Hey, what's up guys. In this video, we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. As you know, on my channel, I like to talk about many different things, obviously from cryptocurrency, blockchain, to marketing, to business, and now this video into psychedelic. So the title of this video is The Benefits of Psychedelic Drugs. I like to consider them actually psychedelic tools and my personal experience in using certain psychedelic instruments and tools to benefit me in my life, both benefit me spiritually, benefit me emotionally, greatly benefit me in business, and greatly benefit me as a better partner to my partner. And something that's really near dear to my heart, because I truly believe that we as human beings kind of live in a video game, almost like the video game Sims. And we have faulty software in our minds for the most part. And you can see all around, we have all these cognitive biases and we had these certain ideologies, certain belief systems that are very difficult to let's say break or very difficult to change your mindset. Hence, there's a huge problem with cognitive dissonance. And I really believe when I when you look at, for example, the benefits of psilocybin, so magic mushrooms, or the benefits of MDMA, or the benefits of iboga, or the benefits of ayahuasca, DMT, etc. These tools, these medicinal instruments gives you an opportunity to shortcut your path from, let's say, this type of ideology or mythology into a new way of thinking that if you try to do this yourself without certain tools, I want to say it is impossible, but it will take you a very long time. And it would be quite difficult. But with tools such as this, it creates a shortcut. So you can actually see the view, see the world from a different aspect, see the world from maybe a different set of eyes that you could potentially never have seen the world before. Steve Jobs is quite famous for dropping LSD. And he credits LSD for a lot of successes he had in his life. One of the one of my favorite people to listen to when it comes to, let's say psilocybin, or psychedelics in general, is Terence McKinnon.   And, you know, I'll tell you something how I would use it. For example, I'm a huge proponent of microdosing, let's say, small amounts of psilocybin or microdosing small amounts of LSD. And there's many studies right now. You know, one of my favorite organizations right now is MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association on Psychedelic Research. So a bunch of doctors and researchers they come together and they are doing peer reviewed clinical trials when it comes to these medicinal tools. And for example, two amazing studies that they came out with. One was with MDMA where they took people with PTSD and a side note with PTSD. PTSD isn't simply people that have gone to war. Anybody can have PTSD. Women who have given birth have PTSD. People who have gone through, let's say, severe traumatic events have PTSD. So they did a study where they took people who have clinical PTSD, who've tried many other, let's say, treatments and failed. And they gave them two doses of MDMA two different times. And with the help of, say, a psychotherapist or a clinicianist, these individuals who've gone through these, let's say, therapeutic treatments, they all reported majority more than 80% reported beneficial outcomes far greater, far greater than they've received with the previous treatments, so, like, say, traditional styles. And what's even more amazing about this is this effect, this beneficial net utility effects lasted up to six months afterwards. So six months, two small treatments, less than two, three hours each. And I say that's remarkable. And another study maps published was with the psilocybin and the regrowth of glial cells.   Now, they do play a role. I do, I do believe, depending on your situation, depending on who you are, depending on if it's an emergency, yes, you know, antibiotics, vaccines, certain drugs can help you instantaneously. But the problem with the industry is because it's an industry, they need repeat customers, they need more product out there, they need people addicted to these over-the-counter substances, which is quite dangerous in the long run. But when you look at, for example, psilocybin, and I think it was just published in the science, in one of the most prestigious journals of science, it's considered one to save the substance in the world. And when you look at the benefits of MDMA, the benefits of eboga, if you want to see a substance, a real good medicinal tool, it's eboga, especially when it comes to addiction. So great book to read when it comes to that is a Canadian, and let me just pull up over here, Gabbermate, and In the Rem of Hungry Ghost, a remarkable book of his history working in East Hastings. So if you guys are familiar with that, you know what I'm talking about, if you guys aren't, it's one of the biggest or let's say grungy, junky neighborhoods in Vancouver or let's say Canada in general. But these substances, you know, doctors are realizing, and people are now realizing that these are not drugs, these are medicinal healing tools that you can use to shortcut your way to seeing the world in a different light.  It's so subtle, but yet, you notice a difference. It's hard to explain unless you have experience. It's not like you feel physically, if you take a full dose, but your cognition has changed. Your left brain, your right brain, they think differently. Your cerebellum is connecting everything together. And it's a fascinating experience. And I think it has personally helped me in every aspect of my life. And I truly believe the psychedelics or etiogens, whatever you want to call them, I think they can greatly, and I know they can, and shamans have been using them for thousands of years. I know they can greatly advance the human software in the mind. I know they can, definitely. And my hopes is with maps and other organizations that governments and bureaucratic officials will realize that these aren't drugs, these aren't drugs in a negative light. These are medicinal healing tools that can greatly increase and advance human society in such a beneficial way. I always think imagine everyone that shrooms or some form of psychedelic experience, the different outtakes or the different life lessons they would learn from that experience. And my hopes is, as we evolve as a human species, as people have more knowledge about this, non-biased knowledge, literally scientific knowledge such as maps is doing over here, my hope is we will start actually adopting this into regular medicine and start utilizing it as a tool in both aspects, both from a psychological aspect, from a physical addiction, say biological aspect, and then for a spiritual aspect. Here are people talking about ayahuasca with DMT, spirit molecule, and that takes you to a whole next level. And that's a whole different video talking about that. But I just wanted to make this quick little video talking about the benefits me as an entrepreneur. I've greatly benefited from using these medicinal properties, these tools in my quest to evolve myself as a human being.  We're all one. When people say where you're from, what's your background? I always tell people, my background is human and my nation is a planet Earth. I always like to think of Star Trek where we have this intergalactic federation where we're all one. There is no borders. There is no you versus me. We're all together. We're all human beings spinning thousands of kilometers on this gigantic rock throughout the universe and these flesh creatures literally are just flesh spinning around the universe. It's actually remarkable that we're alive. So I'll wrap it up. If you want more information about this, I definitely recommend checking out maps like go to maps, you know, I'll leave a link below this video to check them out. And if you guys actually want to reach out personally to me and talk to me about this, please do reach me out and I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.


Kubernetes open source tools you need in 2023. And we're here to discuss tools that we use here at Fairwings that we've developed and that we use to manage Kubernetes clusters because it's hard to do. And so whatever, you know, tooling you can find out there to help manage policies and help create, you know, help create governance policies that make your clusters more stable and more secure and more efficient and all that great stuff. You know, the more you can use, the better your lives will be as folks who operate Kubernetes clusters. So I'll do a quick intro here. A question. So we're not allowed to start using these until 2023. Is that what I'm getting from the title? I think so. Okay, cool. So everybody wait a month, take the next month off and then 2023. So your new year is present, right? Yeah. Pretty cool, must. Snuzzle tag if anyone watches Gumball. No one watches Gumball, Steve. All right, anyway, so I'm Stevie Caldwell. I'm an SRE technical lead here at Fairwings. I've been working, you know, in tech for longer than I will ever admit to anyone. But I've been through lots of stuff. I've been a SIS admin and network engineer and, you know, DevOps and working with Kubernetes for a few years now and also starting with some open source development here at Fairwings with some of the tools that you see here today. And I'm Andy. I'm the CTO here at Fairwings. I've been using Kubernetes for I think seven years now. I've been with Fairwings for four and a half.  And I'm also an author and maintainer of a lot of our open source. So awesome. I think what do we want to say in the mission statement? Oh, I know you love reading the missions. Because everyone loves a slide that gets read out loud to them. So Fairwings is a trusted partner for Kubernetes security policy and governance with Fairwings customers ship cloud native applications faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk. We provide a unified view between dev, sec and ops, removing friction between those teams with software that simplifies complexity. Wonderful. Have you memorized that yet? Not yet. No, I should though. It's my radio voice. All right. I think we're going to kick off a polling question here for everybody. Just a little interactive piece. So what is your greatest opportunity to improve your Kubernetes environment? Is it A, getting help with the basics? B, general best practices assessment? C, improving the security posture of your clusters? D, saving money? Or E, improving the reliability of apps running in Kubernetes? I have to give Zoom points here. Zoom doesn't let me vote in the polls. Some of the other platforms do let you vote as a presenter. So I mean, I would definitely say A, I need help with the basics. I die. All the time, just like a CTO, sketch your hands and stuff and what are you doing? All right. We'll leave the poll. There's just five more seconds. I like how you just like the secret voice of Oz. Exactly. So it looks like we've got 14% looking for help with the basics. So maybe Andy did slip in his answer there. We've got 38% getting a best practice assessment, 13% improving security posture of your clusters, and the remaining 38% improving the reliability of apps running in Kubernetes. All right. Well, I like that B and E, general best practices and improving the reliability are completely tied together because if you follow the best practices, hopefully you have a reliable cluster. And I think that leads perfectly into the first tool that we're going to talk about today, which is Polaris. So I'm going to figure out how to kill these slides. Because I'm using a new browser these days and it is sometimes baffling. All right. So let's talk about the setup here. I have a Kubernetes cluster. So if I keep CTO get nodes, I believe Steven, I will be using the same cluster today from different perspectives with the different tools. So we have a cluster here. It looks like it is working on scheduling down some nodes. That's interesting. And then I have two demo applications running in here. So I have some, a relatively simple application that runs a single deployment. It's got an ingress and a horizontal pot of a scalar. And then a more complex application that has a database and a cache and a front end and a backend. It's a multi-tiered web app. And these are running in the cluster. They're available at public endpoints. So we have this one here. It just pings the pods over and over again. And then we have this one here. This is the multi-tiered web app. It lets you vote for where you want to go to lunch, even though I think all of these places would be more than two hour drive for me. So I don't know that it's going to happen, but we can vote on where to go to lunch. And we are generating some traffic against these. So this vote count is just going to keep going up and up. Hopefully it may have finished generating load. But we have somewhat of a realistic situation here. We have a multi-tiered web app. We've got another app. They're in different namespaces. And we want to figure out if we're following best practices and how we've deployed these. And so the third thing that I've installed in this cluster is Polaris. And if you go take a look at our documentation page for Polaris, which is at polaris.docs.ferowins.com, you'll find instructions on how to install it. It is a relatively straightforward helm installation. I have customized it with a bunch of values that I won't necessarily get into too much detail about just yet. But what it has given us is a dashboard. You can also run Polaris as a CLI tool. So you can run this exact same set of checks against your cluster just from the CLI. I like the dashboard. I'm an executive, so I love shiny dashboards. And so we can scroll down here and see right now. I believe we're filtered by namespace. But if I drop the namespace filter, we should see all of our namespaces pop up here. And we'll get a score that is related to the number of passing versus failing checks. And we've got some errors, some things we consider dangerous, some warnings, and some passing. So if we scroll down, we will start to see some of the things that we care about. I'm going to scroll past all this our back stuff for the moment. And I'm going to look at the different namespaces. And we'll see different checks failing or passing in some of these places. So I'm going to look first at like this deployment. And we see that we have some passing checks. These are custom ones. We're not using host path volumes because that's a big security no-no. And then we have this check here that says I should have a pod disruption budget for my deployment. Well, what does that mean? So I'm going to click this question mark. And that's going to take me back to that documentation page again. And I'm going to see here that missing pod disruption budget is the only one that has no description. Nice. Didn't mean to do that, but we should have descriptions for a lot of these. But essentially what we need to do is add a pod disruption budget that refers to that deployment. And so we have a whole bunch of these checks built in. They're documented here under reliability, efficiency, and security. And these are all best practices that we have learned, followed, and suggest to all of our customers as we've built and run Kubernetes clusters over the years. And so that's the very basics of what Polaris is. And you saw all the built-in checks. And now you may want to add custom checks to Polaris. So maybe there's some things that are specific to your environment or some things that you want to enforce. And so this is where we'll jump into the Polaris values file that I have used here. And we'll scroll down into the config section. And we see here the list of checks and their level of... What would the right word for that be? Their severity level. That's the word I'm looking for. So these are the different severity levels. Ignore, warning, and danger. So the ignore ones just don't even show up. And the warning ones showed up on our dashboard as warnings. And then we have the danger. The danger ones have the added ability of being able to be blocked by our validating admission webhook, which is another piece of Polaris that you can add. So once you've gone through and you're happy with the state of your cluster and you've fixed all these things and you've put in your exemptions and whatnot, you probably want to start blocking things from getting into your cluster that violate some of these rules. So you can mark them as danger and block them at the admission request level. All right. So I was going to talk about custom policy. So if we come down here, we'll see that I've added a few custom policies. I've named them image registry resource limits and host path mount. And I've got some carpenter stuff in here that I've been tinkering with. But we can look at this custom check for image registry. So perhaps you're only pushing your images to a specific registry at your company or you are... Can folks see this? I see my little preview here and I'm concerned. Oh, no, never mind. We're good. I saw something else. But perhaps we want to say that all of our images have to come from a specific list of registries. We can write this policy here that says... It's got a couple of messages to go with it, sign a category to it. It's targeting the container specification. And then we write our policies in JSON Scanline. If you go into the Polaris repository, you'll see that all of the default checks are in the checks folder and they are listed there in YAML files. And they look exactly like this. They're all JSON schema checks. And so we're looking at the image property of the container. And we're going to say that it has to be any of these string pattern matches. So this should be coming from any one of these registries. And so any one of these that doesn't match will pop up as a warning in our Polaris dashboard because we have that currently set to warning. So that's how we add custom checks. And then the last thing I'll talk about real fast is exemptions. There's probably some things in here that have to run this way. For example, that pod disruption budget for CERT Manager that I mentioned. CERT Manager is a single pod controller in this cluster. There's no need for it to run more than one because it runs as a reconciliation loop. And if it goes down or disappears for a little bit, it comes back. It's going to take care of its business when it comes back. That's not a big deal. And so what I want to do is add an exemption for CERT Manager. So I'm going to say controller names. And I'm going to go back here and see that the controller name is going to be CERT Manager. And so move that here. And then I'm going to say rules. And it is going to be exempt from the exact name of it. Missing pod disruption budget rule. All right. So we'll add that in there as an exemption. So ideally we're going to save this. We're going to rerun the helm install that references this values file. We're going to update Polaris in that namespace. And I am going to wait for that to finish and go back to my dashboard. And hopefully that's gone away. And then some of those other settings to set things to warning have been enabled. Any questions, thoughts? I'm trying to keep an eye on questions here. Feel free to use the Q&A tab to answer, to ask questions of us. And we will try to get them answered. All right. I'm going to get pods in the Polaris namespace and just see if we've got new ones yet. And as soon as they're up, I will go check the dashboard. There we go. All right. We'll refresh this. I go ahead and filter down to just the cert manager namespace. All right. And we see here the deployment cert manager just has this new security or this new check for priority class that I believe is a custom check, actually. So I'm not going to worry too much about that. But our, let's see. Where is the PDB1 isn't showing as passing. It should be passing. So we should be good. I don't see this failing. So that's a good sign. But that's custom policy exemptions and how we deploy Polaris into our clusters. And then once we have, like I said, once we have that working, I definitely am going to go. Once we have all of our policies green and we have specific ones green that we care about a lot, I'm going to go enable that, validating admission webhook and start blocking things from entering the cluster that don't meet these requirements, that don't pass these policies. Anything else about Polaris that I should cover and that I didn't see? No. I think that's the thing that's good. All right. Thank you very much. Well, then I think I will go ahead and hand it off to you for the second one. One of the things that Polaris will tell you to do all the time is to set your resource requests and limits on your deployments. And if those aren't set, you may be asking me how to set them. So that's where Steve comes in. Hello. So I'm going to see if I can share my screen. I always have difficulty sharing like the right desktop because yeah, let's see. Let's try this one. See if that works. All right. Can you all see a terminal here? Yes. Yes. I see a terminal. You see a terminal over there? I do. Yes. Excellent. Yeah. So Goldilocks, let me see if I can do this thing and show you a, yay. So this is our documentation for Goldilocks, a documentation page. See if it might be a touch small on the text size. Just heads up. Oh, for real? All right. Let me see if I can give you a make it big. How about that? That's a little better. Yeah. A little better. You want it even bigger? I mean, it's hard to tell, but I'm sure it's fine. All right. Is it also small on the terminal? Is that good? It's fine for me. All right. Then we'll keep going unless somebody pops into the chat and says, yo, that's not good. All right. So yeah. Goldilocks, what does it do? And Andy was talking about how you'll get reports from Polaris about setting resource requests and limits. And I'm sure it's been hammered into you. Like, yes, you have to. You should best practice set resource requests and limits for your CPU and memory and your workloads. And that's always something that people will struggle to do because it requires you to do some thinking about it, right? You need metrics. You need to have a good span of time for metrics. You need to capture traffic at your high loads and your low loads and all that other stuff. And that's a lot to do manually if you're pulling up graphs somewhere in Grafada or something and trying to do that math. Goldilocks does that for you using some already existing Kubernetes projects because it's always great to build on trusted and tested projects and open source software. And so that's what Goldilocks does. So Goldilocks can be installed. So actually first prerequisites for Goldilocks we're talking about those tried and true projects. Goldilocks requires you to install a metric server and vertical pod autoscaler. Both of those things are pretty standard. I feel like most people have them installed in their clusters just so you could do like a cube control top or something like that, right? So this is the cluster Andy was working on. It looks a little different because we're accessing it a little differently. And all of my stuff's just not as cool looking as his. I don't know. It's just a thing I aspire to. But anyway, if we look and I'm going to go ahead and disclaimer at my typing gets really bad when I am in front of folks. And so there's going to be a lot of copy pasta if I can help it so that I don't have to worry about my typing. So as you can see, we already have metric server installed in this cluster. It's all running a good because we can do the good old k-top pods and find stuff in there. And so the other thing that we need running in here, like I said, is the vertical pod autoscaler. Vertical pod autoscaler has three components to it. And the component that Goldilocks needs is the recommender, which we have installed here. And we also have the updater, but that's not exactly necessary. You could get away with just doing the recommender. The third portion of the VPA is the admission controller. We don't install that by default. So you can install the metric server using their Helm chart and for installing the vertical pod autoscaler, you can go to their repo and install it in there. I think they have a script in their hack folder or something like that. We also have a Helm chart for the VPA because as far as we know, there isn't an official one yet. And so our chart is opinionated and we'll by default just install the recommender and the updater. And the recommender and updater pretty much do exactly what it sounds like. The recommender gets metrics from the metric server and then uses those metrics to essentially make recommendations to the VPA objects that are created for the deployments that you've attached to VPA. And then based on those and Goldilocks essentially uses those values to make recommendations or to surface those for you based on the VPA. So like I said, this has already been installed in the cluster and Goldilocks has been installed as well which is also installable via a Helm chart. So we've installed the controller and the dashboard. And those are pretty much all you need to have Goldilocks running and giving you information for setting your resources, your resource limits and request. So how do you actually get Goldilocks attached to your workloads? How do you get it to create VPA objects for your workloads? That comes through labeling namespaces with a particular label. So we actually have already in this cluster because of the way we've set it up, we actually have a bunch of namespaces that have the Goldilocks label on it. But we did create, as Andy said, two new namespaces, this Yelp one here and this demo one here for the demo app. So we created those namespaces specifically to show you Goldilocks in action. So we're going to work within those. But just to show you, if you say K get VPA and K is just my shortcut for cube control, you can see all the VPAs that were created in this cluster because of Goldilocks. And I'll show you how those probably got created in a little bit. But let's start off with just labeling. Well, let's take a look at the Goldilocks dashboard first, right? I'm going to run this in another terminal. I'm not a Tmux aficionado like my buddy here. So I'm going to support forward Goldilocks dashboard here. And then we're going to go over to the browser. And look, I even pulled up localhost already because I am soups lazy. So we're going to pull localhost88 and here's the Goldilocks dashboard. So normally, if you've just set up Goldilocks in your cluster, all this stuff isn't going to be here. These namespaces won't be here because you typically haven't labeled your namespaces. These namespaces are already labeled or they've already been set to have VPAs. So they show up.  And that's the command I'm going to show you now to get, let's start with our demo app. So we're going to get our demo app set up with the Goldilocks label. And again, copy, pasting, like it's my job. And in some cases it sometimes is. So we're doing a Qt control label namespace demo with that Goldilocksferowins.com. And able to do this true, we're going to hit the okay on that. And now we see that namespace is labeled. And if we go back now over to our dashboard, which is not there, Steven, it's right here. No, it's not right there either. It's right here. There we go. And we refresh that guy. And we see demo namespace right here. So that's how easily you can add workloads to Goldilocks. Everything that's now deployed in that demo namespace will be picked up and will have a VPA associated with it. So if we do a VPA, that's the new space demo. We can see there's the Goldilocks demo, basic demo VPA. And you'll notice, well, let's actually just look into it a little bit. So a couple of things you'll notice in here. The update policy is set to off. So with the vertical pod autoscalar, if you have the updater installed, the updater can actually vertically scale your resources on your pods for you based on this information down here from the recommender. We have these set to off. So it doesn't do this automatically for you. And I don't know if you noticed, but when I did get labels on all the namespaces in the cluster, there were some of them that had a label that was update policy or update mode set to auto. So you can pass another label to your namespace that will enable the update mode to be auto. And so it will automatically scale the resources on your pods as needed. But in our default method or our default mode is set to off. And then these recommendations here that come from the recommender, they play a part in how we recommend resource limits and requests in Goldilocks. So if we go back here and we look at the demo app, I'm going to just go ahead and collapse that load. So you see, it's a lot like Polaris in the sense that there's a namespace. So it shows you the workload, shows you the container, and it shows you what Goldilocks is recommending you set for your resources and requests. And so this is the current and this is what they recommend for guarantee quality of service and for burstable quality of service. And for each of these prints out, some YAML that you can then copy, post it yourself into your Helm charge or I guess you can live edit it in the cluster, but I wouldn't recommend that if you're doing some CICD stuff. So also we have a little glossary down here that explains some of the stuff about the difference between the guaranteed quality of service and the burstable quality of service, which essentially about like how Kubernetes treats your workloads when it's under resource pressure. So Kubernetes, the CUBE scheduler uses your resource request for trying to impact your pods on nodes. The HPA horizontal pod, all the scaler also uses your request. And so that's important to have set, but if you have both your request and your limits set to the same values, then if you have some sort of resource contention, your pods will both sort of have a guaranteed like, this is what I'm going to use on this node, right? Burstable means that your pod could go up or down for like short spikes of time.  But for memory, you know, you get a little burstable thing here. And so that makes it a little more flexible. But I also think it means that it's more easily evicted if you have some resource contention. But so these are the things that Goldilocks will recommend. These are starting points, right? So that's important to keep in mind.  So this is like a good starting point to like test out and tweak and see how those things will work for you in terms of your traffic patterns. There is a way to label all of your namespaces. So like you know what I showed you was going in and manually adding a label to your namespace. But you can actually just go ahead and label all the namespaces in your cluster. Or it's not actually labeling the namespaces, but it's like tagging them for being used with Goldilocks. Because if you do a show labels, you'll find that they don't actually create a label in the namespace. But it does create a VPA for every namespace in your cluster. Which means that any new namespace will also automatically get VPAs added for any workloads running in those namespaces, right? So for example, let's see if this will work. I'm going to try and actually I'm not going to do that here because we actually didn't install Goldilocks with Helm in this cluster. So there is no Helm chart that I can upgrade. But potentially in my cluster, just check it out here for a second. I do have a Goldilocks chart. So this is my client cluster. This is what I meant when I said I was going to be using a bunch of different clusters because I think I already ran this command. So all this copy paces, you can see what it is, but I won't necessarily run it here. But this command, there's a couple of flags that you can set in Goldilocks, the controller flag. So if you set controller flags on by default to true, or flags on by default to true in both the controller and dashboard sections of Goldilocks, what that'll do is automatically add a VPA for whatever new namespace you create in your cluster, which is pretty cool. And also create the VPAs for all your existing stuff in the cluster.  And then you'll have like however long you decide to set Prometheus for the worth of data to reference in terms of making those kinds of recommendations for CPU and memory request and limits. That's all I have. Any questions, Andy? Don't ask me any questions, Andy. I don't have any questions. I was a great overview of Goldilocks. All right, so I'm going to stop sharing. Actually, I was thinking, do you want to just do the Nova one, and then I can do, that way we don't have to flip screen shares four times? Sure, sure. Okay, all right. So we're going to go right into Nova. Tool number three, covering a lot of ground today. We are. We are. All right, so Nova. Let's take you to the Nova page. Bye-bye, local host. Nova documentation. All right, so Nova. Again, this is a tool that we developed in-house when we just, you know, found a need for it based on all the clusters that we manage. And it scans your cluster for updates to Helm charts and container images if you're not using Helm.  You know, you want to keep track of, you want to keep as up to date as possible with those, because obviously there's all kinds of security patches that'll come through, stability patches, and, you know, keeping those things up to date as to, you know, the security and stability of your cluster, right? It helps, you know, maintain that. So, Nova is really simple to use. I'm actually going to, so I can do both, right? I'm going to run it in the cluster we're using, but you're going to find, oh, that was a little typed find as I said, find, and that was pretty dope. You're going to find that there's not a lot in this cluster, because, again, this cluster doesn't have a lot of Helm charts installed in it. But let me run through the command here. So, Nova find is the base command, and by default, Nova will output stuff in JSON, and so it passes the format table flag, and it'll, you know, give you this cute little table, and dash s wide is just more information that it shows you, like, if you did this without the dash, that's why you get, like, just a little bit less to get the four columns. You about to say something, Andy? Oh, I was going to ask if you were going to cover the dash dash containers, but it looks like you are. So, yes, cool. And so this is the Helm, this is how it finds old and deprecated versions of your, or the terms if your Helm charts are old or deprecated, you know, quickly going through these fields, you know, release name, chart name, new space, the Helm version. So installed is obviously the chart version that's in your cluster. Latest is the latest chart version that Nova knows of. Old is a bool that Boolean that says, like, yeah, this is either your version is old or not. And then deprecated is a flag that sometimes inside actual Helm charts, they can be set as deprecated so that you know that the Helm chart, you know, should not be used in the future. You should start moving off of it. We saw this happen, you know, in a big way when all those charts started moving off of the stable charts repo and moved into their separate repos, right? So that's why that flag is there. And let's see. So and where Nova gets this information about the charts that are, you know, the different versions of charts and whether or not they're deprecated is we pull artifact hub to get that information. And there's one caveat that has been mentioned in previous presentations that I'll just, you know, carry on the tradition, which is that, you know, you can fork charts, charts can be forked. And that's cool. And sometimes those forked charts wind up in artifact hub. And the chart that YAML is sometimes the same between the forked chart and the original chart, which means that Nova doesn't have a way to see which upstream chart is actually the one that your release came from. So that is important to just keep in mind. We do some matching and scoring to try and like mitigate that. And we do a pretty good job of it. But that is just something to keep in mind because that is where it gets that information from. So what Andy was going to ask about is showing the container scanning. So Nova also scans container images. I'm just gonna go ahead and copy pasta that command from over here. So let's see if we can find some painters. And this is a big cluster, so it might take a moment. So you can see we've got like a similar output here. So these are the containers running in this cluster. Here's the current version. And here's another Boolean. It tells you whether or not it's old. It tells you the latest container version. But it also is so it tells you three different, in three different ways, what you're different, like how out of date you are. So it scopes it by the latest major version, the latest minor version and the latest patch version. And that just gives you more info on what to update. So for example, you might not have any concerns about updating your add-ons to the latest patch version or even the latest minor version. If it's like, hey, my latest minor version is, I'm on 60.1 and the latest minor version is 068.1 or something. You might be like, yeah, I can go ahead and patch that. I don't need to worry about any breaking changes and stuff like that. So it just gives you more information so you can make linear or really granular decisions about how you want to handle patching your add-ons and do those upgrades. Another thing about NOVA is that there are some configurable options to it. So there's a command you can run, and I'm just going to go ahead and do it here. So NOVA generate config will actually, oh, did I not do that right? Yeah, generate config is a dash. Generate dash, I think. There we go. And so that will give you a boa on NOVA config.yaml file. Let me actually put this at the top here. I'd rather have a boa than another yaml file. So this is the config that NOVA is using when it runs. I think it's essentially these maps to command line arguments that you can pass into NOVA on the fly. So for example, format JSON as you can see, that's the fall, and we pass in format table from the command line, but we could easily change this to table. The difference is that you'll then have to point NOVA to your config file when you run it so that it uses your changed config. So I guess we can actually even go ahead and do a quick change there. Change it to table. And then I think if I go back up to NOVA find format table config. Nova config.yaml. So this will just be, so I won't say containers, sorry. I think that will just give me by default. I said format table. I want to format table. So I want to see if that works without it. How about that? So many containers. There it is. See, that's magical. All right. So yeah. So because we changed that in the config, now you've got table as your default, which is great because why did you ever really actually want that to be in JSON? There's reasons you'd want it in JSON. But for this purpose, you don't want it in JSON. A couple of other things that are interesting in this file that you can look into is that you can set the desired version. So that is a map that allows you to specify the desired version of your home chart or container. So for example, if you have some dependency in your cluster where you know I can't use anything above a home chart of this version, then you can put this in here and set that version constraint, essentially, and then it'll ignore it. It'll drop from the output of NOVA. Also, there's a URL list down here. So I was telling you that NOVA pulls from artifact or pulls artifact top. If you have other repos that you know your home charts are sourced from, like maybe you have some private repos, you can add those to this URL list. And it actually uses both. So you can have pull artifact hubs that are true and your own private URLs and it'll scan or pull all those things to give you a report about your deprecated and out of date, so old and dusty containers and home charts. We have a question. It's very important. Hold on. Where's the question? I'm going to read you the question. All right. All right. Can we have your elite bash prompt config string? Can you have my elite bash prompt? Actually, you know who I got this elite bash prompt config string from? You ready? That guy right there, my CTO, I grabbed it from him because he has a whole really cool thing for using Starship. Starship is what I use to configure my bash prompt, so I don't know if that's public or not. It is. Yes. My .files are public. I put them. I don't know that I can chat with everyone, but I did answer the question through Zoom, so. Yeah, Starship is really neat. Sometimes it's more information, like it gets a little messy, depending on what I'm doing, but yeah, I find it very helpful. So shout out to my boss. Did I miss anything? I don't think so. That was great. I think the only thing, oh no, that's for Pluto. No, I think that's great. Thank you. Super. I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I want you to go back to yours. All right. We have one more tool, and then we've got just a couple of things to talk about. So let me get the Zoom bar out of the way so I can actually see what I'm doing. I'm going to go back to the cluster here, and the last tool, yet another tool written as we ran into problems. We were doing the Kubernetes 1.16 upgrades, and if anybody remembers that particular upgrade, all of the old deployment extensions v1, beta 1, API versions were removed in 1.16. And so if you had a whole lot of old YAML laying around, or you were deploying old Helm charts that had deprecated API versions in them, you were sort of scrambling potentially to update those. And we needed a way across all of our customers to tell them, hey, this is where you're using deprecated or removed, particularly removed API versions, but deprecated as well. And so we wrote this tool called Pluto, and what we realized while we were trying to write Pluto was that the Kubernetes API server is a lot smarter than we are, and it automatically translates API versions from one to the next. And so if I was looking at a cluster that had a deprecated API version, and I said, kubectl get deployment-o YAML, it would give me back the apps v1 version, regardless of how I put it in the cluster, because it said, hey, you gave me an extensions deployment, but I know how to translate that into an apps v1, so I'm just going to do that, which is great. And it makes it so that we can upgrade in place, but then that breaks our ability to deploy to the cluster after we've done that upgrade. And so we wanted to prepare our customers beforehand, rather than just blocking them from updating their clusters. And so there's a couple different strategies by which we do this. First, we gave folks the ability to just scan the YAML files. That's kind of the most obvious thing is like I've got a list of YAML here, I want to run Pluto against it and say, are any of these API versions removed or deprecated? And then we thought, okay, well, we want to be able to do that with local files, then we want to be able to template out helm charts and feed those into it. And so Pluto has lots of different options. So if we take a look at Pluto, another CLI tool like Nova, we can run the help command and we'll see that there's several detect commands here that detect different things. So detect files, you just pass it a directory of files and it'll look through all of those. That's relatively straightforward. And then we have just the straight up detect command. And this one's pretty interesting. So I'm going to, I'm going to template out a helm chart, a very, very old helm chart. This is the cert manager, 0.7 helm chart. This is probably what, two and a half years old at this point or something like that. And if we take a look at this, we template this out, we're going to scroll back up here and see we've got, well, we have a validating web hook configuration that is the admission registration v1 beta one version that was removed in 1.22. We've got this cert manager dot kates.io v1 alpha one that's also been removed and deprecated. So there's a whole lot of versions in here that we would not want to try to apply to a cluster today. And obviously we wouldn't be applying this chart because it's two and a half years old, but it's a good example here. So then we're going to pipe that into Pluto detect. We're going to give it the old dash for standard in shortcut that is so popular. And we're going to see it's going to, by default, give us a table output. And we're going to see, I'm going to zoom out just a little bit here so we can see some more of this output. We're going to see a list of objects and what kind they are and what API version they are. What API version replaces it. And then we're going to see, has it been removed and has it been deprecated? All of these have both been deprecated and removed. If you're not familiar with the way that Kubernetes APIs are removed and deprecated, they are first marked as deprecated. And then in multiple versions of Kubernetes later, they will be removed. And in the Pluto FAQ on our documentation site, there's a link to the policy that describes how this is done in the Kubernetes code base, but there are specific rules about how this happens. The important thing to note is that once it's been removed, you can't do anything with it. You can't query it, you can't apply a YAML that has it. It basically seems like it doesn't exist anymore. We have completely erased it off the face of the year. So we don't want to be applying any removed API versions. Andy, real quick, I just want to figure out, it looks like maybe the last column after replacement is like off screen. There we go. Yes. Yeah, it was actually wrapping, which is super annoying, but yeah, we have the removed and deprecated columns over here. So I guess I could have used less or something like that. But anyway, that's how deprecations and such work. So if the Kubernetes API server can't tell us about these versions, then what can? This is the question we asked ourselves. Well, the first thing is helm chart releases. So when you apply a helm chart, it creates a release object, which inside of that release object, it has all of the YAML that was applied as part of that helm chart in its raw form, hasn't been translated through the API server yet. So we can look for those and ask for those. So we have the Pluto detect helm command, which will give you the opportunity to do that. Now, I don't have any helm charts as Stevie was pointing out in this cluster that are deprecated, but if I had applied any of them, they would show up here with their name and name space applied. And then the very last thing, since we are actually running relatively short on time, the very last thing that it does that has been recently added, thank you to a community contributor for that is the ability to detect, it's called the Pluto detect API resources command. And what that does is it looks for an annotation that Kubernetes adds to some resources, depending on how you applied them to the cluster, that is the last applied configuration annotation. And what that contains is essentially a string copy of the last applied YAML. So if you keep CTL apply your YAML, then that that annotation gets set. And so we can look through that and see if there's anything. So actually, I've found two things here using that functionality. The fun thing is that these are both provided by EKS. And so there are not things that I actually control in this cluster, but Pluto has found the last applied configuration annotation and said that, hey, this is something that should not exist.  And since it's a CLI tool, and we control the exit codes based on whether we find resources that have been removed or deprecated, you can use it in your CI to block builds or fail builds if people are trying to deploy things that are not that are deprecated or removed, depending on however you want to set that up. So that's the last tool you should use. So we've talked about Polaris, Golilox, Nova and Pluto today. I believe we also have content detailing even more depth each one of those tools individually. So take a look at our past webinars and you may find some more content if you're curious about these. But altogether, if you're running all four of these and fixing everything that it finds and tells you should be in a much better place in your Kubernetes journey, finding a lot more good configurations and keeping things up to date and not deploying deprecated API versions and setting your resource requests and limits properly. So the last piece, because I can't leave without talking about it, at least briefly, is what if I don't want to install all these tools and run them myself and write my own CI CD code and deploy these into my 100 clusters that I'm running everywhere. And I really just want to install a single little agent that's going to report all this information back to a single dashboard. Can I do that? Can I? Yes, you can. Okay. So this is where we get to Fairwinds Insights. So Fairwinds Insights is our commercial SaaS platform. It allows you to hook up all of these tools that we've talked about today, along with multiple other tools, and then adds a much more additional functionality on top of them. So we normalize all of the results from all of these tools into what we call action items. And they're reported into this dashboard. From here, you can route these to different places. You can write automation rules to send them to Slack to generate JIRA tickets, to generate GitHub issues. And then we add in the ability to take a look at the cost and efficiency of your clusters as well.  So if you like all these tools and you want to operationalize them at scale across a lot of clusters, give us a shout out, give us a shout and we can talk to you about Fairwinds Insights. And I don't see any additional questions. So I want to thank you, Stevie, for presenting with me today. Always a good time. Thank you to everyone who joined today and gave us your time. I hope you all have a great rest of your week. Thanks.


Hey coach, what's up? This year I am on a mission to see how many more coaches that come through our consulting program can get to the $10,000 a month level with their business. This could be you if you're doing private training, group training, camps, or clinics. And that's really my goal at this point. I want to help coaches not only quit their full-time jobs of whatever jobs they have that they don't like and they want to transition into training. That's great. But now I'm on the submission of helping more coaches reach that $10,000 a month level or higher. And I know when you can get to that level, that's when you can begin to automate your business. And you can have everything systemized to the point where you can start working less and earn more money.  You guys hear me talk about all the time on these videos at the end of every video I talk about or mastermind program. But I believe in that program so much because it does get results for the coaches who go through it. And I want you to learn more about it and see if you're the right fit. So all you have to do is click on this button up here and from there you're going to learn everything that I have set up for you. And I'll just give you a few that I feel like are very beneficial that are just right off the top of my head. So the first is I have a script that's for you. So every time you talk to parents, you know exactly what to say, you know exactly how to sell. Number two, you have a contract. So you have a contract that's set up with parents when they do register. They're committed to your program for six to 12 months. So that means we can take someone who I would say is probably thinking that they just want to train for one month and we can have them train 12 times longer. All right. This means they're more committed. That means your business makes more money and you spend less time chasing parents around. Next we have marketing set up. So every single every single month I have it set up to where I gave you emails that you can send copy paste emails. Those emails are designed to build more authority in your community and it's designed for you to sell. So this way you can continue building your program. And lastly once a week every single week throughout the year myself and the group of coaches who are within the mastermind we get on a live call. So this way I can answer any of your questions and I can hold you accountable. And not only that you can hear questions from the other coaches who might be two or three steps ahead of you. So this way you can not only get my advice every single week but you're also learning from those who've been in the trenches longer than you have. That is super valuable. All right. If you want to learn more about it again I have this page set up over here. I go into way more detail on that page than what I just went through here but I know if you're the right fit I would love for you to be our next success story. And at this point I've already posted other interviews from coaches on YouTube if you haven't seen those search our channel. You can see some of the testimonials and success stories of our students who've gone through our consulting program. So that's it for the video. I hope to see you there. Go ahead click on that button. I'm out.


What is up, YouTube? Welcome back to my channel. For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Michael, AKA Dr. Cellini. I'm a fifth year interventional radiology resident. Now on today's video, we are going to be doing something a little different. I actually haven't done one of these videos since way back, almost a year ago, or maybe a little more than a year ago. Today we're doing un-unboxing, and we are unboxing an Aero, hemodialysis catheter or tunneled catheter. It is expired all the way back in 2005. Oh wait, 2008, which it's been sitting in a closet for that long, untouched. We keep these around just for students and educational purposes. So today I figured I would unbox one for you. So let's go. All right, so what do you say we open this thing up? This is gonna be loud. So obviously we have the sterile cover, so the tech would open or whoever would open the dialysis catheter and dump this on the field, and I would open it. So let me show you guys what's inside. All right, so this is what it actually looks like. So as you can see, we have everything. So we have the catheter up here. We have our guide wire. We have a clip, which we don't need. We have our tunneler. We have our sheath and our dilators as well. So let's open this up and see what's inside. So as you can see, the catheter actually comes separate. We have to actually put this together and we have to cut right here, which I don't have scissors in the pit, which they're usually provided with us on the table. So let me walk you guys through this whole situation here. All right, so the first thing we would do is we'd use our ultrasound machine. We take a small needle, as you can see right here. Hopefully that's focusing. So this is an 18 gauge needle. We usually access with a 21 gauge micro-puncher and you actually access, I'm not going to do it on myself, but you would access the internal judular vein. Once you gain access with, if you use an 18 gauge needle, you can directly place this guide wire. I don't know if you can see that. So you ultimately place this guide wire to the J wire and you can see as you, this is our cheater system. You would put this through the needle and you would thread this down the entire length, down to the IVC. So what you would have is basically something like this and this would be kind of hanging out of the neck. There are plenty of videos on here that actually show the whole procedure being done, but I'll just describe it to you without actually doing it. So once you have the wire down into the IVC, you can then begin to start assembling your catheter. So I'm going to put this over here. This is what the catheter looks like, completely assembled. So then you would make your dermatotomy site where you would tunnel your catheter underneath the skin, which would be just below the clavicle. You would use this tunneling device to kind of connect the dermatotomy to the vanotomy site so that your catheter has a nice tract underneath the skin. Once you have that done, you can start dilating your tract up on your vanotomy site. So again, we have our wire and we made our tunnel. We have our wire. We put the dilator on the wire, advance down, dilate up the tract. So you can see this nice big 15-inch catheter can go through. Once we dilate up the tract, we'll put in our peel away sheath over the wire. Peel away sheath over the wire. Once we have that in place, we have our tunnel catheter up, kind of hanging next to it. Then what we can do is remove our inner silet of the sheath and the wire itself. What you want to do is put your finger over this because it'll bleed like crazy. As you can see, you have a big hole, that size in the jugular vein. Put your finger over that. You will then thread the split tip catheter through the peel away sheath. As you can see, so it'll be something like this. Once you have it in that sheath, you can break apart the sheath, peel it open like this. The catheter stays in place. It's kind of hard to do. Peel the sheath off. Now you have the catheter hanging just above or in the right atrium. And all of this is underneath the skin and within the chest cavity, except for this little hub right here with the two injectable ports hanging out. So this entire thing from here over is actually inside the stand or under the stand. And this part is what hangs in the right atrium. This part is on the outside. So this is what a tunneled hemodialysis catheter looks like. Again, only this part is exposed so that you can use this as your means of dialysis. So that is obviously an oversimplified direction on how to place a hemodialysis catheter and what a hemodialysis catheter actually looks like. Again, there are plenty of YouTube videos out there that kind of walk you through this and show you them doing it in real time. I just cannot film doing this on a patient. Maybe I'll be able to do it eventually just not while I'm in training. So here you go, hemodialysis catheter. Hope you guys enjoyed it. So on that note, that concludes this video. If you like this kind of unboxing and teaching video and a little insight into the supplies that we use in interventional radiology and the devices we use, let me know in the comments below or if you want to see a specific device, let me know in the comments as well. Otherwise, make sure you smash that like and subscribe button, do it now. Follow me on Instagram if you don't already. Otherwise, I will see you guys on the next video.


Failure is not from you have permission to fail so that you get better. This plays a very important role in entrepreneurship. Most entrepreneurial ventures start off with a lot of risk. Taking a risk is incredibly important. Until you actually get out there and start doing it, it's all theoretical. It could be researching a new area, working on a new project, joining a network, an association, pushing the button on that marketing spin. All of those things are risk, no risk, no reward. Understanding the space you're in is first and foremost so that you can take a measured risk. We just invested in a high growth startup. They just closed their seed round and now they're leaving their full-time jobs. So they took a measured risk. And when you have responsibilities like most people do, you have to count the cost of taking that risk. There's no right way per se as long as you can measure the risk for the particular opportunity that you're pursuing. And balance is really the key there.  Everyone talks about high-growth startups scale or fail. No one talks about the jobs that were created in the meantime. You know, some startups go from zero to 100. They don't make it, but they had a three-year run, five-year run, seven-year run. People were employed doing that process. And a lot of times the people who have worked at a failing venture are great hires for the next one because they know now what to do to mitigate some of that failure. If you are afraid of failure, usually what you are afraid of hasn't happened yet.  You have to develop it. You have permission to try it so that you get better. So if you want to be incredibly successful, I want to know what you failed at and how did you fail for.


microplastic MP, and nanoplastic NP, pollution has become increasingly prevalent in the environment, with polymer-based plastics being the most common type of MP slash NP found. These plastics can carry a wide range of contaminants, leading to potentially harmful effects on both aquatic and terrestrial organisms. Despite this, there is limited understanding of the potential health risks posed by MP slash NP to humans. In order to gain insight into these risks, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and examined existing data from experimental animal studies. Our findings suggest that MP slash NP exposure may lead to adverse effects on human health, including disruption of hormonal systems, immune system suppression, and increased risk of cancer. This article was authored by Carsten Grote, Fabian Brussell, and Ann-Kathryn Vlassel.


Well, welcome everyone. My name is Carl Blyth. I'm the director of Coral that stands for the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. We are one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers and we come to you from the University of Texas at Austin. And today we are hosting this, what we call our Hangouts or OER Hangouts or our Language Teaching Hangouts because they're very informal affairs. And we're really excited today because we have a topic of great interest all about online assessment. Our speaker today is Meredith Clark. Meredith is the consultant for Finance and World Languages at Region 10. That's the Region Service Center and that of course is in the Metroplex area, Dallas and Fort Worth. Meredith puts on lots of professional development events for teachers and also helps them work with different districts on their curriculum and make sure they're compliant and things like that. She has a lot of experience in giving these kinds of talks. I'm going to turn things over to her in just a second, but I do want to remind everybody to unmute. I know that as she's talking, she won't be hearing a lot of background noise. So make sure that that's muted. And you can write as ideas or thoughts come to you. Please go ahead and write your questions or your comments in the chat box. There is a chat box on the bottom. And we will collate them. We'll take a look at them and make sure that if you have a query that your question will be answered after Meredith, she'll finish. So she plans on about, I don't know, 20 minutes or so to talk. We'll have a lot of time for you to have a nice kind of Q&A. Okay. So again, thank you everybody for being here. And Meredith, you can take it away. Okay. Thank you, Carl. I really enjoy working with the great folks at Coral and they provide such valuable resources for so many languages and that are open. And this is just really so important. So please share what Coral is doing with your colleagues. And this is when teachers need resources more now than ever. It's really great to know that you can depend on Coral to not only learn, but get good resources that you can share and edit and adapt. So we believe in the mission of open educational resources. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Carl. So here's what we're going to do really quickly. The agenda is on the screen. So I am going to, I'll be talking for about 20 minutes. Okay, I do have my timer on. So when I say 20 minutes, I mean 20 minutes. Okay. And if you see a little camera on a slide, it would probably would be a good idea to take a picture. It's a suggestion. Okay. And after I talk, we're going to break out into zoom rooms and we're going to look at some sample assessment objectives. And then that's when we're really going to dig into, hmm, how would I administer this assessment online, or face to face, or in a hybrid teaching situation or a concurrent face to face and remote learning situation. Okay, and then we'll come back and we'll share and discuss and ask questions. All right. So that's that's the shakedown for this afternoon. Now let's quickly check in. Let's start our learning today with a goal. And here's our learning objective. It really has two parts.  So let's just take a deep breath and we're going to really just focus on the basics first what what am I going to assess in my language class, and how am I going to assess it. Okay, once we define that, then we will examine some of those assessment objectives, and consider how we're going to implement that. Okay, now everybody's situation for implementation is different. So my hope today is instead of me telling you what to do is that you can critically think about your situation, and find a solution that works for you and learn from what others are doing as well. Okay, so that's where we're going to spend the bulk of our time collaborating. Okay. All right, so let's answer that first question let's make sure that we're all on the same page. So the question is, what do I assess in my language classroom. Sometimes teachers spend hours searching for assessments online they're like they're you may feel desperate at some point, oh, I just need to find something I need to find something. Right, and so you spend a lot of time looking, but let's simplify a little bit and just ask ourselves the question what what should I assess. What do I want to assess in my language classroom. Okay, because you're going to find lots of stuff that's available out there that isn't necessarily going to help students communicate better. Okay, and so what we ultimately want to assess in the language classroom is student language performance. Okay, now this means, for example, for interpersonal that students are actually having unscripted conversations with other human beings. Okay, that's what we want to assess. Okay, if we decide that we're not going to do any of that during the pandemic, then we're really leaving out a huge part of communication, right. Interpretive tasks mean that kids are reading and listening to authentic texts and under and demonstrating that they can understand them. Okay, and then on the presentational side, students are reading, excuse me, they are writing and or speaking some sort of polished communication in order to communicate ideas to an audience. Not just the teacher, right, like writing five sense sentences using the verb of law is not a presentational task. Okay, because there's no real audience there. It's just the teacher and nobody really cares what the meaning is in those sentences. Okay, so what we really want to do is during the pandemic we were actually seeing our kids less sometimes right because it could take you 15 minutes to take attendance you're only on zoom with them for 30 minutes half your class is gone. So we've really got to make sure that what we're doing in class is communicative. Okay, and helping boil that down and getting rid of all of the other stuff maybe that we used to do to fill a 90 minute block. Okay, and really honing in on the essential is going to help you plan because you'll know exactly what to on what to focus. Okay, so this is what we want to assess for everybody here knows that language performance in the classroom is going to help students become proficient speakers. When they exit the program meaning that they can use the language outside of the classroom in authentic context, and the reason that we're doing this. I always like to talk about the goal of world language education is because we, our goal is to create more multilingual people. So, even though we're in a pandemic. And I know a lot of us are on survival mode and we just want to get something out there to the students, right, we still have an opportunity, even if it's less of an opportunity because the contact we have with our students is we still really want to make sure that that opportunity is about creating multilingual, not just getting kids to pass the class, right, and the more communicating they do in class the more engaged that they will be actually heard from some of the language supervisors up here, like in rock wall ISD who said you know what we changed our curriculum it's more communicative now. And the teachers who were teaching in a more communicative way had less of an issue, moving to online instruction and hybrid instruction. So, let's make more multilingual people in the United States we can do it. Okay, so just why don't you guys type in the chat just a little quick checking for understanding here. What should we assess in our language class. So if you have access to your chat and you're not driving. Okay, which I have seen before in professional development please do not PD and drive at the same time. Okay, let me know in the chat there what do I assess in my language class. I have about 30 seconds to a minute to type in your answer into the chat. Okay, so I'm communicative skills. Okay, seeing here language performance communication. Yes. Okay communication and I really like seeing three modes. Okay because speaking practice and writing practice aren't necessarily modes of communication. Right. So think about the difference between writing five sentences that no one else is going to see and a presentational creating an infographic that you're going to post online or responding to a social media post in the target language. There's a big difference between what we call writing and presentational mode. Okay, so. Yes, we want to assess those three modes of communication. Okay, now the next question is how are we going to do it. And so before the assessment comes the thinking this is the fun part. Okay, now, if we want to consider two different approaches to assessment here. Okay, I'm going to put two approaches on the screen and I'll give you some time to read them. This is approach from teacher a she's getting ready for her assessment. This is what she's thinking about before she designs it. Okay, let's take a look at teacher bees approach. Okay, so question is between teacher a and teacher be approach more purposefully plans to assess performance in all three modes of communication. Why don't you all let me know in the chat there, or I saw some very quick ones. Okay, now if you really think it's teacher a don't feel you've we've seen a lot of bees and this is the downside of using the chat to check for understanding because it's like all five people already put in be guess what I'm going to put in. If you think it might be a go ahead and put it in there. Feel free you could be the one person who has a different idea and we would like to hear about it. Okay, I'm seeing that most of you are saying here that teacher be teacher be is more purposefully thinking for the modes right and then Devon here is saying aids and survival mode. Yeah, and you know what some of us are in survival mode right now. And I, you know, as I just finished watching this great Korean series on Netflix is called it's okay to not be so we are not machines. Right, so there's no judgment here right but but we do want to acknowledge that what we're aiming for if we're really going to get kids more proficient in the target language, we be is a better option. Right. Okay. Now, so if the approach is off and planning for the assessment. Okay, this this reminds me when I flew to the island of Colabra from the mainland of Puerto Rico, right. Okay, if the approach is off even by one degree. We can end up in that in a bad spot. Right. So this is why I mean I'm just going to go back here for just a second. This is why the pre thinking assessment the pre planning how you approach the assessment mentally in your head matters almost just as much about more than the actual prompt that you give the students. Okay, so what we want to make sure that we do is we get we start this approach in the right way, and we end up with a an assessment prompt that could be administered online face to face or in a hybrid situation that gets kids communicating. Okay, so we're going to start with our backward planning framework. If we even sit down and think about planning the assessment, we have to ask ourselves what are the desired results. Okay, so take you 30 seconds what are the desired results I'm teaching level one that desired results are novice high to novice mid to Okay, then we have to ask ourselves what does that look like. So if we're doing a food unit and I need to get kids to novice mid to novice high. What does a novice mid to novice high student sound like in the interpersonal mode. What kind of things can they understand when they're reading and listening right what can they present. Okay, and that's how well can they perform language in those three modes, and then the very last piece is planning the learning experience and I include in assessment is learning experience. A lot of people when they think of backward design they say, start with the end mind plan the test and plan backwards, and I'm like, well, I'm not really sure you want to write the test first, I think you really want to think about this. Okay, and even if you just take 20 seconds to articulate this out loud or write it down on a piece of paper. Okay, you're going to make sure that that approach, right that the assessment is exactly where you want it to be to get communication. Okay. All right, so here's quickly what this looks like. Now I know some of you on the chat may not be from Texas, but these are how the desired results are defined for K 12 educators in Texas. Okay, and it's very similar for post secondary as well. Okay. And then the X, then we ask ourselves okay I'm planning an assessment for level, let's say it's level to this time. So how do I know. How do I know, well, if you're using national standards, you can look at the actual performance descriptors, and they're these are clickable links here so you can go back and click on this and open it up. And then a K 12 teacher in Texas, you'll use your teaks here. Okay, and if students can complete each one of these language functions listed in your standards, then you know that they're performing at the correct proficiency level, excuse me performance level because they're doing it in class. Okay, so I really like the Texas standards. It's very clear for what students should be able to do with the language, and at each desired proficiency level so this is column one is level one that's novice mid to novice high second column is level to second column and third is level three and fourth and so on. So you get a really nice articulated view of how students are expected to develop language. Okay. All right, so then the last thing after you know what the acceptable evidence looks like is to then plan your assessment. And I'm just going to put teacher bees assessment up here so you can see it again. And we can see here that teacher be is assessing all three modes of communication. Right. Okay, ask and tell others. That's a language function. Okay, for interpersonal mode, identify main idea in details from an authentic text interpretive mode, express their opinion about food on a social media post. Okay, all three modes of presentation was the last one there. Okay, and I know because I've done the second step of backward design that I know that for novice high to intermediate low range. I need students using simple sentences. Okay, if we're going to make it to intermediate low, they got to be using simple sentences. Okay, they need to be using that indicated vocabulary in order to communicate and enough grammar control language control or grammar rather. Okay, and communication strategies to keep the communication going and make sure that other people understand them. Okay, now as our non example. You can see teacher a. Okay, and you can tell here teacher a is really only planning for about one mode of communication. And it's down here where it says tell others what to eat. Okay, and that's, it's kind of an unnatural, like, quasi presentational speaking task. Like, I'm, you know, like, when in real life, do we tell people what to eat. And I might be unlikely to record a video and just say 10 sentences where I'm telling who somebody I don't know what to eat. Right. So, you know, when we look at the difference between a and B, we see that this is a lot more natural in terms of yeah humans that actually communicate this way. Okay, more likely to ask and tell other people what to eat. Maybe when we're standing in the kitchen together having a conversation. Okay. All right, so let's move on here. And stop and reflect. What what are your takeaways from that little snippet. Okay, so the question was the question that opened up this section of learning was, how do you plan for an assessment. How, how do we approach assessment. Okay, so how would you answer that let me know in the chat there we'll spend about 30 seconds to a minute, writing our answers down in the chat. The question again is, how do you plan an assessment. What is a good approach for planning and assessment. Okay, so we've got some mentions of backward design. Okay. And I think our language here matters. Okay, because when when we say when we when we don't talk about desired results, right, we can kind of get caught up in, I mean what is what is the end in right. What, what is that right but when we say oh the desired results are. Okay, so what are the desired results that's a there's a question I'll pull out for you guys what are the desired results. Think about a level one a level two a level three class what are the desired results. Okay, yes that they can communicate effectively. Yes. Okay, but more specifically let's really get down to the granular right so yeah level one novice mid to novice high right. Yeah, Deanna here is saying it depends on their level right so so when a parent comes up to you, or an administrator and says what you know what is my kid. I'm going to get out of this class, then we can say, by the end of Spanish 312 K, which I know we don't call it that anymore but right whatever even if it's a post secondary course, or a K 12 course, by the end of this course level the desired results are that your student develops proficiency or is able to perform if you can't have a proficiency test done is able to perform at the specified range, which for level three. It would be intermediate low to intermediate mid okay so saying that has power right actually specifying the level because if we if we totally miss that. Right, then our plane is one degree off. And if I don't know that I'm aiming for novice high or intermediate low, then do I just how do I grade the kids work. Good question right if I don't know that I'm assessing the students work based on their performance, how do I how do I grade it right and do the students know what novice mid novice high, all these things are. Okay, so those are also really important questions for assessment. Okay. I have a comment here from Deanna it's confusing to some students because in other classes they have points. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's as simple as having a representation of that actual proficiency cone in the classroom, and say hey you know what you guys came in your intermediate low by the time you get out, we're aiming for intermediate mid. Here's what an intermediate student can intermediate mid student can do. Right. Okay, because if we're if our students aren't understanding that and we're not thinking about it before we plan the assessment. We may end up in the wrong spot, we may it will still be on the target somewhere but we might not be specifically in the center of the target. Okay. Thank you Deanna for your comment. Okay, so at this point, I'm going to stop talking. And let's look at some sample assessment objectives. Okay, so this is the part where we're going to break out into zoom rooms.  And go away, and you're going to say wait what are we supposed to do right because that's what your students do when you put them in zoom rooms and if you have a picture beforehand, then you just look at your phone and you say oh, I know what to do it says right here. Okay, so go ahead and take a picture. All right. And what what we're going to do is I'm going to show you another slide I also want you to take a picture of the next slide. I'm going to show you some sample assessment objectives and in your zoom room really three minutes or less folks really short through a short introduction and decide who will be the timekeeper, and who will be the note taker or the and or the reporter. Okay, the person with the notes needs to be the person who's going to report back to the group. Okay, and I want you to choose at least one sample assessment objective, which I'm going to show you on the next slide. Okay, decide which one you're going to do really quickly and then discuss as a group how you can administer the objective in a face to face hybrid and or remote teaching environment. Okay, and when I mean hybrid I mean concurrent or simultaneous face to face and remote students at the same time. Okay, you'll have 12 minutes to discuss and ideate and throw out certain situations. And then we'll be ready to report back to the group and then we'll take what you said and compare it to some kind of general best practices in just a second. Okay. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and show you that next slide which I would also like for you to take a picture of. Okay, here it is. These are your sample assessment objectives so you're going to meet in your zoom room. And then introduce yourselves. Pick a timekeeper pick a note taker and a reporter. And then pick which one of these assessment objectives you want to think about how you're going to plan out for those different teaching environments. Okay. And just as a visual because visuals help us. Okay, so you'll pick one of those objectives that you just saw previously that you now have a picture on your phone. Okay, and you're going to think, oh, how would we do this in these different teaching environments. Okay, so you can take a picture of the slide if you want to. Are there any questions about the instructions before we move you into zoom rooms. Hi everybody welcome back from your breakout room I was able to visit three rooms and hear what you all were talking about and the different environments in which you're currently teaching very interesting to hear what's going on with with with everybody. So let's go ahead and move forward. And if you had the role of reporter, what I would like for you to do is in the chat to let's, you know, let's look at this interpretive task. Let's look at this interpersonal task and this presentational task and if you had the role of reporter in your group, please share in the chat with us. So one you did, which one you discussed and any little golden bit of knowledge, right that you would like to share like for example one group said that they practice interpersonal by having the students call each other on the phone and that way they can do a socially focused conversation and not have to get close to each other and worry about not hearing each other so that would be something that's like hey that's really cool let's share that in the chat. Okay, so just tell us for your group, which assessment did you mainly talk about or which mode of communication did you mainly talk about. And what was your strategy for how to logistically administer that assessment. We'll take one minute to do this. We'll give our reporters some time to report out should have about 10 people reporting in the chat. Okay, thank you Devin for sharing. Okay interpretive we've got some folks are using Ed puzzle. Okay, to like you know that puzzle is really great for chunking, right chunking the video chunking that listening, yes. Very good. And Ed puzzle is also really good for asking students to infer the meaning of unknown words like a lot of times we forget to ask students to infer which is one of our functions and our ticks. Okay, so summarizing comprehension understanding all very important, but it's also very important that we're teaching them those inferencing skills as well. I did hear in some of the rooms that presentational and interpretive were quote unquote the easier ones to assess. So I'm curious in the chat here let me know what were some of your ideas for how to assess interpersonal. Okay, now some of them are coming in. Zoom breakout rooms, Mary and Russell is sharing right so you can do interpersonal conversation to human beings having a conversation with each other in the zoom room. And those zoom rooms can be recorded you can assign one student recording rights they can record that room and then when the teacher closes the zoom session the recording automatically downloads onto the students computer, and then they can upload the file into your Google classroom or your canvas or your blackboard or whatever you're using. Okay, so good old fashioned zoom rooms work great for interpersonal. Okay. Let's see creating scenarios for interpersonal like meeting somebody you're having a phone conversation good yeah great discussion here Mr. Pettis thank you so much for sharing. Good so it doesn't have to be super tricky. Right. For interpersonal. If you don't use zoom like I know there's some school districts out there they're like we will not use zoom. Then you could asynchronously do a Google meet or a Google hangout. It's tricky the kit you have to sign the kids up or the kids have to be responsible enough to schedule their own conversation but you can also do a screen castify of a Google meet. Okay, which is also a really good way for students to do this asynchronously. And so that brings us to our next topic here what what should you focus on when assessing asynchronously versus synchronously. Okay, so as you plan for your learning environment which could change at the drop of a hat right like my husband was told yesterday evening that no one's going to the office today. Or some of some of your students could be pulled out of class because of quarantine so you know this is a very important thing to consider not on top and in terms of the learning goal but on how you administer the assessment. Now that goal here is or the idea big idea is you don't always have to administer the assessment synchronously. Okay, now for interpersonal, it pretty much needs to be synchronously but it can happen at times outside of class. Okay, and you will know if this leads us to our next question here, you will know. There's a couple questions up here. Right, you will know you will be able to tell if students are reading, right, if they have to do an asynchronous interpersonal conversation it's going going to sound like they're reading. Okay, so, and a lot of the academic dishonesty this was a question that came in before it was submitted before the webinar. How do you prevent this. And I think you all are welcome to chime in in the chat here but number one students need to know the difference between artificial intelligence and Google translate and what the purpose of that is, and what proficiency is. Okay, and we're in a language classroom we're going for proficiency right when you end up in a country where you're in a place where you don't know the language and you need access to language fast. So artificial intelligence right so, and then also the way we grade students really is a factor in academic dishonesty. So if we're expecting their language to sound super polished and perfect. They are going to be more motivated to use Google translate and things like that. Right. So, I think, articulating those expectations for students ahead of time and helping them understand the difference in the tools that are available to them will help with that academic dishonesty. And then, this is just another question just feed for thought. What about in person and remote assessment should we keep in mind. And you all have listed so many really cool strategies and in the chat about how you are facilitating communication and assessing language performance. In this unique teaching environment, but I just wanted to share this link I found this article, very helpful and it really does address things like, you know what, we don't have to assess all the students at the same time. That's point number one I was like, Oh, yeah, maybe I have options here right. Second thing that this article talks about is that projects. I think projects like everybody design a poster project. I mean, performance based tasks there we go let me back up here performance based tasks are way easier to do remotely and then these hybrid teaching situations and if you're giving your students prompts like the ones that we saw earlier those three assessment objectives, then engagement will be up. It's not a huge summative assessment that's just going to crush them right so you know you could even think about eliminating your summative assessment and just assessing as you go to see if the kids can do those language functions. So we really have a lot more hopefully you have a lot more flexibility, some districts mandate you have to have a summative assessment. I think we can ask ourselves now what does that really need to look like, and it really should look like what they're doing in class, right, not this big huge thing. Okay. Yeah, good. Thank you Devin for sharing there in the chat. Yeah. Yeah, so we have we can be a little bit more creative. Okay. So I will leave you with this we have five minutes left and I know Carl is going to mention some things for you. I would just like for you to take 30 seconds and let me know in the chat. What did you learn today and how will you use it. Okay, a short little reflection on your part will really help you process your learning and help it stay with you after you're done this evening so if you wouldn't mind sharing in the chat. One second. What did you learn today and how will you use it. Yeah, I love this one, help you refocus yeah like let's go back to the basics. Right, we can go back to the basics and it might actually be less planning for you. Right sticking to that streamline planning. What are the desired results intermediate mid. Okay, that's what I'm going for. What does that sound like what does that look like. Okay, I know what this means that I know the language control the function. Okay, I got it got my cheeks I got my standards. Now how am I going to write the assessment prompt and I think planning in that streamline fashion for assessment probably will will help you with some time efficiency. I hope I hope it will. Okay, oh good someone learned about a new app. Great. Wonderful. So you could share that in your breakout rooms. Good. Great reminder and backwards design. Thank you guys so much. I'm going to read some more of these in the chat afterwards but at this time I would like to go ahead and thank Carl for this opportunity and pass it over to Carl. Okay, thank you so much Meredith and thank everybody for participating as you're writing a finishing up in the chat. I'm going to ask Sarah to put up the last slide because the last thing that we do is to ask you to fill out a really quick survey remember that our money comes from the federal government and they want to make sure that we're spending it wisely and we're actually doing what we say we're doing it's this takes really just a couple of seconds it's a very quick survey it's not long at all. Again thanks to Meredith for animating our discussion today for teaching us lots of tips tricks all kinds of ideas to think about in terms of online assessment it couldn't be more relevant. And I also want to remind people before you click on the link there that go that takes you to our survey. And that in an in our next OER hangout, which will be in a month, November 16 will be focused on all the cool stuff that we're doing with Spanish heritage we have a very active group. And so we'll have a very interesting talk ready for you on November 16. Okay, so thanks everybody. Click on the feedback link and let us know your thoughts, we appreciate you and until November 16 for the next OER Hangout. Hi folks. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thanks Meredith.