiler actually two seconds better actually but again that's just this one example here but this shows that GCC is up for this task of being usable for such scientific computations of course that doesn't make the PGI compiler obsolete or anything but it was a great success for us you can read more about that in this blog post there then a real world example N-body simulation that simulates a set of N individual bodies like stars in the universe or particles or whatever with distant dependent forces between each pair and the problem is to calculate the trajectory of each body and you can understand if there's a force between each pair that's a lot of computation as when your problem space runs bigger so a GPU can be very helpful here and I will, oh right there's one slide missing before I show the demo I'm showing this with the GCC8 compiler as shipped by Ubuntu 1804 so roughly one year old is the maintainer of these packages here Matthias Klose-Doko, no he wanted to see that so he has done the packaging of that GCC stuff so that's available in your Debian Ubuntu packages you just have to install the GCC8 offload NVPTX package and its dependencies obviously Debian and Ubuntu are not shipping our latest, greatest development branch builds but they're rather the stable GCC release branches so that's something to try out but if you're looking for performance or for the latest features then you will have to look at our current development branch which is also available in public or talk to us about binary releases of GCC which we could also get you right but now the demo, live demo either it works or it doesn't hopefully it does, time's up but that will be quick the laptop is more than five years old it has a very powerful GPU and the GPU, powerful CPU the GPU is not so much powerful here again I'm just showing the hot computational loop which is this compute body force function an update directive that moves memory then we have this parallel construct here and in there we have a loop construct doing the actual body force incremental computation then I can build that that's using g++-8 the g++-8 compiler available on the system it's building and then I can run that so there will be two windows up here one is executing the host executable the CPU executable and one is executing the OpenACC accelerated one and I hope it's easy to guess which is which and that's the end of my talk so any questions? if we still have time for them we'll do okay thank you


to do a Google Hangout. So we decided that we would do it today while we're still at work, because we love talking and we don't talk enough. So we decided that since we can't be together in person that we would do a Google Hangout using the app Zoom. And so we have a few questions that each of us received from you guys and some topics that came up in our feeds that we're going to just chat about. And yeah, pretty fun. I'm dying. I'm choking on popcorn. I'm eating a snack. I should go get a snack. I have tea. Oh my gosh. This year they do a coffee cart on Fridays. We get free coffee, but I get tea. Look at you. I have water and I am not at my goal. I've had the same jug on my desk a week. I'm being really bad. I feel all frumpy because I'm in a big old sweatshirt because it's supposed to rain. It's 50 degrees outside, but cloudy. I have a kernel stuck in my mouth.  Okay, so we start. Yes, do you want to do a question you got first and then I'll do one. Sure. So this question, do we say people's names? Yeah. Okay. This question is from Princess Wanda from Instagram. Okay. I'm in my second practicum before student teaching and my cooperating teacher has been amazing. What teacher gifts would you guys recommend? I want to give back to her for all of her, all of her help this semester. Well, I was thinking about this when I was student teaching and I know this was a gift given to me, but I really liked that my mentor teacher took pictures of me teaching and then had kids write little notes to me and then put it in a scrapbook. So I would like that even like as a mentor teacher because I've been a mentor teacher. If my student teacher had done that for me, I would have been very appreciative of that. But honestly, I mean, I was going to say Starbucks gift card, which is always great, but I'm really thinking like an Amazon gift card because you can get so much on Amazon. I'm even thinking of making an Amazon wish list that I can share with my parents because I had a parent this year saying that she was placing a really big Amazon order and she asked if I wanted anything and all I could think of was glue. So I was thinking, are you looking for David? No, it's okay. I'm talking Charlotte. Hi, who is it? Shidler walked in. Hello, Shidler! That's a really good idea, the Amazon. I'm all hot. It's super hot in here. I was thinking too like I got my mentor teachers a pot and I like decorated it with like the ruler and I put a plant in there and then I painted the pot. I said thank you for helping me grow. Well, that's so cute. It's something that they could have in their classroom and I was also thinking a teacher t-shirt. Yes. Hold up, keep talking because I'm going to go take this off because I'm getting hot in here. It's like red. So you keep talking. I'm throwing popcorn. Any type of gift card, either Target, Amazon, Starbucks honestly will take any of them. You could do like something like obviously you spent a lot of time in the classroom with that teacher so you know what they have and what they don't have but I think it should be something more personal to them instead of like their classroom. Just because it's nice to get a gift that you don't have to share. Oh, I like that. I'm all about sharing but like if I was going to receive a thank you gift like I want it I would want it to be like for me only it would feel a little bit more special if I wouldn't have to like share it with my students. That is true because as a mentor teacher you don't realize how much work it is because not only are you mentoring this new student teacher which is really fun and I met one of my best friends of Rachel doing it but you also have to still be in charge in the long run of your class even though they're taking over lessons. First of all, can we just say that we both have on lipstick and little shirts and why is mine backwards and yours is not? Yours is not backwards on mine. Mine's backwards on mine. Oh, I'm backwards when I see it. That's so weird. Do you want to do a question next? Yeah, let me find one. I have one written down. Okay. Oh, somebody wants to know our summer plans. Are we allowed to disclose our summer plans? We can. No, like we don't have any specifics. No, but we have a general plan. Yes. Okay, so I'm going on three trips this summer. Guys, my wonderful environmental stability magician is walking through. So see him. Just say hello. Okay, so I'm going on three. Hold on. Hold on. On that. Did your dad make that name up? I think? Yes. Yes. I remember that. I forgot what it was. I did too, but he was really good at that. Like environmental specialist. Something specialist. Because custodian and janitor is just a weird name because I think you're more of like a magician. I don't think he realizes I'm talking to him. Okay, so I'm going on three trips. I'm going to Disneyland with my husband. We're going for like four days to California. We're going to meet up with Darren for a happy hour. And I might have Kendall cut my hair. Hi, you can peek in. It's okay. Oh, that's really cool. And then we're going to Laughlin in June for my sister-in-law's wedding. And then Oh yeah. What else are you doing? Oh my gosh. We're going to camp. Teacher Tuber. Is that what we're calling it? Yeah. Camp. Yeah. Camp Teacher Tuber. Yeah. I think we should make shirts. I think we should too. I have a cricket, but I haven't found really good vinyl. Come on in. And I'm like, it, you know, I've made the shirts and then once we wash it, we just can't wash the shirts. Well, I'm going to see if Ashley can make us some. Like if I buy the shirts. And all the stuff, maybe she'll make them. That'd be fun. And then so you tell us where you're going and then we'll give more details on the teeth. Camp Teacher Tuber. All right.  Oh, okay. So, and I don't know when the first part is happening, but the first one is we are going to go to New Mexico to see David's mom and his stepdad because they came down to see us for Christmas. And we're going to go drive there. I'm probably going to see the Buddy Holly recording studio. And then we're going to do the Camp Teacher YouTuber, Camp YouTube teacher. Teacher YouTuber. Wait, I can't hear you anymore. Oh, I hear you now when you said, uh-oh. Let me get the official name. Okay. Camp Teacher Tuber 2019. Okay, there we go. And I'm going to go to Vegas for David's birthday. It's going to be fun. We're trying to get Sam and Jessica to go because I think Sam's birthday is three days after David's. Oh, that'll be fun to celebrate together. That'd be really fun. But those are my only plans. Only. That's like three trips. A lot. That is a lot. Okay. So, Camp Teacher Tuber, everyone. A few of us are getting together in July, specifically July 11th through the 14th, probably 99% sure that's when it's happening. But we're getting together and we're going to be in Southern California somewhere. We're thinking like San Clemente area, Dana Point area, Beachy spot because we're going to go to Disneyland. And we're thinking, and this is not official, but we're thinking we should do like a meetup at Disneyland. Yes, we're thinking more than just the people we're staying with, but like an open meetup, but no details on that yet. We're not sure about that yet. We just know the dates and we know the majority of the people going. So, let me list them real quick. Okay. So, so far, we have 100% confirmation from Darren Nakakihara, from Marie Morris from the caffeinated class, and Kate, the sleepy teacher, and then Jennifer and I will both be going as well. And we get to drive. Are we the people that are driving the furthest? Yeah, because everyone else lives there. And what do we drive? Six hours? Yeah. Okay, it's not too bad. And we invited a couple of other people, but we won't say their names yet unless, until they decide to come because we don't want to say it and then they're not there. Yeah, it's going to be super fun. We'll probably film like a ton of videos. It's not like like an event that's put on. We're just planning on like getting a place and just all of us staying together for four days just to hang out. It's super fun. All right. Your question. My question. How did you become friends? This is a long story and I'm going to shorten it. Okay. Have we ever told the story? I think maybe on like Teacher Talk Tuesday. Our teacher BFF video. Yeah. So, long story short, we found each other on YouTube. And then you made a video about moving and I was freaked out because I was like, Oh my gosh, that looks like where I'm going to move. And then I followed you on Instagram and then we got the same welcome package. And I was like, Hey, this sounds really weird, but I found you on YouTube and we're working at the same school. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. And then you came up to me during the new teacher orientation at the district and I was super nervous. And I was sitting by Mandy. Me and Mandy were just hanging out. We're like, Hey, we're going to be friends. Yep. So that's how we became friends. So we were both YouTubers separately before we met before we met. That's crazy. Internet man. Yeah, the internet is crazy. And we both got our jobs separately before knowing each other. Yeah, we had already had our jobs before we met. That's so weird. Oh my gosh. All right. So that was that question. Okay. Here, we'll just combine because I asked you a question. Yes, you did. We'll just combine it. So how far apart do we live? And how do we mean maintain? How do we maintain a friendship being long distance? What are we like, I'm going to round to 100 miles. More than 100. Because once you get to Phoenix, it's like, Oh yeah, it's 100 to Phoenix, but you're further from the center. Yeah. So I would say probably around 200 miles away. You're 200 miles away from the center of, you're 100 miles away from the center of downtown Phoenix. Let me see. Because I'm 25 miles from school. I'm like, I don't know, three miles. If that four miles, I don't know. Let me see. Okay. From here to you. Yeah. Right now is 182 miles. So I live 25 miles away from where I am right now, even further. So it's 200 miles. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's crazy. 200 miles away. Okay. So how do we maintain a friendship? Well, we talk to each other on the phone and through text messages. And now through this. And you still have family that lives here. And I still, and I have family that lives where you live. So very, very often we see each other. And honestly, it's like a two hour drive. If we meet in the middle, it's not even that bad. We could meet in Anthem and have a party day. Yeah. Yeah. Shopping, Starbucks. About keeping a friend that's long distance is just like staying in communication. Like, we never go too long without talking to each other. Yeah. And like, we're always sharing the things that are going on in our lives. Well, and I think it also helps that we are both teachers and we're in the same grade. And I think that we should plan over the summer. I think so too. We're going to do it like this. Yes. And in person. All right. Is it my turn? Yep. Okay. When did you start teaching? I started teaching in the fall of 2008. And I taught second grade for six years. And then Kinder for two years. And now I'm in my third year of third grade. So I've been teaching 11 years. Wow. It's 11. I know. I'm so old. I started teaching in January 2015. So technically, I've only been teaching for four years, four and a half. But I've had five classes. Yeah. So that's weird. But I taught fourth grade the entire first section of my career. And now I teach those. I know it's your turn, but this question goes really well with that. And it's basically for you because I don't know. How is fourth grade different from third grade? Oh, good question. Okay. One of the things that I struggled with the most was in the beginning of the year because I realized that they're coming in as second graders. And that I needed to teach them how to write a sentence. I needed to teach them how to write a paragraph. I needed to teach them how to capitalize. It was a big challenge. I went into a lot of things thinking, oh, they already know how to do this, but they really don't. I think a lot of the standards correlate with each other, except for fourth grade builds a little bit more deeper in understanding. As far as math goes, a lot of the standards are very similar. Like with fractions, for example. In third grade, you have to show the unit fraction. You have to label the fraction. And then in fourth grade, they go on to adding them. And technically, you could add them in third grade. And most kids figure out how to add them in third grade, but it just builds on to the next thing. So everything you do in third grade builds on to fourth grade. Well, and another difference is now you're not getting my kids. That's true. I'm actually going to give my kids to Mandy. Well, and then so you went from fourth grade to third grade. And I had the opposite. I went from second grade with a break with Kinder, but basically second grade to third grade. And so I was like, oh, they know so much more because they're more independent. And so that's it's funny. Like you just see the different perspectives. Yeah, I do think that if you are going to make a grade level change, that going from fourth grade to third grade is a really good one to do because fourth grade is that transition year, where they start using everything they've learned in the past grade levels and applying it in fourth grade. And I feel like if you already know what's coming in fourth grade, you can better prepare them in third grade. Yeah. Like I have I'm gonna have to cut all that out because I'm like stuttering. Like knowing what's coming like specifically what's coming in fourth grade. I feel like I was able to that's true. I'm a little bit further, especially my like my students at Excel. I'm able to push them up a little bit more. So that's helpful. Well, and I also think the same thing because when I teach something I go, okay, this is something that you learned in second grade. And now we're just making it a little bit more challenging. Yeah, that's nice. I think it would be nice. I mean, I never want to leave third grade, but I think it would be nice to if you taught a grade if you had both the experience before it and after it. Yeah, that would be really good. But I don't want to leave third grade. No. I don't think I could teach second grade. No, it's hard. I like it. But third grade is my favorite grade ever. And I if I could stay here my whole life, I would. Well, you just might. All right. Next one, I have two questions left. Okay. I have a couple. Okay. I'll just ask one. I guess we can do this one together. Okay, so somebody asked us how we deal with loud children in the hallways. And if we are easy or hard graders. So our own children being loud in the hallway. I'm assuming. Okay. So we practice a lot at the beginning of the school year. You're in an indoor school. I'm in an outdoor school. Yeah. And so our rule is second tile, single file. We have bulletin boards which get destroyed by just everyone. And so my rule is you need to be quiet and you need to be looking forward. And I remind them to put their hands behind their backs. But some of them may or may not do it as long as they're keeping their hands themselves. I don't really push that. But I am very picky about like them not talking because we are in an indoor school. And our library is in the middle and then like the hallway split off from it. So if we are talking in the hallway, we'll do laps around the library, practicing, walking in line. And I had to even do that last week during state testing because after we were done with the test, they thought it was a free for all to be silly. And I was like, nope, we're practicing. And so we do that when we're in the hallway for the bathroom. I have bathroom monitors and then they come and say like, oh, so and so can clip up or so and so has to clip down. And this is why. And then when they come in line waiting for everyone to come out of the bathroom, they have to sit facing forward like they're in line. So that's how we deal with being quiet in the hallways. Nice. And then I don't remember your second part. Oh grading. Well, you can go into your hallways and then we'll go into grading. So my school is an outdoor school. So we don't have any like second title single file, but we try to stay on the right side of the hallway. And for the most part, I keep my students in two straight lines, one for boys, one for girls.  So my lines are very uneven, but they walk better because I do a competition for every line we walk in. So whichever line is the straightest is the quietest and is the stillest. So walking well earns two points and we call it the super trooper point. So they earn two points every time we walk in line. And that's like from here to specials from specials back from lunch to lunch. Every time we walk in a line, they can earn two points. And so I pick between the boy line and the girl line. I like that. I'll do a good job. Then I give all of them two dojo points. And then I usually, I haven't done it in a while, but I play the song, the imperial one. And whenever they hear that song, they always walk in a better line. It just really helps to motivate them to like look super. And that really helps. And then I also always have grabbers, which is like the PBIS tickets, that if I'm not giving out super troopers or watching for that, I just hand them out. If I notice my lines being super loud, and I don't want to be like, quiet down. I can just start handing kids grabbers and the rest of them get quiet. I've also done like a super secret student. And so I just pick like a popsicle stick before we go. And they don't know who it is. And then if we're going to specials, for example, I haven't done this in a while, but you can do like a paw, which again is PBIS or when I did this. I'm in the dark. Hold up. We have do your light dance. There you go. We have sensors now when we used to not. So we do now. But when I didn't have pause to pass out, I would pass out like a skittle or something. So like if they got to art class, for example, I don't have art. But if we went to, I don't know, the library, we don't have library. If we went to PE, I could just hand that person a paw. Or if that person wasn't in line, I could say, oh, my super secret buddy wasn't paying attention. So better luck next time type of thing. So the second part of that question was grading. So right now I'm in a transitional period for grading. People are yelling in the hallway. And it's adults because kids are here. We're in a transitional period. So we're moving towards standards reference grading. So we're going to be on a four point scale. I'm sure I'll make a video about it once I understand more. So we're basically making proficiency scales on their understandings of the standards, which see it seems like it's going to be a lot of work, but I feel like I'm going to know my kids better. So I feel like with those scales, basically rubrics, I feel like I'm going to be harder because I have very specific things like, Oh, this is why you got a one or this is why you got a four or you have a three, you need to know this to get to a four or something like that. Right now, I mean, I feel like I give assignments that are very just black and white, like it's either right or wrong. And then writing, I give them rubrics. And I'm pretty lenient when it comes to writing and rubrics because kids are really reluctant writers and I don't want to fail them because it's not perfect. So I feel like I'm more lenient in writing. Like one of my little boys, it was so sweet. He was like, Ms. Reese, I love writing now because of you. And I was like, and so I just, I, I write down what they need to work on. So like, I'll make goals for them, but I may or may not be super hard on them for their grades. Yeah, I feel like I'm the same way. Our grading system here, it's not standards reference, but it is a four point system. And it's for each area. So like literature, informational text, convention, speaking and listening, like it's each different section. I like that. So I do try to run it like the proficiency scale where like a four, you're above understanding and you can like teach someone else and you can apply it to something else. Three is you can do the work without making any mistakes on your own. A two is you can do the work for the most part, but you may make mistakes here and there. And then a one is you make too many mistakes to show that you know it. Yep, which is basically what we're going to be moving towards. And then so I usually, I, because I try really hard not to take anywhere home with me, I usually give a credit score for like any assignment during the week that isn't an assessment. So as I grade, as I look through them, I give them like a three or a four and then I organize them in order, but then I don't give them a grade for it. I give them like points for turning it in, but I'm still tracking their understanding. And then at the end of the week, when I give my assessment, I actually put that grade in, but I also compare it to the other assignments. So like if they were getting fours all week, but they got a two on the assessment, I usually round them up to like a three. Oh, I like that. That could have been like a bad day or I'll let them retake it. And then for writing, this is a huge one because writing takes forever to grade because you have all the different steps. So as I'm teaching each writing process, I only grade the rough draft because if you're able to do the rough draft correctly without my help or any corrections, then you mastered it because if I go through and correct everything, that's not you. That's me. So I grade their rough draft. That's the grade I give for that. And then I give them a credit for the final just as part of like the writing process. But I feel like if I actually grade the assessments at the end, then I'm getting like a better snapshot, especially if a kid was like struggling all week, but then at the end, they could do it, then they just get their credit scores throughout the week. And then that final one will either put them up or down. So I feel like I'm a pretty easy grader.  You either got it or you didn't. All right. So I have one other question from Instagram. And then I have a question from one of my friends here at work. She's a first year teacher. So I feel like that would be a good one to maybe end on. So should I ask my Instagram question and then you can ask all the other questions you got? I don't really have any other one. Someone asked me how I decided to name Cash. Oh, you can go into that. He's named after Johnny Cash. That's it. Easy. Done. All right. So this question says, how do you find the time and energy during the week to work out and teach? That's a new question. So no, you work out too. I for me personally, I have to work out in the morning. And I hate it. Never like it. But I cannot work out after work. I'm too tired. And I know that you can do your workouts after work. I can't. Like I just want to go home and sleep and like eat all the food. But if I just get into a habit of like, I'll set my alarm for 4.50. Honestly, I don't start working out until like 5.40. And so I just take that time to wake up and I just get through it. I've been doing a new program. It's an hour long. I don't think I can ever do that again. 40 minutes is like my top, especially for the morning. So at first, and it's still like this, I just wake up without thinking. I get my clothes ready. I just drink pre-workout. And then that gives me like the jitters. And I'm like, okay, I have to work out because I don't like how this feels now because I have too much energy. Yeah. And so that's how I do. I just forced myself to do it. I can't work out in the morning only because I have to get up at 5 to get to work out. So if I wanted to work out in the morning, I'd have to get up at 4. And I just don't, if I wanted to do that, I'd have to be like in bed by like a sleep by 8 o'clock. And I just can't do that physically. But it works out for me because my husband's home Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So when I'm being good, I go to the gym right after work. I usually get there around 4. And then I stay for about 45 minutes. And then I'm home by like 5. So that's pretty good. And I still get about three hours at home with cash because he goes to bed at 8. Hi. What was he back? No, it's Darlene. Do you want to say hi? Darlene. It's Darlene. She's seen Shidler. She's seen David. She's seen you. All the people. How's it going? It's going. It's dragon. She's seen third grade now. Yaw. Yeah, we're all looking for Arizona resources. Oh, I have them. I got the ones you put in the file. Okay, good. Yeah. Let's get the books from Denise. What books? Here I'll show you. What are the magazines? Oh, those are good too. Oh, so those are good too. She has a different book. What? She only has the one set. So maybe you could make a copy of it. Oh, okay. It's really good for the regions and the different Indian tribes. The magazines are really good to do. I feel like they cover it for the most part, but we'll ask her for it. She had a whole set or just one book? Well, it has a whole class set. And then she also, I think I had like six extras last year. And I would just talk to them. Maybe. Maybe there's some in that storage. In the summer, can we like, I have to put my computer down. That's fine. In the summer, can we plan like Arizona since you've actually taught it? Yeah. You see what you're Gotta do the salt dough maps. That's a good time. Salt dough maps? Yeah, that's what they did. That's what they did. And then I also did a, um, I did a diary thing and you had to pick between like a territorial Arizonian or an ancient culture Arizonians like an Indian tribe. And then they can do an easy Arizona project on the computer by making like a PowerPoint, doing like the symbols, the animals, like the type of weather like they pick, we did a regions project where they chose one region. And they had to like, write about the animals in the region, the climate of the region, types of plants, landscapes, landscape water. How'd you fit it in? Did you fit it in all year or? I feel like Um, we integrated it into like reading, but then at the end of the year is when we really did like the projects. Okay. Which is like how I'm doing it now. Bye, darling. See, we should just like put you on Skype every day. We're doing zoom. I guess that's a new one. The one that we used for Like the sea world. Yeah. Um, I don't know. It's easy because it's just through the internet. So anyone could access it. I don't know. Well, I told Darren that we were filming. I said, do you want me to invite you? Oh, she was talking about inviting someone on here. Bye. You too. Um, yeah. So should I, I don't know, when do you have to leave soon? Like by 4 30. All right. So I'm ready to go. I just, I have one more question. And this is from the girl that I work with. She's a first year teacher. And she asked me because she knows that I'm like, I don't take anything home. And I leave right at contract time. And she basically said, how do you get everything done? Is me. I just like downed my T. She said, how do you get everything done and not take stuff home? And so, um, I said, I don't know when it was like my third or fourth year. I had a really rough class like behavior wise. They were really low academically. I basically had to untrain bad behaviors and it just took a lot out of me. And I thought in return, oh, I'll just stay later and create things or all be making different behavior management things or going home and looking on Pinterest. I don't even know Pinterest thing, but blogs were. And then me and my friend, Maribel said, you know what? Cause we're both having a hard year. Let's just go. It's time to go home. Our stuff can wait. We'll come back tomorrow and then do it. And then we just kind of kept doing that. And then we just, we went home. We had something planned. We got into hobbies and we just took time for ourselves and we slowly started realizing that we were actually happier and well rested when we didn't take stuff home. So now my thing is I work from eight to four and for the most part I come in at eight and I leave at four. Now, yes, there will be days where I come in at seven 30 because I got ready a little faster or there might be a day where I leave at four 30 because I'm in the middle of a project, but I'm not like forcing myself to stay here and get it all done. For example, today I gave four assessments. Ooh, it's really hot in here. Oh my gosh. Look how hot it is in here. I'm so red. It's so hot in here. I feel like I should open the window, but it would bring in the wind and the sun, a glare.  Like I could always grade more. I got three out of the four assessments graded. I'm not going to bring the other assessment home to grade it. It can wait till Monday. And if it's progress report time, then I might take papers home to grade in front of the TV, but for grading, I only grade what's the most important. And for like math exit tickets, I don't put a grade on them. I just, like you were saying, I sort them and I'm like, these kids got it. Okay, I put a star on it. You can take it home. These kids didn't get it. I'm going to reteach you tomorrow morning. So I do a lot of stuff like that. Doing a lot of your planning at the beginning of the year for like, so if it's, I always plan, I mean, I always get behind, but at the beginning of the year, I'm always two weeks ahead, because then that gives me a head start. So now at this point of the year, when that doesn't work as well, because we're super busy, now I'm a week ahead. So like, I planned for next week. And I always have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are my busy days, like Monday, I'll sit down and plan everything. Tuesday, I'll go ahead and print everything and copy it. And then Wednesday, I'll go ahead and file it. So that gives me Thursday and Friday to do grades, or just kind of sit around or plan bigger units on those days. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly like, you're just, you're not going to get everything done. No, it's okay if you don't, because the kids won't know. No, don't get everything done. Like, I get here, I get here a little bit earlier in the day, but that's only because one, my husband and my child are asleep. So I'm not missing out on anything at home in the morning. Two, I live an hour away from where I work. Technically, it's 40 minutes, but on a great day, it takes 40 minutes. So I have to leave early because if I don't leave early, I'm going to hit worse traffic. So I usually get to school between seven and seven 15, and I leave at three 30. And when I get here, I immediately start working during that time. I'm working during lunch. I'm working. Yep. And at the end of the day, the last 30 minutes, I'm working. Like that's what I do too. I socialize, but if someone wants to come in my room and talk to me, then they have to be okay with talking to me while I work. Yeah. Oh, you saw there's like a million people that coming in out of my room. And I, I, they're like very often, well, almost every day, I eat lunch in my room because I take a working lunch. Like I'm lesson planning while I'm eating a burrito. And if I'm in the lounge, it's because I finished all of my work for that week and I have time to sit there. Now there's days where I just sit in my room and watch YouTube during lunch because it might have been a hard day and just my brain needs a break. But for the most part, I'm always working every second or like, if my kids are working on something, I may be able to go ahead and prep for the next lesson I'm about to teach. Yeah, same here. If my kids are working on something independently, or like I always plan for a day without a small group, because I haven't made. So I really don't have to, but I always plan for one day without a small group. And that gives me a whole hour. Yeah. Do something extra. So and I do the same thing as you. I plan and prep Monday through Wednesday and then Thursday and Friday at grade. So I think just having a schedule and sticking to it. And honestly, I feel like sticking to a routine of every Monday we do this every Tuesday, not just for me, but for the kids. Yeah, like, Oh, Tuesday is fluency. Wednesday is the story from the book. I was going to plan I was going to make and maybe you can put it on your teachers pay teachers. I don't want to do that myself. But I was going to make like a weekly checklist. All of the things that you make sure you do every week. So yes, I have to make sure that I have materials prepped and printed for my aid. So I put that on my list. I also want to make sure that I have like any spelling words or anything like that printed and ready to go. I want to make sure I have like my math review ready to go my monthly writing prompt paper copy. It's like anything that I do every single week. That's the same. I have a little checklist and then it's dry erase and I can just erase it for the next week. And then Monday morning or Friday afternoon before I leave, I just check it as I do it so that it's ready to go. And I don't forget anything. But if you do the same things consistently every week, your planning and your prepping time so much faster. Well, and I think it's really easy because I have curriculum for math and I have curriculum for reading. And so, and I've been my personal focus has been writing for a long time. So I know exactly what I want to do for writing. But I think when you have a curriculum, it's easy because it's like, Oh, we're on module five lesson two. So I don't have to write anything other than that. So then I just pull the copies that are already made. And if I have to make copies, I know exactly what I'm doing. But for things like writing, I think just planning ahead, knowing like, Oh, in January, I want to teach opinion writing or informational writing. And then just kind of pre prepping, maybe in the summer or a few months ahead of time will really save you time day to day. Absolutely. I'm summer hot. Look, it's crazy. It's because the heaters are still on, but they're not kicking in. So that means that the AC isn't kicking in either. I can't believe that there's some schools in some states, I'm not Arizona, that don't have air conditioning at all. I don't even know. So those are all the questions that I got. I'm gonna have to go soon because we're meeting for a happy hour. I'm gonna go and pick up cash and pray that he's happy. I'll be happy to see you.  No, it never ends. And he's being bullied at school and he's only one. He got bit yesterday. God said he got pushed today this morning when he got there from the same kid.  He gets pushed over all the time. He always falls and gets a boo boo report that he hit his head because he got pushed over. And we're like, you know, if he comes home one day because he's socked some kid in the face defending himself. Now you're like, now I understand the kids a hit back. You're like the things you learn as a parent. Some kid's snatched his pacifier right out of his mouth. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, well I had fun. I had fun to look at me. I'm packing up. I'm already packed up.  My commute's like 10 minutes. Hey, when I buy a house one day, it's gonna take like, I don't know 20 to 30 minutes to drive there. Yeah, it only took me 20 minutes from my mom's house. Oh, okay. So thank you guys so much for watching our first live hangout. We're live, but you're not seeing this live. So we're gonna have to figure out it's recording. So I'm gonna have to figure out how to upload it to YouTube and save it. So I don't know, should we do this? Like, I mean, we'll talk more than monthly, but should we do it like monthly or that would be fun or like even in the summer, like weekly or in person? All right, well thank you guys for watching. Oh wait, we should do an insta story or a picture. Okay. And then we should like do something like, we can screenshot us high-fiving. Oh, that's true. Okay, ready? Oh man, my good side, let's like, pick her hair on this side. I'm sorry. You ready? Are we editing all this part out? Yeah, we're editing all this part out. This one. You ready? Should we do a heart? Yeah. Wait, why is this so hard? Oh wait. It's recording. Not yet. I need permission from you. I have popcorn too. Yeah, I don't know how it saves, but whatever. I'll show you how at the end. Okay. Okay, I'm ready if you're ready. I'm sorry.