adjustments to the agenda. We're going to move on the school calendar 11.2 on the actual 12.1 up for executive sessions. So right after the reports, anybody have any other adjustments they need? Approve a minute of Wednesday, March 16. So moved. Second. Is there any discussion on the March 16 minutes? All right, hearing none, so moved. Any board correspondence communications anybody needs to share? Public comments? Is there any public on? Hi, my name is Michelle Samma. I have a public comment if you're ready for it. So my commentary is pertaining to item 11. It's on your agenda, the COVID vaccines in the K through 12 schools in the SU. You know, I just wanted to give my opinion and input on the matter. The vaccine board, the Vermont vaccine board I think is scheduled to meet in May. And as some of you probably know, that's who makes the decisions about what shots are required in our K through 12 schools. And I guess one of my concerns is the atmosphere in our schools such that it's going to be a hard sell if, you know, they do come and mandate the vaccines. And I am in favor of them mandating them. But and I can explain those reasons. I just feel as though the atmosphere we've got going on right now is not conducive towards, you know, mitigation strategies or preventing COVID in the K through 12 environment. The higher education in Vermont has mandated the vaccines and had great success. Much of the education went without huge interruptions. There were definitely some issues. But I feel like there's adequate data out there that shows that vaccines work. I think we should still be pushing for them within our schools. And, you know, I hope that the school could continue some communications around vaccinations and just COVID 19 in general, so that if the vaccination board does approve this as one of the mandatory vaccines that, you know, we don't have a lot of pushback within the community. I'll comment on the same thing. Can you hear me? I don't know my microphones on. Yeah. Okay. I'm Brad Moral Cornelius. I have two kids in the school. I'm also a critical care nurse. My first COVID patient died February 25th of 2020. I've been working with COVID patients since then. I feel like mandated vaccines in the school is, for staff, is necessary, especially with the masking mandates coming down. Early on in 2020, I left the safety of Vermont and went to New York when their case load was exploding and ended up working in a 450 bed hospital on Long Island. We saw a lot of people die of this. It was evident to us then that it was mutating very quickly because week after week, the presentations were changing. We are lucky now that we have vaccines that it's apparent to me are effective even against the new mutations that are coming out and Omicron isn't going to be the last one. We will have another wave. We know this recently had the opportunity to speak to a patient who ended up in our ICU, vented for over four months. He was one of the few I've seen that actually pulled through and was able to speak to us afterwards. I was giving him a rectal suppository that he needed. Once they're able to talk, we like to give them their autonomy back and let them be part of the decision making process. I explained to him why he needed this medication and why I had to be given the way we were giving it. He looks at me and says, well, it's not comfortable, but if I were the smartest person in this room, I wouldn't be in this bed. Referring to the fact that he refused the vaccine initially. I'm lucky that I'm in a field where I'm on my third round of vaccines in three months. Probably we'll get a fourth over the last eight or nine months or so. All of our patients that we've received have been unvaccinated. We don't see any who are vaccinated. I feel like it's important because this is our children's population. Not all of the children in the school can be vaccinated. It's important that our staff members are vaccinated to protect our children and protect the community. Thank you. Thank you. Call in number two. We have a call in number ending in seven six. Just let me know who you are and if you're not a forward member, do you have a public comment? Star six. Star six. Let's see if I can stop that noise. So this is Camille Olmsted. I'm a long time member of this community. I'm also assisting in the school right now because of the COVID tracing that was required at the nursing level. I've been retired for two years. I was an health administrator with the Veterans Administration. And it seems to me that it's important that we realize that there are several tools in our toolbox to deal with this pandemic, which is not over with even though we're all sick to death of it. Those tools include vaccination, they include masks, and they include, I don't want to see the schools close again. It's very important that the kids are in the school, active, able to speak to each other, able to see their teachers. So I feel that it's super important that we encourage people to vaccinate and even wear masks if that's what we need to do to stay safe. Thank you. That's our public comment guide. So we are on to the Superhand Report. Obviously you all have my report in hand. We're gearing up. Millers will go out for Rochester Stockbridge, Granville Hancock, and First Branch very soon. Tara's been working on that along with the principals and Kate and board chairs. So those will go out soon. We have three votes in May. So I just wanted to add that to my report. Otherwise I think I've captured almost everything in it. Other than I did have a great meeting with Phil Gore of the VSBA. He's the new trainer and we met on Thursday and he is scheduled to attend our April-May-June meetings to finish out our board training series. So I'm looking forward to that. And then just a reminder to board chairs, I had Christy White register us for the annual mandatory board chair superintendent trainings. And those begin here at the end of April as well. So you should have that registration in your email. If you don't, please email me and I'll track down what happened. But I should have that in your email inbox. And then I'll take any questions folks have. Not a question. It's a combination to our superintendent and it's proactive reaching out to Phil Gore, who's the new development director for Vermont School Board Association. Since I've been a director, I've had to catch up a lot. So I've read maybe a dozen books or manuals about effective school board governance. And one of the best books that I read was co-authored by Phil Gore, who's the gentleman that's going to be joining us. This is his book here. And since we're going to be seeing him in public, we probably don't have to read his book, but I strongly recommend it's readable. He's got great chapters. It's called Improving School Board Effectiveness, A Balanced Governance Approach. And he did this as part of the publishing of his Harvard University. This guy knows what he's talking about. He's been out there and he speaks to if we're going to have sound effective schools, it takes more than our superintendent, the superintendent's teams, the best and brightest teachers, the whole staff going along with the supporters. It takes effective leadership at the board level. And that's his specialty. And I think all of us when I certainly read this had a lot to learn about what does it take to be an effective board? What does it take to be an effective board member? How do we measure that? Shouldn't we be taking that seriously as part of our governance responsibility? So I look forward to meeting with him. I strongly recommend that we utilize Phil to the best, not only at the SU level, but at each of our six boards. And again, Jamie, I want to really appreciate your reaching out to him because he can make a difference. And to the extent that he helps educate us, we can make more of a difference in a positive way. So thank you very much. Anything else for Jamie? Yeah, I have a question. Jamie, do you know what the topics are going to be that Phil's going to... Thanks, Bill. I think that's really interesting. I'll look at that book. But what else he's going to talk about in April, May and June? Yeah, so April was going to be board protocols and procedures. April in May is going to be mission visioning work. And June was on policy development and monitoring. Thanks. And then we did talk about then... I'm going to have him engage in a conversation with the board around how do we go about board development moving forward? And he had some ideas to talk to you about that. So, yeah, it was a really, really positive meeting. Did he ask you? Did he tell you who are from Texas to Vermont? He said that, you know, he was... He grew up in the military. He was a military family. So moving and was easy for him and that he really loved Vermont. And wanted to move here. Okay. Good evening, everyone. You have my report. I'll just give a brief overview. So we aligned with our goal around developing and sustaining a comprehensive MTSS. We are already starting to think about summer and we have a number of school-based teams who are looking at two professional learning opportunities that happen in the summer. One is the Best Institute, which is hosted by Vermont and TSS. And we have a number of our schools who are looking at and are planning on attending that to think about their PBIS and implementation and their universal social-emotional system. And so we're excited about that. And we also have some schools who are looking at the Middle Grades Institute. And that's sort of in collaboration with the Tarrant Institute and we have a number of our schools that have been working with them. And this is an opportunity to really think about what's really unique about those adolescent years and those middle grades and think about how do we continue to develop our programming there so that it really responds to students' needs in that age group. So we're excited to be able to support our schools. And certainly the additional funding from the federal government, it makes it really more possible to sort of support that participation in a way. And our teachers, although fairly exhausted from this challenging year, are excited for, you know, to kind of switch gears and be able to do that kind of collaborative learning together in that setting. And so we're excited to be able to support them. Along with our second goal around proficiency-based learning, when we finally had a chance to meet for our February meeting, we went over the academic benchmark data that we had gathered in January. Following that assessment window, we sent out a sort of a feedback survey to all of our teachers just to find out how well the assessment tools that we have are matching sort of their needs in the classroom. You know, as we've talked about sort of all year, that's the most important use of assessment data for our teachers and students to be able to use it to, you know, inform teachers to inform their practice, students to inform their own goal setting and know where they're heading in terms of their learning. And so we want to make sure, although we need data that can tell us how our system is doing, we want to make sure that our teachers first and foremost have the information they have to support student growth and learning. And so we got a lot of good information back from our teachers around those tools. Three sort of overarching themes that we saw. One, teachers, we have a gap in sort of assessments that are information about foundational literacy skills. So what kind of understanding to our, especially our sort of kindergarten through third grade students have around phonics, phonemic awareness, decoding those things, we have a lot of teachers have tools that they are able to sort of deploy on their own, but not, they're not sort of universal across all of our schools. So we're going to definitely work to fill in those gaps, use what's working in some schools and make sure other schools have access to it. There's also a lack of vertical alignment in our math assessments. So we use something in pre-K, a different thing in kindergarten. And then we pick up another tool in first grade and up and teachers were asking for some more consistent data so they could really see student growth and not have to look at those three different. So we'll continue to look at that to see what would make, what would help to create more consistent information from grade level to grade level. And then a third theme was just a need for more comprehensive professional learning around the tools and how to use it to improve instruction. Again, we've got teachers who do this, you know, and don't have, it does very well and been doing it for years. And other teachers who feel like we're using assessments, they're not quite sure what information they can get out of it. And so that's certainly an area of focus for us in terms of making sure that, you know, teachers aren't just doing an assessment, but don't know how to get that information out of it. And that's, that's certainly on us as administrators to make sure they have that learning. So those are kind of our, some of the key sort of overarching themes. It was all open-ended questions. So there's a lot of information there that we are still sussing through. But we certainly some action steps we can take from there to improve it. And you may see some changes to the assessment calendar framework that come out of that. And we'll continue to communicate that. But know that our goal is to make sure that the information is as helpful to advance student learning as possible. And that's that's what's what's will drive any of those changes. And then the last piece we mentioned a little bit at the last meeting was we have our public plan for spending on the ARP SR funds. That's the American recovery plan, elementary and secondary emergency or school emergency relief, just to get our acronyms defined. But that's the sort of third tranche of funding that's come out of the federal government related to COVID relief and then recovery. And so we had a survey go out. We got some feedback. I would not say an overwhelming amount of feedback. I know people are tired of surveys, but every piece of information is helpful. And I do think can be representative of more folks as well. And so we certainly found support for the way that we have in our planning to spend money around academic support and increase focused on social emotional learning. I think some there was certainly push for more focus on hands on experiential learning. And so we will continue to look at where that can be can be expanded and then questions around how do we how are we specifically supporting students with disabilities so we can be more explicit around that. And we want to keep thinking about how we support our educators who have been doing their best work with students and make sure they know that one of the complexities of this is just this is not the only source of funding. And so trying to communicate everything that we have and where you know what it's supporting. So in some of the places we are using title for funding to do what someone was asking us or funding to do. So we're just going to be more explicit around that. We've got lots of funding around students with disabilities. It doesn't all come from this one one source, but this is the one source that we're supposed to do specific engagement around. So we'll just continue to work on communicating all of those pieces as much as possible and happy to answer questions as they come up from folks either through board members or from the public more generally. Don, do you have a question? I did. And it has to do with the results of our changes and things to the the tasks that we're asking our teachers to do. Is there any way that we can get empirical data showing that the changes that we're doing are effective rather than just the anecdotal stuff? Don, which changes are you referring to? We were talking MTSS. We said we were doing some changes so we could be more effective. Is there any way that we can get some data to show that rather than just the verbal stuff saying we are? I think that's a good push. I think some of the data we'll see in terms of the changes will be what we see in sort of student data whether that's in their academic data. That's what we looked at in the fall and then again in January we'll look again at that at the end of the year. And then we want to part of what we want to do is be able to look at that more longitudinally so be able to see what is what does this data look like a year from now as well. So that's that's certainly what we'll be looking at. Thank you. Can that come to the board members rather than to the principals or is that not what board members are doing these days? Yes, no, I hope to. I brought data in February which was ended up being in March. That was what I hoped when we had it talked to it as a board here for you to be able to see sort of how that changes in the growth. Yeah, we had data last month, Don. Yeah, Meg. Thanks. Yeah, it's funny. I actually I was sitting here with like the opposite question from your start which is that I think we've seen a lot of empirical data and I was kind of debating whether to raise my hand and I'm wanting to what I wrote down was I love I know that our job on this board is to see deliverables but I also think that student work can be a really powerful piece of information and also like the live action formative assessment of just teacher you know teachers watching students. So I guess I wanted to just put a plug in for that and I know I'm sure that's something that's going on but I know and I think that the in these meetings there's a feeling that there needs to be a report out on you know hard data and numbers but I want to make sure we don't put too many eggs in the data basket and instead kind of remember that that formative that live action formative is really good powerful stuff. We've got great teachers who do good work. That's all. Yeah, no, I think that's great, Meg. And I think some of where we're seeing that and again it's just a snapshot is in the celebrations of learning that we've been doing at each of the districts. We I guess have the benefit of getting to see all of those across all of the districts and you as individual board members you may only be seeing the ones that are happening in yours but it gives us a nice picture of you know we saw a pre-k at Rochester and Stockbridge. We saw I think the fifth grade news in Stratford. We saw third and fourth grade play in Chelsea and Tumbridge so there's a lot of different ways that I think some of that information is coming through and we can continue to think about what other ways to get it to the whole board. So you're seeing more of those snapshots across the SU because it's pretty powerful learning when you when you see I think we saw the chicken coops in Bethel. So that just really I think it's a nice combination of all the different kinds of learning that are happening so we can think about yeah making those more maybe more available to everyone. Thank you. I want to commend you about using asking your staff our teachers what they think and it sounds so common sense why wouldn't we? In my 30 years of experience in the public sector it's so rare that the senior management asks the people that are delivering this service what do you think and what can we do differently? I found that they could be very tough markers and I've got some of those things that rah rah rah and other times you know I've really had to pick up pieces but they're invaluable of what we can learn from and it sounds like you're doing it you are picking up useful information that you can move together as a team to to improve our delivery of our educational performance and I strongly encourage that you continue to do that. It's just a benchmark of this SU. I just think those organizations that are too afraid to ask are missing out on something and they say most of the organization I'm afraid of either they are too afraid or they don't take it seriously that your staff has something important valuable that they can contribute it either way those are fatal flaws and I again want to commend this SU for for doing that and I'm sure you're learning and everybody's going to do this at the last so thank you. All right anyone else? Thank you. Yeah good evening everyone so just to summarize again we're continuing our professional development opportunities also starting to plan as Ando had mentioned kind of our summer work and what that will look like and some of our summer work right now actually looks like kind of deepening what Ando was talking about with kind of the universal assessments through some of our our idea of being our ESSER money which is different than you know that ESSER money that's provided to the whole SU. Ours is just for like our department. I've purchased student assessments that actually go from pre-K all the way up through 21 plus these assessments are very focused assessments around reading, math, writing. One is kind of a more universal tool and is their subtest for all of the areas even like oral comprehension and motor and things like that so that as Ando was saying about the universal screeners these can also be used as screeners to dive even a little bit deeper you know when when the grade level teams have questions about a student's performance or their learner profile and so our special educators are going to be trained in the early summer around all of these assessments which they've never been trained before so this is exciting that we can can then dig a little bit deeper to find kind of narrow narrow the the narrow the view of the student to kind of even find a more of a targeted the gaps in the learning so that you know then we can provide intervention in a more thoughtful way so I'm excited about all of these assessments and that training has already been planned for the summer. Again I'm continuing to work with Kerry McDonald the one planet director for the summer but I'm also looking to expand some of our opportunities to even a greater population of our students so I've been working with one of our certified occupational therapy assistants who is going to be actually a licensed occupant occupational therapist to provide kind of a one week summer camp experience for our students that have motor difficulties and may not be able to have the opportunity to have a camp experience and actually be able to work and interact with other students that are similar to them because our schools are so small we might have one or two students in a building so it'll be nice for them to kind of have like a greater community and get connected with some peers that maybe look like them and move like them and have similar equipment to them so that they can make those connections so that's exciting and also I started to speak with Renee Hinton our preschool coordinator to kind of think about if not for this summer next summer how to expand some opportunities to our preschool students and then for this summer I've been speaking with our alternative alternative classroom special educators about ways that we can continue our social emotional learning for those students in the alternative classrooms throughout the summer so we're doing some brainstorming about how we can connect continue to connect with those students and those families whether it be virtually or in person we're just trying to think of which way we'll be able to connect with parents more so they're actually going to send out a survey to their families to see which way they think that you know they and their and their children would be able to attend more frequently so that's exciting because we know you know if they're not available for for learning learning doesn't happen so if we can stay connected with them then that means they'll be ready to learn when school starts in August so that's exciting and then the last part is that we're you know continuing to hire it's it's it's very busy thinking it's taking a lot of time but I'm so excited about it to the point where now I have almost too many choices which again I'm very excited about that I'd rather have too many choices than than not enough so I'm super I'm super excited we've been doing a lot of work in our department but it's all good work and it's all work that's planning for the future so I don't entertain any questions if anyone has any great job yeah thanks great okay so bring up my report here um information on how we're spending asset money in this department to improve wi-fi the buildings and an update on some success we've had filing for e-rate and then a couple of programs where we're providing service to students to use at home under the emergency connectivity fund and t-mobile's project 10 million and then some details about pebt and the work that has been done there and then my favorite part of my report the boxes of old records we were able to free up yes beautiful in color yeah so I will entertain any questions anyone might have virtually are here they see hi ray I wanted to hear more about the wi-fi update does that have to do I my understanding is that all the buildings have really slick sexy fiber coming from ec fiber is this update around radars and modems or is this something about infrastructure so these are the wi-fi boxes that are generally in the classrooms okay cool so the the buildings that were first on the list had equipment that was no longer supported by the manufacturer and had reported some problems with connectivity here in there from time to time so the next phase of that project is going to include uh Rochester and Stockbridge where the wi-fi boxes in the classrooms are older although still supported so we're trying to be a little bit proactive awesome and kind of a related follow-up question I know that when schools were closed we had open wi-fi access available kind of in parking lots is that is that still happening or have we locked down those public networks now that's still uh the case that equipment was given us given to us by the state for that specific reason right so as part of accepting it we had to provide the available network to support things like health services basically if somebody didn't have another option themselves so that equipment had to face the parking lot basically available yeah thank you yeah ever had a question on the um your ecf initiative yeah families in need of internet service to help with remote learning and quote homework gap situations how are we doing on that is if we close the gap or is there is that's an impossible goal but how are we doing on it uh well uh better over time uh two years ago we would have had 50 families that had no internet right and that specific funding those devices were working backwards in time meaning working from the set of people we knew had needs based on uh public quarantine from this year or students who were part of the virtual learning academy last year and now back to the shutdown so um I don't have an exact number but let's say we were at seven percent two years ago um and I hesitate to say because I don't know exactly but I would say we're at three percent give or take any other questions for Ray thank you Ray yeah thank you you all have my report I have some updates I'd like to share with you since writing it the first is I have a new accountant that started today her name is Ellen Blanchard and she comes to us from several years at Gifford Medical Center as a staff accountant there so we are very excited to have her on staff um and second we found out on Friday that bill H737 passed the house and that bill I'm going to read you a couple of highlights from it is an act relating to the setting the homestead property tax yield and the non homestead property tax rate so this is the bill that we anticipate every year so if this passes the senate the property yield and I'm going to provide this report and I will update all your tax rates in your April board meetings but at this rate the property tax yield will be $13,472 the income dollar equivalent yield will be $16,146 and the non homestead property tax rate will be $1.449 for $100 of equalized education property value this bill also as Jamie mentioned at the meeting I think it was last week or the week before I have my weeks confused this bill will also set aside 36 million within the education fund as potential funding source for the universal school breakfast and lunch program 36 million are applied to lowering the tax rates uniformly across the homestead yield non homestead tax rate in the income yield and the yields and tax rates were calculating assuming changes associated with legislation that is being considered by the general assembly so like I said I'll give you this bill along with your projected updates in your meetings next month but I just wanted to share that with you so now if there's any questions any questions anyone are you pleased very I'm glad we took the conservative route and all of our initial budgets but this is great news for all of our communities so this will help with it yes yeah tax rates will go down even lower less than we projected very nice and I'm excited about the universal meals I think that's definitely the right step forward after what we've experienced the last two years and you're really excited about your account very excited about that all right guys um our valley superintendent um evaluation committee I have tentatively going to set up a date of the seventh car meeting with sue so we send watch for an email those of you are on the evaluation committee I just got an email back from her on Friday so um I would be sending an email out to all of you um April 7th April 7th yes calendar um conversation yes and we had a um conversation about calendars and wagon wheels at our last evaluation committee meeting um so going forward in August we're looking at um a wagon wheel type meeting um that's how that was going to work so there was discussion about two districts um getting together at a time um Strafford and Sharon had done this previously and so the concept was that we would look at two districts getting together at the same evening and that the meetings might offset uh an hour so one might start at 5 30 one might start at 6 30 and someone went forward to start now at 6 30 and some started 5 30 um and so that that was going to be the approach that the committee was suggesting and we wouldn't start this until August and then the further concept from that group was and other members were on here so they can jump in but was the idea too that the two the two districts that meet together now might change annually or at least you know or every two years just to have different boards get to know each other at a possibly a different level so that was discussed as well and Jamie is going to come up with a calendar for everybody and all the boards to have a chance to look at before we roll it before we decide on it in August Don yeah I just would last I wasn't there at that meeting so I'd like to ask some consideration about these pairings maybe be join towns instead of people having to travel from one end of the district to the other unless they're going to be over the computer that is what we talked about is using geographic location yeah okay Sarah well it seems to me that we could meet in our hometown and do the the together part virtual couldn't we rather than travel so then we could be part of Stockbridge Rochester group sometime but I think we can talk about that more sir but I think the idea was we left Jamie be at our meeting and I don't know that yeah the plan was still for me to be there in Tara and be able to be in attendance certainly we'll still allow the hybrid option as well um but the the group's initial thoughts were our son g-hub together sharing red together f-bud strafford together was the initial time for the first incoming year that wasn't cemented but that's what was discussed well I just would say I have no problem driving over to Tumbridge to do that I have a serious problem driving to Stockbridge no right that's that's that's what Don that was like that's like what Don's point was to try to keep district you said that you change them like every two years I'm you know I'm nothing against Stockbridge except for that's pretty far away from strafford it might be something that it might be something that yeah might be a good point at times yeah you could come to Hancock and sleep over yeah yeah but we did think about f-bud could go with run right like there's a ruds with our son like there's other options too in combinations so we can switch it around and still kind of keep geographically together I want you to know I support that concept I just also I just don't support driving you know much beyond South Royalton to go to a meeting right well and I think we're going to have the hybrid option for four numbers to to come in so if you're one that doesn't want to drive we're going to still make keep we're going to try to continue to keep the option that you don't have to yeah yeah I just think we get better attendance from our public to in certain districts by having a hybrid option yeah so unless the board tells me no my plan was to continue to author it right we had our policy committee meeting tonight we're coming back and we're going to meet again on the 11th we're working on social media yep social media and verification of student residency our two that we're working on at the next meeting on April 11 okay and then we're on to 11.2 school calendar uh so this is the uh 22 23 school calendar and so some of the feedback that we've received is is that over the last few years based on statue of having to align with our regional tech center and so for us our regional tech center is Randolph that so that requires three s used to work together around aligning our vacations and so um on to Adam and Tracy Thompson um facilitated a group that was made up of teachers actually we had a board member on it as well um to start to develop two different versions of a calendar we called it counter a counter b um and then we got feedback from the entire admin team and then also from teachers across different districts and the the counter that we settled on was a and one of the things in this group's work that came out early on was the desire of aligning one vacation to the north and one vacation to the south and what i mean by that is we still don't have a statewide calendar secretary french i actually just met with him in this office last thursday and asked if he thought there was any momentum on that he said that there's been talk but the legislature really hasn't tackled it um and so what we've heard is is that many of our families in our our towns of strafford first branch our sud um and sharon will often have students who might go to a school that uses a southern calendar like harford woodstock befford and so this calendar now aligns us one vacation to the south and one vacation to the north um and randolph and cbs u was willing to do that uh with us so i think that that's going to be a really well received change um from our families and then the calendar does have 14 early release days which aligns to the support staff master agreement around any time and don you had a question i do um in the past there has been um the ability to go to the it was a commissioner but now it's the whoever it is superintendent french and ask if we can amend that calendar and historically we've always been denied but now i understand you to say randolph is going to allow us to change it is that what you just said yeah randolph was willing to work with us on it so we don't actually have to ask for we don't have to ask for that don because randoffs they worked with us and agreed to it okay good so again one vacations to the south once to the north so it seemed like it was uh it was a good compromise any other questions on the calendar there are no other questions um someone likes to make a motion to accept the calendar is there any more discussion on the calendar okay hearing none all those in favor to approve the calendar say aye hi hi hi hi hi hi are there any nays right calendar is approved thank you everyone i'll have a letter going out this week and um we're already asking for the calendar so i'm certain that that's included um as well okay so we have one more topic on our agenda yep thank you guys all for coming tonight it's nice to get to see you thank you for signing on one that was a bad sense this moment i'll move to return to public session at 742 with no action taken all right so moved we're in public session um so um 11.1 um COVID-19 vaccination yeah so um the what i provided you preliminary data on the current status of our employees in regards to vaccination status we still have a chunk of unknowns in each district so lisa where our HR uh person is going to be reaching out to those individuals to get updated information around vaccination status and cards so next month i can provide you with an update both on COVID-19 vaccination status for employees but also our students um we've been trying to update that monthly so i'll be able to give you the student rates as well in each district very good any questions jayney again will that data be with boosters can you make sure you know like if you ask that question because our some a lot of our students are eligible for boosters too yep so i will get i need to go back and look at what the aoe's last guidance around that was shannon uh they were giving us definitions of what vaccinated was and so i'll use whatever that latest version was that they were using i think it was different i want to make sure we know what we're looking at i think it was different for adults versus students i think with booster for adults um not for students but i will get clarity and that's what we're reporting on anything else on that topic like i you all here i do want to say great job on on the getting this the evaluations first until the back end we had really good numbers so really excited that like i think 25 out of 32 participated and some of those could be board numbers that weren't because we're right at our change over time so it was a really good number so thank you everybody for getting that done um resignations new hires i'll have a whole list for you next month there's several still that i need to meet with and finish interviewing because i do meet with each person so next month i'll have the detail list to you with names um in the agenda i'll have christie update that but like annette said it's it's coming along really well so um any other business that anybody needs to talk about future agenda items we have on your board development series was jamie touched on tonight and formula for w r vs you assessments there was discussion around that yep um and then we'll have coven 19 vaccination status um as well nice and our next meeting date is april 25th is it really happy anniversary how many wow that's a big one you shouldn't even be here go look to get after matt what i know if you guys heard it's kathy's anniversary on the 25th i said she shouldn't even be here we could just celebrate chair what is there a co-chair and you can there's a vice chair but she's no longer on the board and we haven't reword yet wait who's who i think was lisa floyd if i remember right lisa floyd is no longer on the board yeah no she's she did not run it right so we have a vacancy to fill well we'll reorgan june yeah in meantime we have an anniversary party to plan i know all right is there anything else tonight guys i moved to adjourn so move guys thank you thanks everyone


Anyway, my name is Robbie Adair and I'm going to be talking about using AI to speed up your WordPress builds, okay? So in other words, how many of you build websites in here? Perfect. All right, great, great. Well, then this will be right for you. I'm on, well, you can find me all over social media as Robbie Adair. It's easy to find me. If you want to tweet, also don't forget that word camp Rochester is using WC Rock. In my session, I actually used AI to generate all the images that you're going to see throughout this. And so I also wanted to share with you what I used as my prompts, because prompts are important. And we'll talk about that more because learning how to use a prompt, it will give you what you want. Just like Chris said, AI is very undependable on the results you get. The more you can learn how to use prompts, the better information you're going to get back from AI. So in this one, I said the back of a female web developer. By the way, if I just said web developer, I would have got a male. 100% of the time. So I said a female web developer. Now what's interesting, I had actually done this, I don't know, I put this together about six months ago when it was all still in beta, Firefly. And when I did, I specifically said I wanted a female web developer. So I did get females, but all of them were white. They have been doing a lot of work trying to improve the results and lower the bias of AI. And now if you ask for a female web developer, you get different skin tones. And so this is actually good. Things are changing. And it's changing very, very quickly, which I like to see because just like Chris said, it all changes very rapidly. So you have to stay on top of it. All right. Quickly about myself, because again, I talk long, so I don't want to spend too much time on that. But if you don't know me, if you haven't met me at another conference, because I've been in talking at conferences for years and years, my name is Robbie Adair. You can check out my personal website. I call it the Red Headed Stepchild because I never have time to update it. Anyway, so but I have an agency that I've had for 20 years. And we do a lot of content creation and web application building. And then OS Training, which is what I'm here with as we do web development training. So we have a website where you can just sign up as a member and learn from our video courses, our ebooks. We also do a lot of white label training for customers too. All right, enough about that. Let's get into what are we going to talk about in here? We're going to talk about a brief history on AI. I am not going to bore you.  Yes, I am. No, I'm not. And then we're going to talk about generating text. And I know we talked about it with Chris and his last one. So I'll definitely give you guys some other angles on stuff. And then also images and backgrounds. So I want to talk a little bit more about using the image creation that you can use. And then some other ways you can use because you can use the chat GPTs and bars out there for more than just generate an article for me. You could say help me write this bit of CSS code, analyze my report. So there's a lot of things we can do. I want to talk about some of those things that we can do. And then some other things that you should consider as you start using AI, things you should keep in mind. And then of course, Q&A, if we have time, I have actually set a timer. So fingers crossed, I'm going to leave some time for you guys. So my little robot over here again was also with Adobe Firefly. And I'm going to talk about why I use Adobe Firefly the most or Adobe. And that is this is a robot checking off a list on a clipboard. They're holding and there is a clock on the wall behind them. So by the way, I like I told you, I have done this presentation and now and I regenerated is now that they were out of beta. But honestly, I liked my image that I received in the beta version before beta better than I did this one. But I went ahead and switched it anyway. But I thought that was interesting that I was seeing some changes running the same prompts. I was getting very different results, which is a lot of people are saying that about chat GPT for in particular, that they feel like there are some things that they're just not getting the same as they were before, like it's degrading itself sometimes when it's learning, which is interesting. Now, the brief history on AI, this is where I told you in 1914, I'm not going to read all this for you. I'm really not what I wanted you to see on this, because I don't want people to be afraid of AI. And there is a lot of fear with AI, like people are like, it's going to take our jobs and all this. Quite honestly, AI so far has only generated more jobs. We have prompt engineers now that are making a fortune right now. So it is actually only creating more jobs right now. And you can see 1943 is when the first neural network was actually even invented. This has been around a very long time. And then in the 50s, they expanded again in the 60s is when we actually got the term artificial intelligence. So it's been here. You've been using it, you just didn't know it probably. But I can tell you what this became pretty popular 2018, 2020, when we started getting the chat GPT APIs out there. And then of course in 21, when they actually released it as something you could just log in and use, it became very popular. And then all everybody's like, Oh my God, AI is like it's not been there, but it has been there. You've been using it, I promise you, you remember him. So yes, if you've ever used dragon speech recognition, you were using AI. If you've remember the chess programs, remember he won actually the AI won against the master. And then also things like email filtering, spam filtering, that's all that's been AI since like late 80s or early 90s, whatever, you know, I mean, this has been around a long time. Some of it was like data mining. That's probably one of the I would say one of the biggest industries that has used AI over the years that you, you might not have been touching it necessarily, but it's been there. So you've been benefiting from it regardless. So Clippy, I asked chat GPT, was Clippy AI? And it got snarky. I mean, it really did. He was like, well, kind of kind of a basic AI, but it was really funny because chat GPT did not want to admit that Clippy was AI, but he was. All right. So what I want to talk about in here though is how can you actually start using AI in your day to day? Okay. So practically, how can you actually start using it? Well, all of you said you work on websites. If you work on customer websites, if you're working on your own website, then all you have to do is blame yourself if you don't get your stuff to yourself. But if you're working on anything else that you need content from the client, you need images, you need texts, right?  And so then what do you start doing?  I'm going to start laying this out anyway. And I'm going to use this image holder, Laura Ipsum.  And the client looks at it and goes, no, no, no, I wanted it in English. And you're like, oh my gosh, they totally don't get Laura Ipsum. There's not a real language. And so they're just confused. And then image, well, what kind of image are you thinking there? So imagine if instead, my client is a cupcake company, right? And they're going to sell cupcakes on their website. So if I just go and generate, give me a lemon cupcake on a gingham tablecloth, make it look festive.  This is not my client's lemon cupcake, but it doesn't matter. It's a cupcake. This they can relate to, right? They can understand that. And then I'm like, give me a short description for the lemon cupcake from a homemade cupcake factory. And so it gives me a short description. Now, you do need to tell your client, this is not your image. And this is not your text. This is so that I can show you what this layout is going to look like. And better yet, it gives the client the ability to look at that and go, oh, that's what they need from me. Oh, this is much easier than I thought because I can tell you, a client starts getting just like fear in their soul when you ask them for content. They're just like, huh, I don't know. I've never had to describe my cupcakes, right? But if you can start giving them ideas, now they can go in there and they go, well, yeah, mine's not really tangy sweet though.  And so they can go in here and they can start modifying this to fit their own needs. And it takes some of that anxiety off of them. And you might even actually get your content faster from them. But at least you didn't hold up layout and design for them. So this gets you moving along on your project. So by the way, this also was generated in Firefly. So this is a web developer growing old while waiting for an email to come in with from the client. And that is the truth. Now notice I also put claymation style on that. So you can also dictate in your prompts what style of artwork you want back. Okay? So I find that that way, let's say for instance, if I wanted to go through and theme this website more, using the same style throughout my prompts as I'm building this content is going to give me a very nice theme.  But if you can just use your same style as your prompting, it's going to keep you in that same family of look. Generating content. So let's talk about generating content. A couple of things. And Chris showed you some examples, which I love because you guys are actually seeing, if you haven't used chat GPT, you were seeing him use chat GPT. And you put in your prompts, it's going to spit back some stuff. One thing, and he did it once where he said, oh now take all of that and make it funny or do something like that. Remember the benefit because the benefit is I can build upon what I've said in chat GPT or barred before. I don't have to repeat my whole self. You can say, oh now take that in and shorten it or shorten it. So remember that you have the ability to keep the memory in there. That's the whole beauty of this, right? Is we are having a conversation with that API and it remembers what we've been talking about. But there are some key things that you need to know. You need to say things like short description or you need to use the words in your prompts to get exactly what you're wanting out of chat GPT or barred. Like how long? Like one sentence or a paragraph or for an about page, which is what you see over here. So I asked chat GPT, you know, writing an about page for a custom made cupcake company, yada yada. And you'll see that it wrote it and it just put, you know, put your cupcake company name right here. Now, and I will tell you, because this is part of if you're using chat GPT, the non paid version, you have to know that everything that you are using chat GPT goes back into train chat GPT. All right, which is maybe fine for you. But if you're going to, and this is an about page, it's going to be public anyway. So this wouldn't matter. I could have actually used the cupcakes, you know, crazy cupcakes company. And I could have used that name in there. But let's say you start using chat GPT to do some other things for your company, like write internal SOPs or things like that. If it is confidential information, you might want to consider paying to have the paid for version of chat GPT because you can turn off where your conversations become part of the learning model. So just note, if you need to have some confidential information that you're going to use in there, you might want to do that. The other thing you could do obviously is write your own thing, use the API, but if you're using chat GPT in its online state or in the app, you probably want to pay for one for that. Now, you want to also supply some things. So like this, when I was building this about, I wanted to give it descriptions that I knew about the customer, right?  Now again, am I going to use this for their about page? No. And I want to tell the client they are not using it for their about page. I want them though to look at this and now go, oh, okay, I can now modify this. And again, you're taking the anxiety off the client. You're helping them. They're actually happy with these kind of helps and prompts themselves because it saves them the time of having to, you know, they're have a meeting with everybody else and go, well, what do we think about our companies? Write this or whatever. And they just want to make cupcakes, right? So they don't want to make a website, but you do have to have this information from them. So this will help you speed up the process with the client, and kind of guide the client as you're doing this. The other thing you can do is you could say to the client, hey, do you have brochure content? Do you have bios that you've written for people? All of whatever content you can send me, doesn't matter what it was written for, send it to me because I will say AI is extremely fast at taking that content and summarizing it for you, right? It's not coming to come up with this information. You've given it the real information, so you don't worry about hallucinations here. You've given it the information. You're just saying, summarize this. Make a bullet list, whatever. And it's taking your real data then and putting it in a different fashion for you. And so that's a great way to use it and that actually then is usable content for you probably. You're still going to want to mold it a little bit to, you know, change some things so that it matches the whole voice of the website, which we'll talk about voice in just a minute. You can also have it calculate things. Like if you know the date that they started their company, you could ask ChatGPT, well, how old this is? You could do that math too, but it'll come down days old as it's coming, how many hours or whatever. But it's going to give you a very accurate count on how old it is. So you could say, you know, 13 and a half years ago, and it did the math for you. You didn't have to do the math. And there's some other things that you might use ChatGPT on math. I just actually recently, when I was doing a proposal and I was trying to estimate time on something, ChatGPT is pretty good at estimating time. Like we needed to go through some database records. And there was a few thousand of them. And some of them we could do programmatically, but some we needed to do manual touches on. So I asked ChatGPT, how long would it take us to manually go through this many, this many columns of data with this many records, you know. And it was very good. It's very logical about it. It did, you know, give you stipulations of, well, it depends on how complex the data is that they have to check and all this, but here's the average. And so, and it gave me an average. And so that helped me with doing my proposal. So you might also consider that it's very good at estimating how long it'll take you to write blog posts or articles. So if you're trying to use that in your proposal, that will be good. Now, this was what I said in ChatGPT. And this is what I got. I also, at the end, I'm going to close well, actually, let's just do that now in case I run out of time at the end. Bard also had do this as well. So this is Bard's. And it's a little more detailed quite honestly. And I actually kind of like the way that it broke it up with headlines in there. So two different answers from both of these, but, but, and I might take a hodgepodge of these too, right? I might take a little bit of this one. I like the way it broke it up, but I might have taken the guts from the ChatGPT because I just like the way that it said things in there. So I, I recommend that you use both and try both of these, trying the same prompt in both will give you totally different answers. So that's kind of a good thing in a way, because that also means that everyone else is probably getting different answers to replicating ourselves, right? So what did I do with my presentation now? Oh, there it is. All right, let's go back here. Images. Let's talk about images for a minute because they're OpenAI, Dolly, and Mid Journey. I think the image that Chris showed probably was a Mid Journey. It had a very Mid Journey look to it. They all kind of have their looks, I feel like, but Mid Journey especially, there's just a look to the images from it. OpenAI, Dolly, by the way, the latest little version they put out was pretty amazing with some of the features that they have out. And so you might want to check that one out. Now, what I don't know about Dolly or Mid Journey, they're still trying to determine their whole copyright issues, which is why I typically tend to tend over to the Adobe products, because Adobe, they trained their model from their own start that they know they control the copyrights on all of this. They actually allow their artists to opt out if they don't want theirs to be included in the learning model. So they are actually, they are marking their images that have been generated with AI with metadata on them now, and most importantly, especially for all of you, that if you're doing this as a career, you're building websites for clients, Adobe has officially said they will represent you and court you get to talk to. So, hey, I was like, that's good. We're kind of at Adobe house anyway, because we do a lot of video editing and things too. And by the way, they have AI tools throughout their whole suite that are amazing with all you can do with it. So this is just an example of some of the things you could do, though, for our project that we got going here, right? So they've got inside of the Adobe tools, you've got a text. And by the way, you can do this online, you can you can do Firefly online and have these tools, or if you have the Adobe products, most of them right now, I think in the live version, you don't have to get the beta version right now in the live version, they have these AI tools in them. So like this is I can pick a font, I can type a word, and then I can give it a text prompt to say what I would like that word to look like, cover it in icing like a cupcake, which is what I did here. Okay, so this is cupcake icing on the word cupcakes using a certain font. And so you can change the font, you can say what you want it to be covered in. And then you just like any other image, you can just keep regenerating if you didn't like the pattern that it used or whatever, you can keep generating some other things. I don't know, I'm sure you've had to do this over the years client wants a repeating background. Oh my gosh, it's such a pain. You got to go in there and you like chop it, flip it, flip it, flip it, whatever to make sure you have this perfect repeating. Then you put it on there, you're like, well, that doesn't look great. So you have to go back in and there's a lot of editing sometimes involved in trying to get the perfect repeatable background. Guess what, you could just say I'd be like a perfectly repeatable background of cupcakes. It gave me four options. I could tell oh, I'd like bigger cupcakes or more random or I want these colors. I'm not having to manipulate an image every time I do this. And so for background generation, it's pretty slick. I like it. And what was the other thing I was going to tell you? Oh, the other thing is that the cool thing about this is you could also let's say I need an image that's going to be a square image across the text. I can go in there and dictate and say, I need an image that's square of a female web developer out of whatever, you know. And so I can actually dictate the size I'm going to get. And I could say, oh no, I need a hero image. So I need a Y, X number of pixels by X number of pixels. And it's going to give me exactly what I asked for.  Can you put it at the top? And you're like, well, that's not going to fit exactly. Well, now you have generative fill. So you can take that cupcake.  It does. If you go into Photoshop, you want to do a little grip on it and generate fill for those. But you can make then an image that fits in the area that they wanted in with their image, even though their image was not the right dimensions.  That's just the text with icing. And then this was make it perfectly, by the way, say perfectly repeatable. If you just say repeatable, guess what? It's not perfect. I tested it. But if you tell it to be perfect, it will. If only I worked that way. Cutting out images. Now, for some, I mean, we have Photoshop, like I said. So for us, we don't have to use any other tool for cutting out images. But I see a lot of more web developers or maybe it's a coder who now has to do something. He has to do some, he or she has to do some fine work too. And so they don't want Photoshop, but they need to do things like maybe they're setting up the staff page on this website. And they want to have everybody, I love this, in this pose cut out, you know, and then on a banner of their name. I see this all the time. It makes me crazy. But anyway, and what do they get? They get, you know, here's a picture of Sue by the fridge and here's John by the Christmas tree. And so you want to cut them all out. So you use some tools online segment anything, which is a Microsoft or meta tool meta. Thank you. Oh, I did say it good. It's a meta. Thank you. I was like, wait, it's one of the two big guys. So it's one of this tool and you tools and you can use it for free on there. And you just literally upload your image and you just highlight over the image. And it just like, it's amazing. Actually, like you'll have like where there's like horses running. And like, there's a leg of another horse over this one.  It's amazing how good it is at detecting the full thing that you want to cut out. Now over here, I did tell you about magic copy, which is a Chrome extension. They also have a Figma extension, I think, which is just using segment anything. And like this, I just literally you put it in your browser. I went to a news article and I said, oh, on this image, I want to use magic copy. And then it pulls it up, lets me highlight what I want, which was Taylor Swift and then boom, copy and paste into my slide. And I was done. I will tell you, though, that magic copy. Last time I tried to use it was having some issues. There's a GitHub repository. So I guess he just wasn't updated with the latest changes. But that is where his GitHub is, if you want to check it out. It's kind of cool though, because it's just a real fast way to grab images. Even if you just want to use it for your own personal like text people, crazy images, you can do that too. So other things from ChatGPT and or Bard, by the way, they're both pretty good at CSS code work. You know, PHP, any of your JavaScript flavors. As a matter of fact, one of the things that's really cool about these is you could take, let's say you had some old Mootools and you could say, take this Mootools and convert it to vanilla JavaScript and it'll rewrite your code for you in vanilla JavaScript. So you can actually use it for converting code between languages or between flavors of languages at least. So that's kind of cool. I don't know if you guys saw the like two days ago, I think it was the latest version of ChatGPT. Everybody's losing their minds because a couple of things, they have now image recognition. So I could take an image and I could upload it. Like one of the examples I saw they took a picture of their their bicycle uploaded in ChatGPT and said, how do I adjust the seat on this bicycle? It could look at that, recognize that bicycle and go, oh, this is a, you know, a track mountain bike, whatever. And it has spots underneath here that you need to do and it'll recognize the image. So that's amazing. The other thing that you could do is you could just sketch and they even showed, they like a whiteboard. Like here's the kind of widget I would like built with PHP and they uploaded that image and said, please build this with PHP. It coded, wasn't perfect, but it coded something very similar with the interface looking like that. So it's getting pretty cool. Now is any of it perfect? No. As a matter of fact, like if you use it for doing code, what I always tell people is you do the code and you say, hey, write me a widget that does this in PHP and it does it and goes here, there you go. And it would, you run that PHP, you would do it. But ask it, is this the most secure way to write this code?  Wait a minute. Let me rewrite this. And it rewrites it and goes, this would be a more secure way to write this code. So again, it's the prompts. You've got to learn how to talk to it to get the best results out of it. As well as when you're using it for articles, like Chris was saying, oh, never use this right on the back because it sounds so mechanical. It sounds like a computer wrote it because it was a computer. But like we chat at GPT-4, I could take, let's say I've written five or six blog articles that I have that I wrote myself and I can pop them in and I could say, this was written by Robbie Adier and this was written by Robbie Adier. And so I could give it several examples of my writing. And then I could say, now, write a blog post about X in the voice of Robbie Adier. And it's going to try its hardest to make it sound like me. So we're going to get a lot of awesomes and things like that in there. So it does a pretty good job and you can definitely tell that it has manipulated the way it gives you that information back. It may not be perfect, but maybe it'll be a step closer to make it so that you have to do less editing on this side. And another thing that I want to bring up about that is getting it to cite its sources. If it writes an article for you, yes, get it to cite the sources, but you may want to also go check those sources. I haven't seen a problem with this, but Marcus and I were actually on a panel this week on the AI and he was saying a friend of his put in some medical stuff and it's where you get this information. It cited a medical journal, but his friend got the book off and looked it up, went to that page and went, that's not what it says here. So check the sources too when you have it do it. Or don't be like the lawyer who said, could you please write my closing arguments? And it had like three or four cases in there that it cited. It totally made up. Those were not real cases is all that guy got in a lot of trouble. So don't do that. The other thing that you can do in here is have it scaffold up a plugin for you. And actually, there's a couple of really good YouTube videos out there. If you go search for this of people who like do it live, they'll like show you. Have you done it? Awesome. Awesome. It's pretty amazing. So Topher actually did do this and it did work. You still will probably want to touch it and change some things about it, but it's pretty good about doing that. Now the other thing that I find developers, because this happens all the time, you inherit some code, right?  And so what does every developer go? I'm going to have to throw that away and rewrite this. What every developer says, like every developer on the planet says this. But really, exactly. But really, take that code, plop it into chat dbt and say explain. Use prompt, explain this code to me like a noob. It will break it in OB. It will literally break it down line for line. And it's actually pretty good about even referencing. Oh, this is referencing a, I'm going to start making it because I'm a real developer. I'll be like, this is a class object, blah, blah, blah. And it'll say where it references it somewhere else, right? So it's pretty cool.  Maybe I actually could use some of this or I could see what it's doing and make the modifications that I need to. So definitely try that. The other thing that I want to point out here is, again, the CSS that I had it build here, it teaches as well, right? So it wrote the code for me, but then it explained what it wrote for me. Now you'll notice that I just said, Hey, create rounded corner buttons that are orange or whatever. And it did do it. But if you know CSS, what it just did is it overwrote every button on my website, right? So I had to go back and say, Oh, could you make the class? Could you give it a class name? That's what's funny. Could you give it a class name? It literally named it class name, I think. And I was like, wait, could you name the class, you know, orange button? And then it did it. So it did do who run on my time here. So it did do it. But the nice thing about that was I didn't keep having to write out this whole thing of can you give me an orange, you know, I just said, Oh, now can you change the class name to this? Oh, wait, I also wanted to have a shadow. And it just gives me back the code with the added changes that I wanted in there. And you save those. So all of your conversations you're having with GPT are saved in there. So I could go back next week because let's say I send it to the client and they look at it and they're go, Oh, that's great. But I really wish we had purple blitz. Okay, great, whatever. Now I could just go change that purple. But maybe they go, I'd like more rounded and I would like, you know, one square corner. Okay, so I could just go back in there. I could go, Okay, could we up the radius on three corners and make the lower right square? And it will give me that same code back with those changes in it. So it's nice because I didn't have to repeat myself is saving those little microseconds of time in your day actually adds up to a lot of time in the end. All right. So that was what I said, right CSS to make it. Like I said, I kind of was like, Oh, that was too vague. I should have said with this class name, you know, giving it a little more direction there. So if you're going to start doing this, and I highly recommend you do this AI is not going anywhere, obviously, all these tools are now incorporating AI. So you're going to start using it things to think about whenever you're going to do it, which by the way, I asked chat GPT, what should we be concerned about? And it gave you a lot of extremely long list. And I was like, Oh, wow. Okay, let me just find things I think are really important in here, quality and coherence. We've talked about that double check everything that it you generate, right? Check it out. Make sure even if you've asked for references, check it out. I asked it. I asked the GPT out, you know, again, this whole description about their history, and I've been in this for 65, 70 years almost. And it was like, and then the CEO passed away in 2002. I was like, he's still alive. But okay, that's weird. And then I went over to Bard and I said, you know, tell me the history and did the same thing gave me the whole little history and said the CEO passed away in 2012. I was like, honestly, you know, the day when they really have it. So I went back to both of them was like, why do you think the CEO has is deceased? And both of them went, Oh, I don't know. I guess I did make that up. Literally, it was the answer I got back. Because what you do have to know about AI is it's designed to give you an answer. Even if it has to hallucinate an answer, it's going to give you an answer. But the answer, if you ask it the right question could be, Oh, I made that up. I don't know. I don't have a reference. I can't find any reference. Oh, okay. So check everything. Plagiarism. Plagiarism is obviously something you want to run your content through a plagiarism checker. Or if you're using something like Grammarly, like Chris had up here, Grammarly will basically you can use AI and Grammarly, it generates it, then Grammarly runs its own AI to correct it. But then it also runs it through a plagiarism checker. Or you could do this yourself. Just run it through a plagiarism checker. There's also things like zero GPT, which is checkers to see if something is generated with AI or not. They're not perfect. Just like Chris said, I ran through something that I generate with AI and went, Oh, this is, you know, 97% probably. Well, it was 100% because I just generated and plopped it in there. But it said 97. So that's pretty good.  I threw it in there and it went, well, there's like a 7% chance or something like that. And I was like, I always knew I was part robot. It's proven now. Zero GPT said it. So I'm good. And you just have to keep up with illegal and regulatory compliances are the hardest because they're changing every day. But if you're going to try and use something that you know you're going to use, like I said, some of it could just be using in the building process of your website. It's all thrown away. Anyway, that doesn't matter. But if there is something you're going to in the end use, make sure you can use it. Okay. And they're saying that this is a lack of creativity. I say the total opposite of that. I think that is not true. I think it actually boosts our creativity and it makes us faster because just like he showed you, I could I sit down and write down 10 article ideas for a t-shirt or whatever. Yeah, I probably could. You know, here's some blogs. I could write about it. But I can go and check GPT and go, give me 10 ideas. And it generates 10 ideas like that. Okay. I may or may not use all of those. I may use some of those. But it still sped up my creative time. And I'll probably modify it from there. So I find it just sparks creativity versus kills it. Misinformation we know about. Data privacy is a true key, which is what I was telling you about. Have the paid version and don't let it learn if you're putting in confidential information. Lock it down. And then over dependency on AI. I can't imagine us being over dependent on any technology. Come on. Come on. Not at all. I mean, it's like I had like, I probably have looked five times to see if my phone was there. You know what I mean? I can't imagine being over dependent. So what are the, what should we do by the way? So chat GPT just, you know, wanted to help me. So it just went on to say, and these are some things you could do to, you know, help this anyway. And I'm just like, okay, all the things I said, check your stuff. Stay on top of it. That's basically it. And this is moving very fast. So do use it. Don't get left behind. Do use it. See how you can incorporate it in your day-to-day life. By the way, there's a tool called scribe how. So when I get to the website and then I want to start by steps on how to go out of post or at a page or make a change to something. I literally go turn on scribe how. And as I'm doing the actions, it is literally taking a screenshot for me at every little step that I take. It is writing the step-by-step instructions for me. And it is dead gum. Good. When you're done, you say, stop, it takes you in there and you've got this step-by-step document is written for you. You can still modify it, change it, whatever, generate a PDFs and you can generate HTML from it, whatever you want. And that has saved me so much time because it's called scribe how. It's great. You guys should check it out. It's amazing. I subscribe to a lot of podcasts. I get too long didn't read emails about AI. And let me tell you what, it's amazing. I probably get 10 new AI tools to review a week. It's crazy how fast this is happening. So definitely get in there and learn. And I actually did make it to my last slide. So I'll be able to answer some questions or show you something if you want. By the way, if you are interested in a membership to OS training for you or your clients, by the way, you can use Unleash Me because it's the 20th anniversary of WordPress. I'll get you 20% off. Yes. All right. So and by the way, I will show you guys the scribe how site just so you can, let's see. There we go. This is it. Scribe how. And so like I just create, ooh, I'm not online. Hang on. I know the Wi-Fi blocks everything. It did. It did. Let me, I'll switch to my phone and see. Here, I'll just switch to my phone now. Maybe. Oh, come on. Come on. There it goes. Okay. So like for instance, this is how to update something on there. And you can see it, I literally, as I did it, I was showing the client, I was showing them live too. And so I just literally turned on record while I was doing it. And it generated this. Now, I know I could, I do a lot of video, I could record my screen and give them a video.  They really do.  I don't have to keep just putting this up. And to me, it's quite honestly just about as good as the video may be better, because then I can give them some little instructions in there if I, yes. It will, it does, I haven't used it on anything else, besides browser, but I think it will. I use, like this is inside of here. You somehow can do it. I think maybe has a download mod, like a little app, you can download it, but I haven't done that. So don't quote me on it. But they also have a little browser plugin. You see it right there. So I can just start capturing anywhere I am and then start going through it. You can actually combine them too. So like if I've done something and then I'm like, oh, page or whatever, then I can put, combine those two together and stuff like that. So by the way, well, I did show you this with Bard doing the different, you do get different, even the, the CSS was slightly different because I said rounded corner. I didn't tell it how much rounded one pick like five pixels, the other one picked 10. I don't know why, but that's what they did. Right? So you will get, even in CSS, you're going to get some slightly different results. Yes. So, so, okay. So notice, because that was one of the things that just came in here, browse with Bing. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Okay. So the question was, where does Bing fall in with all of this? I'm talking about Bard. I'm talking about chat GPT. Where does Bing call on this? Remember, Bing is Microsoft. Microsoft put $4 billion into open AI chat GPT. What do you think they're using? Chat GPT. So I have not, I have not. So no, I haven't gone into just Bing's tool, but I think it's just through their search anyway, right? Is the way they're, they're kind of spitting back the AI is through their search. Don't give, that I don't know. I haven't seen a particular tool for them. So I think it's just in their search is what they've done. They've incorporated that into their search results, which is cool. And Google's working on that too. And they're late. The latest Bard actually came out with a checker. That was yesterday, I think it has a checker in there. So when you generate something now, it's going to pop up and go, would you like me to check and show you the site? My source is so it's kind of helping you remember to do that. So uh-huh. Okay. So here's what I'll tell you about that. And I have been building websites since HTML 1.0. There was no image tag. I've been doing this a very long time. And I should have not said that. I just dated myself. Anyway, but yeah, we'll just cut that out of there. That's not true. What I will tell you is there are many ways to build a website, right? And everybody kind of has their own technique and their own flavor in there too. So what I do think is you're going to find people who haven't been web developers, this is going to be a cool tool for them. They're going to go in there and go, I want a five page website. And they get it. Like, oh, that's great. They've never done it any other way. So they don't know if what they've got is great or not, but it was done. And so they think it's great. I do think if you are a web developer and you generate this, you may look at it and go, either that's garbage on the code in the back end, or you may look at it and go, oh, yeah, okay, this is a good start. And now I'm going to start finishing it out. That's what I think about them. I think there are going to be tools that web developers will use to save time if they can get them to generate something that is usable enough for them to go forward with. I haven't actually tested them myself, but I've watched several demos on some of these builders like you're talking about. And so far, I haven't been super impressed. I mean, it's getting there though. But just like you saw the audio AI six months ago, that audio AI was pretty much garbage too. Six months later, here we are. And I can make Elvis sing Snoop Dogg song, literally. And so it is pretty amazing how fast things are moving. The video stuff. Here's the other thing I will tell you, this is what I think about AI. It use it. But some of these general tools, like just chat GPT, that's pretty general. I can do a whole lot. I can ask it a whole lot. I'm in a very big world there. But if you use something like he brought up Yoast or Elementor or something like that, where they're narrowing down, and it's already a tool that does a very specific thing, SEO. And then they're saying, I'm going to use GPT's API to just do this little section. They're actually kind of helping you mold prompts, basically. And so I think that's where we're going to see a lot more use out of AI tools, is in the tools we already use, but then using them to enhance or speed us up. Just like the Adobe products.  Could we have composited and put a background and made this blended? Absolutely. But it might have been to make a really good composite. It might have been a couple of hours on that image. Whereas now we can do generative fill, generative fill, go, oh, that looks pretty good. Let me just touch up a few little things done. And we're done in 15 minutes and something that used to take us two hours. So I'm using AI, but I'm using it in a very specific case. And I'm using it with a skill set that I already have and I understand. And I know if it's good or not, and I know how to improve it. You see what I mean? So I think that's what we're going to see. That's why, just like that, I mean, describe how.  I do this all the time for people. Make a screenshot, highlight what I'm showing them, write the step by step. I mean, I can do this, but that speeds up my time because it's doing these things for me. And then just letting me edit it and get it right the way I want it. Video, we're using already things like runway for upscaling. You've got some old video, like we have a client video we're doing for one of them, they're doing a conference and we're building a video for them. And it's got some history of the company in it, right? And they've got some old, old, I'm talking old video because 100 year old company. And they've got some old video there and it's like this big on a 1080p, right? And so we can use runway though and you could upscale that and you could, you could take a 16 millimeter upscale it to 1080 and it's pretty good. I mean, it is not perfect, but better than definitely just scaling something, right? Which is always going to degrade. So upscaling with AI is pretty amazing. The audio, I mean, yeah, making Elvis sing Snoop Dogg is cool and all, but really what's good about that is, especially if you do a lot of your own recordings and such, you could go into something like Descript. You have to say it is your voice, you can't do this with other people's voice, but I can record enough of my voice in there. And then literally I can just upload a document and say, read this. And it reads it in my voice and it's kind of eerily good. Like you're like, wow. The other thing with the speech in AI is for editing. Like when we're looking at our, in Adobe and you're looking at editing a video and say an interview, you could say, I'd like to remove all the ums out of this. It literally transcribes the text, finds the ums and it clips them out. And then all of a sudden your video is shortened like this and it just cut out those ums for you. It's pretty amazing. The other one, I don't know if y'all saw last week where they have the tool that translates. Like I can literally video myself here doing this presentation in English and then I can go make Robbie do this in Spanish. And it not only does it convert my voice over into Spanish, it moves the mouth.  It's pretty, it's pretty good too. Pretty good. Exactly. Exactly. And it's not for a lip reader. I don't think it's perfect though. I really don't. I don't think it's not quite anyway. And they said there's certain languages they're better at. Like, you know, going from English to Spanish is pretty, pretty good. But when you start going to something like, um, German where it's more guttural and you, there's more harsh changes in the lips than I don't think it does as well. But it will, if I guarantee you it will be doing that. So, uh, all right. So we are right at time. Any other questions or if not find me somewhere here. Yes. They have it is open for commercial use. If you're an Adobe cloud member, you get it for free. If you're not, you can actually now subscribe to Firefly. They just announced it's like last week. It's a very confusing thing about credits. But basically you pay a monthly amount. You get so many credits to use in there. And then as you eat away the credits, you can buy more credits if you want to keep generating. So that's the, that's the way that works. Yes. So do you know the too long didn't read newsletters that are out there, TDLR, they have one that's specifically for AI. It's amazing. It gives you really good information every week. I like this week in AI podcast, it gets really geeky, nerdy, and it's pretty long, but it's really good. It's really, they may sometimes is like, you might want to go to sleep when they start really getting into large language models or there's like really, okay, whatever. But it's interesting. Most importantly, I like hearing like, I like hearing what the geeky guys are talking about and women are talking about in this world, because then I kind of, let's me kind of have a hint at where we're going with things. Another one I like is AI. I think it's AI in business is what it's called. And he like interviews a different corporate, large corporation people. He interviews them to talk about how they're using AI to speed up things inside of their corporations. Like I knew before, before it happened, I knew that my hotels.com was going to be being merged into one key or whatever they call it now with Expedia and all that, because I listened to the woman that was the project manager lead on that, how they had to take all these different databases from hotels.com and Expedia and all that. And they had to figure out a way that they're going to merge all this data into one. They use a lot of AI, because remember data mining, data merging, all of this stuff, it's right up AI's alley, right? So it can look at it and go, well, you have this, these columns here, you have these, this is probably a crossover here. And I mean, you're still going to have to, you're still going to need the data analysis in there to like say, yes, this is true. But it's just so how fast that AI can work, it can just speed them up. And so by, I listened to her old talk about that. So I knew that was coming. So I wasn't surprised when I got the email that was like, oh, you're a hotel.com is now in one key or whatever. I was like, oh, that's cool, because I heard her talk about. So I think, you know, and there's a lot of podcasts. So just look at the podcasts that are out there because, you know, I, you can really hear some cool stuff that's coming. One more thing that I've meant to tell you guys about, especially just still in that building website, if you have some errors that are happening, and you probably get this from your host all the time, look in the logs.  I hate that answer all the time because then you get the log file and it's just like long text file. And you're like, I've got to try and find the date and time that something odd happened in this. They would take me a long time to go through and do it. I could do it, but it's going to take me a long time. You can literally dump that log file in a chat GBT and say, find the anomalies done. So think about it for those kinds of things, debugging, things like that. So, all right. Again, if y'all have any other questions, find me. Thank you.


Hair cells of the inner ear are highly sensitive to changes in mitochondria, the subcellular organelles responsible for energy production in eukaryotic cells. Over 30 mitochondrial deafness genes have been identified, and mitochondria are implicated in hair cell death following noise exposure, aminoglycoside antibiotic exposure, and age-related hearing loss. Little is known about the basic aspects of hair cell mitochondrial biology, however. Using zebrafish lateral line hair cells as a model, researchers have observed a unique mitochondrial phenotype consisting of multiple small mitochondria at the apical end and a reticular network at the basal end. This phenotype develops gradually over the lifetime of the hair cell, and disruption of this phenotype leads to mitochondrial dysfunction and deafness. Additionally, hair cells require both mechanical stimulation and synaptic transmission to form these mitochondrial networks. Taken together, these findings suggest that hair cells play a critical role in regulating their mitochondria for optimal physiological function. This article was authored by Andrea McQuate, Shaman Connect, and David W. Rayable. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been involved in the IT business since 1981. Now during that time, I've worked with a lot of different operating systems from the mainframe world, the UNIX world, well before we start talking about Linux, going all the way back to the days when Microsoft was working with IBM with DOS. Of course, I went from there to Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 3.1 for networking, all the way through to the current technologies. Now during that time, I've had some experience in the security world as well. And of course, I've worked with other competitors when it comes to the world of the cloud, as well as with Microsoft Hyper-V. My goal is to be able to share with you my experience with Microsoft, with security, and with the world of the cloud as we take a look at how we can deploy private cloud services through the use of Microsoft's new System Center 2012. Well, as an introduction to what we're trying to do, we'll start off in this module by making sure we can understand what the private cloud is and what that really means for us. So we'll have first of all a discussion about the private cloud, talk about the things we need to do to be able to prepare to deploy that cloud. That includes understanding the components, not only of the cloud, but of what System Center 2012 has to offer. And we're also going to look specifically at the use of Hyper-V hosts and managing them with the Virtual Machine Manager. We'll start off first of all by just talking about the private cloud. We'll compare that to the public cloud. And we'll make sure we understand some of the differences between them, what the benefits are of the private cloud with the use of Microsoft tools. And of course, as I said, we'll talk about the use of System Center 2012. Now, when we take a look at the clouds, there are some things that we have to think about. First of all, why the cloud? What are our benefits? Well, when we think about the traditional business disadvantages, where we had physical servers and each physical server would house some sort of a role or service like maybe be our exchange server or the SQL server. What we saw was on average that those physical servers were at about 15% utilization of their capabilities. That meant their processor, their memory, and all the rest of it. So when you think about that, we are using rack space for a physical server. We're using electricity to be able to power those physical servers. We're having to really beef up the HVAC to be able to cool that room down for using a bunch of physical machines that not only cost us money, but cost us power and space to be able to house these applications and still not get full utilization. Whereas one of the benefits of the cloud is that we can begin to virtualize the data center. That means that we can take these different services and roles that were on physical servers and put them onto a single server that we call the Hyper-V host, where we're now paying for one physical server, yeah, probably a little more money than any of the others just because we want more capabilities out of it. But we're certainly paying a lot less power using a lot less space and better utilizing those resources, its memory and its storage and its network card and the rest of it, processor as well. And so by consolidation, we're getting more out of our money. Now again, like I said, we usually had one server per application. Well, that became a high cost when you think about it per application for, again, just the power in the physical server. Whereas now we're getting a lower operational cost immediately out of the benefit of the cloud. Now remember, when we talk about the cloud, we are talking about virtualizing these environments and be able to manage that environment as a single environment. So we got rid of those unused servers, we began to get into that consolidation. And what's even better about that is when you think about the traditional server, most of its data was stored on that server on its hard drive, which meant we had more work to do to be able to back up each of those individual servers to make sure that we were ready in case of a disaster or trying to maintain business continuity. Whereas now with the cloud, we can have all of our data on a centralized storage area network, a storage area network that can by itself take care of its own resiliency as far as backup and restores or having duplication. But not only that, but if something went wrong, we could move a virtual machine literally from one host to another host and bring that thing back up online hours, maybe even days before we could have done a full restore to another bare metal physical machine and brought that back online. So you're getting better resiliency, better support for the backups, better support for recovery, all of those are benefits that we have from the cloud. Now, there are some differences between a public cloud and a private cloud. First of all, in the public realm, that usually means it's not inside of your management. So you're sharing resources, perhaps with other customers, whereas on a private cloud, you are dedicating the resources to the virtual machines that you want. You have often in the public cloud limited control, as you should, because the people managing that cloud should be in charge of its security. Whereas you'll get more control in the private cloud, because it'll be up to you as administrators, as far as what other users can do, as far as self service or how you delegate the control of authority. Now with the private, or I should say with the public cloud, you have limited options for customization. The private cloud is yours fully to customize as you need to. Now we could say that the public cloud has a lower operational cost. You're not paying for the power. You're not paying for the administration. I mean, I guess really you might be a little bit in the cost that you pay for the use of the cloud. But that would probably be an advantage over all of the management costs that you would have to incur with the private cloud. But hopefully is offset again by you being able to take care of the resources, you having more control and you being able to customize that cloud in a way that best meets your business needs. Now with Microsoft and with System Center, there are some big benefits to having a private cloud. Number one, you have that cross platform integration. That means that we can support things like the virtual machine manager to manage all of the different host machines. And those host machines can have a variety of operating systems, not just Windows products. They can also contain a variety of applications. In fact, we'll even talk about some of the great ways that you can push out the virtualized form of an application through the server app V. So you have a lot of capabilities. It is certainly scalable because it is a high performance cloud computing platform. That means that you can expand through different hosts that are running hyper V that you can dynamically have virtual machines shut down if they're not being used to save power to have them turned on or have more hosts turned on to host more virtual machines as you have more demand. So you have a better performance and I think giving you a better efficiency. Now you can also improve your application availability, because again, this can be application centric as far as the design with the use of server app V. You can virtualize applications and make it look like it's running on a host machine when in actuality it's running somewhere else in the back end on the cloud. And of course the customization is a lot easier. You're in control of it. And it might even be a hybrid cloud where you're using several different types of hosts. Nobody said that it had to be just hyper V. You might be running a VMware ESX server or maybe some of the older models of virtualization that you have with Microsoft, although we'll see some of those aren't supported anymore in the current version of system center and with hyper V. Now when it comes to system center 2012, by the time we're done with this module, I will talk more about the interaction. But as far as some of the things you have as far as the tools of the components, you have ways of being able to deal with application management. You'll have an application controller. You'll have the operations manager. You'll have the virtual machine manager. And I do promise that we'll talk about how those interact. As far as dealing with services, well, we have the service manager and we'll look and see what that does for us. It also works hand in hand with another system center component called Orchestrator, which is a way of automating different types of actions or services that you want. And as far as managing the infrastructure, we have the virtual machine manager to be able to work with a variety of different types of virtualization hosts. We have the operations manager to be able to help us in monitoring how not only the host is running, but how the virtual machines are running and how the network is running. We can push out changes with the configuration manager to make automation or to make multiple changes at once to be able to have consistency. And we have protection through the DPM. And like I said, we'll talk about all of these different components, at least as a high level in this module, we'll get into more detail as we need to. But it's important that when we get to that point that I am able to tell you, hey, this is how all of these components and system center work together. Now one thing you should know about system center 2012 is that when you purchase this, it is a package. You can't buy just operations manager, you can't get just configuration manager. Now with system center 2012, you will get the entire suite. Now it's up to you what you install, it's up to you what you use. But the nice thing is that it is fully integrated. And that if you use all of these components, you can make management of the cloud much easier. You can lower the operational costs. And you'll like the way in which automation can help make your business cloud more scalable when it needs to shrink when it needs to more operational and better able to meet the business needs.