Good morning. Thank you. I want to acknowledge the Mi'kma and the African Nova Scotians who opened us up in such a beautiful way this morning with their song, their drumming, their prayer, their smudging. I also wish to acknowledge the Mi'kma as the first peoples of this land acknowledging that this is a post-genocidal context, a post-genocidal land while recognizing that Canada as a nation is beginning to acknowledge responsibility for this historical harm and is taking first steps to address it through the historic settlement and truth and reconciliation process which has ended but which I hope will continue. I also wish to acknowledge the African Nova Scotian people who were here historically. We were hosted by them on Saturdays, was said by another speaker and it was such an eye-opening experience for me. Again, I want to acknowledge the historical suffering, the institutional and systemic inequities and also recognize that the province of Nova Scotia is taking steps, is taking responsibility through the historic settlement and restorative inquiry process. And I want to acknowledge the formidable Jen Llewellyn and Amanda and the rest of the wonderful organizing team and all of you we hear from all over the globe. I want to tell you a little bit about our work in Oakland, California. I co-founded Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. The acronym is RJOY, RJ-O-Y. I became its director in 2008 and our mission is to promote restorative justice practices and policies in Oakland's schools, community and juvenile justice system. We started with a middle school pilot in a black area, probably the most economically depressed and highest crime area in Oakland. And we were successful in reducing suspensions by 87% and also reducing racial disparities because as was said earlier by Moana and by Richard that you can reduce suspensions using restorative justice without touching or even with increasing racial disparities. We also were able to eliminate violence, that was a school where there had been a lot of fights because students learned to talk through instead of fight through their differences. We were able to reduce or eliminate teacher attrition. It became a school where students wanted to learn and teachers wanted to teach and we were also able to increase test scores. So this got the attention of the entire school district. They didn't even know that we were there the first two years. And they, with some youth organizing, the school district, the board, adopted restorative justice as official school policy, not only as an alternative to out of school discipline but also as a proactive means of creating a healthy and caring environment and a cultural connectivity. And could we go to the slide? There's a triangle there. We used a three-tiered approach. Well, that's the pilot. We can go on to the next slide. And that's the resolution and we can go on to the next slide. Actually, is there one with a triangle? There we go. So this illustrates the three-tiered approach. And it needs to be clicked a couple of more times so you can see all three tiers. The first tier involves training teachers, cafeteria workers, school security guards, counselors, everyone as much as possible. At least 80% of the adult staff is trained in how to conduct restorative conversations, is trained in how to facilitate community-building circles, not the more complicated and time-consuming conflict circles or family group conferencing. This tier one impacts the entire climate of the school. And we feel that it's more important to do tier or we want to do, I should say, we strive to do more community-building circles than conflict circles because these proactive circles promote social-emotional learning and reduce the chance of unhealthy conflict occurring or unhealthy responses to conflict. So the second tier would be for persons who are in charge of discipline, deans of discipline for administrators who are tasked with discipline. And they are trained both in tier one and in tier two, which is how to facilitate conflict circles. Tier three are reentry circles and these are circles for youth who are returning from a period of incarceration or other absence and the whole purpose of the circle is to bring them and their family in so that the student can reintegrate into the school in a positive and healthy way. Now can we go backwards, please? So a study was done in January of 2015 a little bit more than a year ago comparing restorative justice schools with non-restorative justice schools over a period of three years and we had some pretty amazing results. First, the graduation rates, I can't really see, the graduation rates at restorative justice schools increased by 60% and only by 7% at non-restorative justice schools. The blue bar would be the restorative justice schools and the orange one would be the non-restorative justice schools. The reading scores increased by 128% at restorative justice schools and only by 17, is that 17%? No, 11% at non-restorative justice schools. Chuanxi chronic absence decreased by 24% at restorative justice schools versus an increase of 62% at non-restorative justice schools. The dropout rate decreased by 56% versus 17% and the suspensions decreased by 50% and so on. So in Oakland, are we practicing school-based restorative justice through a racial justice and social transformation lens? Absolutely, we are. We make it a point of understanding how schools reproduce and replicate and perpetuate systemic inequities and we figure out how restorative justice, the way that we practice it, can help break those cycles. Let's say, for example, mass incarceration or racialized mass incarceration. As many of you know, the U.S. forms only 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. You may not know that one out of every three black males can expect to go to prison at some point in his or her life. You may not know that the incarceration rates of black youth is six times that of their white counterparts. You may not know that black youth are nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent. Black and brown people form only 30% of the general population but 60% of the prison population of the U.S. And with the rise of the prison industrial complex with the rise of mass incarceration over the last four decades where we've seen a quadrupling of rates of incarceration we've seen a parallel rise in the use of out-of-school suspension and school-based arrests. Black youth are being suspended at three times the rate of their white counterparts and we know that once a youth is suspended their chances of being incarcerated triples according to a study out of the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Their chances of dropping out doubles and we know that once a kid drops out they're headed into that school-to-prison pipeline. Even one suspension as I said earlier can put them in that school-to-prison pipeline. So the question is how do we practice restorative justice in ways that will disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline? First of all it takes a lot of awareness, a hyper-awareness about these issues and secondly it requires us to look at data and follow it especially disaggregated by race and look at it on a regular basis and make changes in our work as we need to. I want to tell a story about Cameron. Cameron, his first suspension was at the age of four and it was for that of his own candy. He had some candy, the principal took the candy, the principal put it in his office under lock and key. Cameron was resourceful as he was even then found an open window, got a chair, jumped on the chair and went through the window and retrieved his bag of Skittles. And for that he was suspended for four days for theft. And this ensnared him in this system where he ended up by the age of, by 11th grade with 150 suspensions, multiple school-based arrests and multiple expulsion hearings. His second, his first arrest was for having a milk fight, an adolescent milk fight when he was in middle school, a milk fight in the cafeteria. He and his friends were throwing milk cartons at one another. It was not until he got into 12th grade and was sent to a restorative justice school that things changed for him. Even though he was sagging, you know what we mean by sagging, right? And was wearing a hoodie and had a terrible attitude. As soon as he walked into the door of this new school, he was embraced. He was used to being stereotyped. He was used to being jacketed as someone who is a gangster, is a thug, if not a super-predator. But this school welcomed him with open arms. He felt that they could see him. The principal invited him into her office and she gave him his thick jacket of arrests and expulsions and suspensions and invited him to tear that up and throw it away. And then he was escorted to the restorative justice room where he saw a bunch of youth talking about their feelings and crying. He'd never seen anything like that before, because a man don't do that, you know, as far as he understood. And he ended up graduating with a 3.7 grade point average. I don't know if that translates here to how it affects in Canada, but a very high grade point average. And today he is a trainer and presenter in traveling all over the country for restorative justice for Oakland youth organizations. And so our task is to create these kinds of opportunities, not just for Cameron and other young men, but for all of the young men. And we do this by not only creating programs and offering these services to our individual youth, but creating systemic changes. As I said earlier, we engaged in advocacy so that restorative justice would become official policy and not just an alternative. So to close, oh, I should say... Oh boy, okay. I need to close right now, but very quickly, is this the way we practice restorative justice as a whole in the United States? No. This has been a real challenge. The first 35 years of the restorative justice movement in the United States, there has been no consciousness of race, no consciousness of racial justice. I'm happy to say that this is changing, especially with the work that we're doing in Oakland. Now, when I... Well, I should say when I first learned about restorative justice in 2003, I googled race and restorative justice and only got maybe four hits and knew from that moment that we would need to get about some work to change this. And we have been successful in doing that, especially those of us in Oakland. And today, if you google race and restorative justice, you'll get tens of thousands of hits. There's still no books yet that have been written on the subject. We still need to do that, but there are many conferences and regional convenings and lots of conversations and discussions on the subject. So thank you so much for your time and it's really been a pleasure being here. I'm certain that the next few days will be equally pleasurable and enlightening. Thanks again.


He hails from Canada from the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University and he helped build up the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab. Please welcome Nikolai. Hello everyone, thank you very much for that kind introduction. Thank you all for just coming to the latest talk tonight. And thank you for CCC for inviting us. It's a great honor for us to be here. Just a little bit about myself, just a little bit of background. I'm a German Swiss citizen, but I work now in Montreal for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. And since the beginning of the year, or for me better, since April I helped build up what we call the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab. And I mean everyone has a lab these days and so what we want to do with that is actually kind of try and reach out into different communities. There's a lot of policy work, but obviously since we have a hacking audience tonight, we also want to be involved in tech communities and hacking communities. So when we saw the talk on the keynote and the introduction to this Congress, my colleagues and I were really pleased to see that there is a need from the community actually to open up and kind of let people who are not necessarily hackers like my background is international relations and not necessarily the deep tech. I'm interested in it and I can follow what the CCC is doing for the last couple of years. And especially one talk just at the camp this year by Claudio about helping the helpless where he basically told the InfoSec community to reach out to human rights groups and then help them where they can actually be helpful that resonate with us. And we come from the other side and basically Montreal like we're a fairly small team. And so what I'm going to talk about in the next couple of, I would say 20 minutes, it's just a little bit what we did over the last seven, eight, nine months. And it's going to be like pretty much in chronological order. We're going to talk a little bit about what UN is doing in peacekeeping and peace tech. We did a big research project using MediaCloud. That's a tool by the Berkman Center and the MIT Center for Civic Media. We kind of encouraged, like we talked a lot of technologists and hackers at various hackathons and so we kind of want to share some lessons learned. And like if there's time I just want to go through like a couple of various projects which we found a little bit interesting, very interesting and just kind of see what you could learn from it and then just open the dialogue between different fields because obviously I'm coming from a fairly different field than many of you. So one thing we do at the Montreal Institute of Transiting Rights Studies is we have a workshop on mass atrocity prevention. So it's mainly for policymakers and people in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding community. A lot of people with a non-technical background. And what we try to do in the last couple of years is getting more tech stuff into the workshops. You see here at this picture it's like the workshop in the middle. We have Walter Dorn who is a professor in Kingston, Ontario in Canada and he looks on how like the UN is using technology or could be potentially using technology to monitor peace treaties or just kind of look at new ways because I mean obviously it's 2015 and the UN is finally kind of catching up to that. For those who are interested like there is earlier this year like the UN actually came off come out with a final report on how they can use new technologies in peacekeeping and Walter Dorn was part of that kind of expert panel. So there are things happening. I mean the UN is a slow and sometimes very kind of hard to, like a ship hard to maneuver. So it's interesting to see that even there there's kind of thinking about technology and then admittedly like it is more like on the military side of things so like they think about like the new peacekeeping kind of force and then how to kind of get them equipped. But what we also have been involved with is like a growing field of what they call peace tech which is more like on the civil side and really kind of, I believe a lot of people with good intentions are being part of that and it seems like there are a couple of conferences out there since I guess 2010, 2011 they started and what they wanted is try a couple of, try to get a lot of people from the tech community, software development community together with peace building community so it's about kind of getting the barriers down between different fields because that's also what we saw over like pretty much last year in the different events we participated like it is difficult for those fields to talk to each other there's different languages, different backgrounds and like different cultures and we see a benefit in actually kind of getting those barriers down in a bit. So that would be one part of just kind of informing what's out there there's way more stuff out there and that's just like a preview overview. The other thing what we did is at the Monterey Institute we have a media monitoring project where basically we do qualitative free research in countries which might be at risk of mass atrocity or atrocity crimes there are other NGOs out there the crisis group for example has a very prominent project as well but what we find is that it's very difficult to just kind of we basically rely on interns who like escape look at the media landscapes in those countries and look at international media and see what's actually happening but it's very qualitative work so we were thrilled when we saw that there is a way to actually use more quantitative methods there's a tweet by Ethan Suckerman which we basically followed we wrote a proposal for this and we kindly got invited to do research with the media lab what we did there was we used the media cloud framework that they have a couple of other tools we mainly used the media matter dashboard which pretty much is like a dashboard which you can query a database in the sense that we query the database about US mainstream media there's about 25 biggest media sources in the US and basically just look you can query for different subjects and then it gives you like a timeline where you see like it's basically sentences per day and then over the timeline which you have looked at and you can get like a world cloud it's very good to kind of just get a very brief overview on a topic and what we did we were really interested in a lot of countries we did research on like in Sub-Saharan Africa mainly so we wanted to know how Sub-Saharan Africa is presented in US mainstream media because many of the things you would normally think is like there are a couple of topics which always come up but many other good things which happen in Sub-Saharan African countries that never show up so what you see here we have a couple of countries like Cameroon, Niger, South Sudan, Uganda they're all like they're all plotted next to each other and what we found is that compared to other topics there's not much coverage at all if there is and if there's actually interest to see it here it's when there's a World Cup so there's like an event in the West which then actually sparks interest in media attention and obviously now we don't really have too much to compare it to so we figured that like we needed something which is very prominent in US mainstream media and that is Kim Kardashian I'm not sure if you know who she is she's like a media celebrity but when you've plotted against like what the media attention she gets it's way more than what all those nine Sub-Saharan African countries get combined that's actually not nothing new we had the kind of research that's been done like since the 60s but now we can actually show it with actual like a lot of data behind it then we also went into like a more like a qualitative sort of research where we looked at 50 articles each and what we saw was like basically we have like 340 stories which are valid and when you look at what the frame of those stories is it was terror related, it's Ebola related or soccer related but that's pretty much the main topics to get on mainstream media reporting in Africa is that and so a lot of good things which are happening in those countries are not getting reported they're just not there so when we kind of were at that stage we looked at the supply side of things that's what the media supplies and that's what people can read and all and we also looked at the same time when we did the research there was an article by Quinn Orton on Medium where she basically says that it's also on the demand side like so a lot of people actually don't really want to like read anything else so she has a very strong quote there where she says like you people never click the fucking link so and when we kind of think about mass atrocity prevention or prevention of atrocities we believe it's important to know that the way we see a lot of countries like African countries especially we need like another frame we just don't need only the frame we have which gets normally portrayed like Ebola and terror related then one thing we kind of did at the same time when we talked about when we did the research when we wrote the proposal right at the beginning we had like a little mishap I'm really interested in like the philosophy track we have here at the congress and so I want to share like a little anecdote so basically what happened we saw the proposal and I just saw it on my work computer and then I went home on my laptop and so I went home and I wrote like an email just kind of trying to figure out hey guys what is that research about et cetera and just had a couple of questions what I didn't know was that my wife actually she installed a chromium plug-in which would actually mock the overuse of the word cloud and turn it into butt so what happened I read this really long elaborate email because I think that it was a great project and then this is what I get back FYI it's media cloud not media butt I'm really curious et cetera obviously it was a fail we felt embarrassed but we were lucky and we got it but like yeah I think it's important to kind of share whatever mishaps you have be it in like software development or especially in academia so just putting it out very briefly then I guess the last thing I want to talk about is like we participate in various hackathons and sometimes there were like free and open source software hackers there there was a lot of people who were just like the traditional tech community like in Montreal we have a lot of software developers and obviously out there there's like some sort of like a hackathon fatigue I mean you see they're like T-Mobile and Red Bull and Evernote they're like basically big corporations using hackathons and hacking culture in a way to basically outsource their R&D so we also saw kind of like a hackathon fatigue in what we did and we said like a couple of criticisms like pretty much the biggest thing we noticed was that when we when like a lot of people who organized hackathons we participated in they tried to bring actually both pieces together the tech community and then the peace building community for example but oftentimes it was really difficult to actually get enough people with the tech knowledge so you had like 40-50 people but only two or three were able to code which then in the end if you have to actually like try to get some sort of ideas going in the deployable project you actually end up with a lot of policy talk and a lot of like there wasn't as much like cross-culturalization as like talking between the fields as I would have kind of hoped for it but also like one I would say more like on the positive side of things an example was where we participated in like the Talking Peace Festival where we found like that hackathon in Washington DC and we participated in that and there we found a good mix of both people actually knew how to code, knew kind of how to think about surveillance and kind of think about the important topics I guess the audience here is really concerned about so and what we also found is that when you think about building whatever kind of technology it's really important to be engaged with the community those people it should be served with or for so we found like this was something we felt like there was a lot of movement I think there was interest from both sides so it wasn't only from like the political policy side but also from the side of the tech knowledge and we think and so like in a way like what a lot of NGOs and the human rights groups could use like hackathons or similar ideas could use it for is actually like yeah Bill trying to get a bridge between those two communities I know there's like I mean today we heard a lot of a lot of fairly depressing stories and I don't want to end with like a happy ending but like I'm just like what I want to say is that we feel that there is like there are a lot of people who think they could be working together to actually build technologies which could help people in human rights situations and what we think in Montreal is like actually just trying to engage and get together and see where that leads that's part of why I'm here that's kind of like I'm happy to talk to people who like have different thoughts and actually give us feedback on what we can improve because if it is about talking to each other that's something we would really be engaging in okay and so like just to give you like an example a couple projects we found fairly interesting or kind of we came across during the time we did the research and then in the last half year there's a project called the early warning the early warning system which basically has a couple of components such as like a statistical analysis method and some sort of like an expert grouts or so they ask a lot of people from the peace building community and then different other communities like what they're going to think is going to happen in the next 12 months in country X, Y, Z and then they give opinions like it's a fairly big opinion poll too it's about like I think 200 people participating from different fields so it kind of tries to get a couple of methods together and I'm very sure that like a lot of people who are engaged with this project would be interested in how to make those tools better because what we kind of think is that a lot of NGOs and human rights groups what they can offer is kind of like a network to connect people with each other and they also have like often times quite a bit of knowledge of how to actually get the message out rather than if you just have technologists and attackers who just think about the deep tech and that's what they're doing kind of getting their heads away from the keyboard and actually in the wider world and how it is deployed etc so it would be great if you could get some feedback on that as well then there's another actually like I'm very kind of hesitant to promote apps because I'm not really sure how just an app by itself can promote peacekeeping or mass atrocity prevention is just I don't really see that necessarily like a good way of promoting it but there's this one app we found pretty interesting it's called Eyewitness and basically what it does it is an app to document atrocity crimes and like you can just download it and it kind of looks at takes the security of the people who use it very seriously so for example like it's not just like a logo on the app but it's kind of it's more hidden within the US but actually to get to that point it took a lot of work from security researchers to actually be able to make photos of an atrocity and then securely transmitted to I think it's international bar association which then can use those pictures with timestamps etc then to be actual legal documents in for example ICT international criminal court cases I think the last thing I would do is just kind of there are like three Canadian companies I think a couple of them might be even at the Congress so we try to kind of engage with them like for example Equality, Subcraft and Impsyphone they work very much with free and open source software in the field of human rights and kind of since we're very new with what we're doing at the digital mass atrocity prevention lab it would be great if we could just kind of get a conversation going seeing what's actually what we're doing really badly from a securities perspective and yeah so if I think that should be actually most of what I wanted to share I will put a couple of links already of what we did and what we did on an Etherpad but feel free to just reach out, write your comments in there you can't even troll, I will just delete it and yeah I think that would be the main thing of my talk give us feedback and let us know what you think and then be critical Thank you very much Nikolai we have actually plenty of time for questions so if you have any questions please line up at microphones Are there questions from IRC? No questions from IRC Any questions from the audience? No, come on Please go to the microphone so our listeners at home can hear you and we can also record it Microphone, front left please From left Hi Yeah, I guess some reflections because you were also asking for input the first one was I'm interested if anyone here is developing USSD or Sim application toolkits or any type of technology that I guess it's called technological blending or whatever you call it but to bridge the digital divide between people with dumb phones and feature phones which are pretty much the new dumb phone and I guess the entry level of an Android phone that can run that app is always increasingly going down but successful projects like Ushahidi have thought about that integration with dumb phones from the start so I would be interested if we have those skills or Sim application tool kit for example is that a completely neglected technology that's just I guess more of a brain part more of an idea and then the second question is how do you deal with the fact that in situations like this you do usually have tech experts usually from the global north narrating the stories of the global south as a big generalization but it's a tendency and how does that get resolved I think the second question I could answer in a way that a lot of what we're doing is part of a learning experience especially for myself personally I know my colleagues that do that work for a longer time and they've been involved in peaceful projects for a long time so they were actually talking about how getting Western narratives, getting them into narratives where they shouldn't be and so they know way more about that but for me personally it's just kind of like a learning experience that's what we try to reach out so I'd be able to talk more if that's possible later Sorry just to add a selfish point I'm writing a thesis on the topic so if anyone wants to continue a conversation later I'm sure that's the point of this whole session anyway to continue a conversation Thank you very much Microphone on the front right please Themetically bridging the early warning project and the media cloud project I'm wondering it seems kind of plausible to me that mass atrocities are introduced by some media activity locally or globally and I'm wondering if you're aware of any research or if you have done any research into that direction analyzing media and as an early warning for mass atrocities are you aware of any research done in that direction Yeah like I mean one piece why we were interested in what media cloud is providing is that it actually measures what's happening like in the media environment in certain countries for example Burundi and one thing we kind of were thinking about and that's just an idea which would be interesting to get also some feedback about it like there's something called the cheat out project it's like the general database on language and tone and I mean it's a project with like actually Google is behind some of that and then they basically look at media and runs in almost real time so when you basically have an environment where you think there might be atrocities happening in the near future that could be something to look at because you can actually monitor what's happening but I mean then again monitoring is close to then again also like you surveil a whole country and you surveil what's happening in their environment but like that's something we talked about like I mean the research on what like different technologies or media play in mass atrocities that I think that's a whole range of literature out there when you look at that at the Rwandan genocide for example there's a whole bandwidth of literature on like RadioS being the enabling technology because it was like there was lies and then kind of hate speech transmittable radio technology for example so there's a whole bunch of research on that topic The microphone front left please Hi, thanks for the talk Could you expand a little bit like in an ideal world what kind of software would be missing from a peace building or from a UN perspective? In an ideal world like I mean that's such a thing I think what we're actually interested in is how to enable collaboration I think collaboration tools might be something really interesting to look at because in some environments you have many different NGOs with different channels and how they work with each other so if you make it like a community effort it might be interesting to look at just basic collaboration tools and how to implement them So what I got over the work I did over the last couple of months over like a year was that often times the tools are there and then tools are there to be used but they're actually not embraced or not used by a lot of NGOs or like I mean when we look at like a lot of surveillance technologies or anti-surveillance technologies people know about it but we know how to use it and it actually would be great to have better resources and that's the way to implement it but it also I think it needs a human factor to actually push people to use the technologies that could be provided in them Microphone front right please So I understood that you are covering official media reports with media cloud Are you also researching already in the social media like the publicly available what ever Twitter streams and stuff like that to understand? Like us personally we don't I mean obviously there is like I've been involved with a couple of projects which like I know about it but I said who do that but that's the thing like us we're not like a handful of people actually at my institute and like we don't at this point we don't have the technological skills and some of it is actually fairly easy I suppose there are tools out there in which you can look at what's happening on Twitter etc and actually at this hackathon in Washington DC we had something which basically looked at the GDEL project, media cloud and Twitter at the same time as some sort of like a big monitoring system or risk assessment system and the interesting thing about GDEL is it also evaluates tone so basically if I have a sentence which is kind of negative towards a special group it could theoretically trigger something and we had a couple of guys who like coded in Python they coded like a prototype and basically they would then send it automatically a message to the piece building people on the ground so they're thinking about it like I'm not really sure who else is thinking about that kind of stuff but I mean the fact is like stuff's gonna be more digital like years to come so I think the piece building community will have to catch up to that I think that Twitter sentiments are also image recognition this can help thank you microphone front left please yeah thank you for your talk one thing that was missing for me was actions for peace enforcement which you I think did not cover in the talk did you what you're gonna do peace enforcement is the third escalation step for UN atrocity prevention I mean deploy forces to prevent stuff so what I saw here was mostly reactive international law is reactive from these atrocities some I think technology could also be used as an offensive the eyewitness idea I think was a good start if you combine it for example with image recognition on the ground or let's say drones or small mini drones that fly over the area affected so that they are also visible so that people on the ground who might commit atrocities can also see that they are witnesses stuff like that so that you build up offensive capabilities with technology I think that will also be interesting that's something I haven't thought about yet but thanks for the input that's great do we have any questions from IRC no then one last time please you had mentioned using technology for looking at the media and it seemed like also some things were leveraging what's already been done by different organizations involved in preventing atrocities and it seemed like you thought that eyewitness was an example of an app that may not be a very effective direction for technology investment it seems like the appeal of an app like that is that it's about directly impacting the atrocity whereas the media and just leveraging other people's abilities seems more indirect it seems like this image recognition is also a way of using technology to more directly impact things I kind of wonder if there are other directions that would come to your mind as far as having a direct impact on atrocity or potential atrocity I think what I meant with the apps in general I think I've seen a lot of apps which just don't really make much sense it's basically just a website and an app umbrella just kind of repackaging content actually the eyewitness app we found comparatively very smart in the way they thought about it so what was the other part of your question whether we think about other ways of kind of what we've been talking about so far besides eyewitness is like image recognition where it seems like clearly the technology itself is playing an integral role in preventing or documenting an atrocity so I was wondering if there are other ways that the technology can be used to directly impact either the prevention or the results of an atrocity to be honest I'm not really sure whether we've thought about image recognition in that sense as you describe it but I mean that's part of why we're here because we kind of want to get input on a lot of different things I mean obviously you can research a lot but just getting a human feedback on things would be very audible so if you can stick around a couple of minutes later I would be able to talk more Thank you very much Nicolae please give him a warm round of applause


This lecture is entitled Yandaheem and the Baroque Still Life or What on Earth is a Prank? Now Yandaheem, who you see depicted on this screen here in this portrait was yet another of the leading still life painters working in the Netherlands and he's famous for creating this new kind of still life and it's called a Prank still life and we'll take a look in just a minute at a prank still life and see exactly what that's all about But first I just wanted to say There's something interesting you should note about Yandaheem and that is he actually worked in both Holland and Flanders now we've been looking at Flemish art, which is the art of Flanders Flemish and As you should know Flanders was Catholic and we're gonna be looking at Dutch art in the coming units and Dutch art is the art of Holland So he's an interesting figure to look at right now because he kind of bridged the gap between these distinct places one Catholic one Protestant with a very different set of cultural moors guiding them So now let's take a look at an example of Yandaheem's still life painting Alright, so this is a characteristic still life by Yandaheem and it's a still life with fruit and a parrot and it dates to 1650 and By this middle point in the century still lifes Had become even more lavish than the ones we've looked at so far They became really over-the-top and These really over-the-top still lifes are known simply as prunk That is what a prunk still life is and prunk means Ostentatious and essentially they are Ostentatious displays of wealth and extravagance and luxury So hopefully when you looked at this still life right away You might have noticed a few things about it that might have caught your eye and said you said to yourself Okay, this is this is a really luxurious still life and even if nothing caught your eye right away I'll point out a few things to you and and I think help you See exactly what it is that's different about this from some of the still lifes we've looked up before So what we have here obviously we have you know what you would expect to see in a still life and that there's food There's perishable items We have a lot of grapes We have meat we have oysters We have oranges And then of course we have the objects that go along with that Goblets and pitchers and trays and then we have this parrot which is an interesting addition because That's more of an object of curiosity It's not so much a food stuff But an interesting objects and then musical instruments and these rich overflowing curtains so things that we're used to seeing in a still life, but what's Unique about this still life and certainly to the contemporary viewer it would have been a lot easier to read this these items Really just scream luxury luxury luxury just over-the-top wealth And that's because a lot of these objects are import luxury items not things that a typical Flemish or Dutch person would see every day. So the oysters for example In the bird is a very exotic imported Curious curious object Even things like Citrus fruits oranges and lemons we take those for granted you go to the grocery store You can buy a whole big bag of them and not spend a lot of money in the 17th century They were a luxury object that weren't so easy to get your hands on So again, this is Ostentatious or it would have been very ostentatious to the contemporary viewer and Maybe it'll help you if you replace some of these Objects in the painting at least mentally with things that you think of as extreme luxury items imagine instead of oranges if those were iPods Sitting here on the tray and if instead of grapes. This is overflowing with caviar and Maybe you've got some expensive designer handbags Overflowing on this tabletop you get the point right these that's Essentially what these items were to this culture at the time Another interesting thing about this. It's not only Ostentatious and luxurious in what's depicted but the way it's depicted is over the top as well Again, we have tremendous attention to detail in textures I like this detail over here for example You can see a reflection of a window in this glass so really captured that sense of light reflecting off of glass You can see that up here as well So that same attention to texture and detail and color But even the way the artist has assembled these items suggests luxury. I mean if these items are so Expensive It's almost surprising to us that they would be assembled in such a careless way. They're just kind of strewn Across this tabletop. It doesn't seem like a lot of care has been given to them Which even suggests more wealth if someone can be so careless with such luxury items So that's a very deliberate thing yandaheem has done here as well is displayed the items in a way that suggests no care the true sign of Wealth what final point I just wanted to ask you about is where do you think this scene is located I Asked because there's this whole interesting side of the painting over here and the Seem seems to be set in front of a broken Wall it almost seems like an ancient ruin or something the way the walls crumbled at the top there And there's vines growing along it and then there's this expansive view into a really beautiful Almost idealized landscape And that's a really interesting detail. It's I think it's interesting that he chose to depict His objects against this kind of setting Because it kind of removes it from the ordinary even furthering that sense of luxury and almost puts it in a Dream-like mystical setting. It's not a home an ordinary place. You would recognize And let's scroll down for a second Hopefully you recognize the image on the right which is Franz Snyder's market stall It's in stark contrast to This image as well. It's not in an identifiable commercial space. It's in this abstract again almost mystical magical Neverland So I think that's a really interesting detail that adds to that sense of luxury and ostentatiousness I wanted to close today by comparing this to The image that should hopefully be very familiar to you by now Clara Peters It's her still life that we looked at a while ago now And I want you to try and ask yourself, you know, what how are these similar? How are these different? And I won't guide you I want to leave you with this you can pause it So you can keep the images on the screen, but ask yourself What are some important differences between these and what makes Yandaheem's more luxurious and ostentatious perhaps than Clara Peters image. So enjoy making your observations


Hello, hello, and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm Julie, I'm so excited to be here with you today for family communication in grades six through 12. Like I said, my name is Julie, I'm just so excited that you took time out of your busy work week to join me in honor that you would take some time out of your day to learn more about CESA. I was a high school ELA teacher for 18 years, so I was working mostly with 12th graders using CESA every day. Now I'm on the teacher community team at CESA. I would love if you could find me on Twitter and give me a follow. I'm at EdTechJulieJ, and of course you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CESA. Now I do wanna tell you that this particular webinar is not about setting up a class or setting up an account in CESA. This is really specifically talking about connecting with families. So if you are in need of some brand new to CESA training, I've included a link there. Don't worry, these slides along with the recording of this presentation are coming your way later. And when you open this slide, you can click right there where it says brand new to CESA, and you can see some of those trainings. If you're just getting started with CESA and you haven't created an account or set up a class, I do recommend you check out one of those particular trainings. I love working with teachers in the six through 12 band, and I just have so many tips to share with you about using CESA with older students. So here's our plan for today. We're gonna talk about just the first steps you need to take in your CESA class to invite families, how you get those families connected to your class. Then we're going to talk about some of my favorite tips and tricks for getting those, maybe even reluctant families connected when you have the last few people that you're trying to get connected to your class. I'll give you some really practical tips that have worked for me. Then we'll talk about some of the things that are different between students posting to CESA to their journal or portfolio, versus you sending an announcement through the inbox, and then we'll have plenty of time for questions. I can go over whatever you need and can demonstrate for you at the end of the webinar. So I'm excited to get going with you on this topic of family communication with CESA. So let me tell you a few things that make CESA different from some other things you could be using for family communication. Obviously, one of the things we talk about with CESA is that it's engaging for students. It's really a great student engagement platform with so many creative tools, but it's easy for all students to use. And when you're working with older students, I think one of the things that makes it so useful is that it works across all devices and platforms. So even if your students are in a BYOD, bring your own device environment, whatever device they have, whether that's a smartphone or a Chromebook or a computer or an iPad or another tablet, CESA is gonna work equally well for them on all of those devices or platforms. It's obviously a time-saving way for you to communicate with all of your students' families all at once, and the updates you can give them using the announcement specifically, you're going to be able to give them some really great photo and video updates, along with always having the option to have a note or comment translated, which is a really great feature of CESA, especially if you have students' families who speak different languages. So that's another great reason to give CESA a try for your communication. Okay, I'm gonna show you this in a live demo here in just a second. So I will walk through these steps for you in an actual CESA class, but what you're gonna see on the next few slides are some screen grabs. Mostly, I just wanna make sure you have this in your slides so you can use the slides as a resource to consult later. So obviously, I will have a demo for you, but later, if you need to consult the slides or even share them with someone else, you'll have all the step-by-step instructions you need. So the first thing we're gonna do is find that plus families button that's gonna be at the bottom right of our screen, okay? And I'm gonna actually show you a demo class of eighth graders, so you'll get to see what that looks like in a demo class for older students plus families. If you've never clicked that button before, the next thing CESA is gonna remind you to do is to turn on family access. This is the time of the school year where it's great to remind people, and especially if you have other adults in your school or parents and families asking you this question. Remember, family members are still only going to see their own child's work. Sometimes people are worried that, like, I'm gonna see other kids work or other grown-ups are gonna see my kids work. That's not gonna happen. You're only gonna see things that are tagged to your own student or things that the teacher marks to everyone. And then you're gonna have an option to print some paper invitations. You'll also have another option to send an email, and I'm gonna tell you why that was the most successful for me with older students, but I'm gonna give you a couple of different tips there. And I would like to show you what that looks like in a live class. So the same steps that I just walked through with you, I'm gonna show them to you live in a CESA class. Now, if you've been with us before for any webinars, you know we use some of these demo classes. So these are pretend students names and we have some samples of student work here, but this is the type of class I would use for a training or a workshop or a webinar, just like this one. So this is what I'm gonna be demonstrating from. What you can see here is that button that says plus families at the bottom, right? Just like I showed you in the slide a few minutes ago. So when I am ready to connect families, that's the first button I'm gonna push. And then I'm gonna get this pop up telling me that I can print some paper invitations or I can view a sample email. And I'm gonna give you some tips about both of those things in just a few minutes. But I do wanna point out to you that when I have this option to print paper invites, I can pull this little carrot drop down here and I can pick a different language. So it's really helpful to invite families in the language they speak. So if these are helpful for you, be sure to print in that language. When I click that print button, it's gonna open up the invitations in like a print screen. So I could just go ahead and click print. It's gonna give me some reminders and instructions here which are super helpful. This might not be helpful for you today if you're connecting parents for the first time but I'm gonna tell you this page is really helpful as your school year progresses because what you can see here in page two of this printout is all of the names of the people who are connected and it would be easy for you to identify which parents and families are not connected. And then I can print a unique invitation for each of my students and you can see someone's first name is at the top of each of those. So you just match the right invitation with the right student. Okay, let's go back into our slides and there's a few other things I can show you as we progress today. One other thing that's really important for you to remember, especially if you're having a meeting with parents like if they're in your classroom for some kind of meet the teacher or open house kind of event and you're talking with parents and family members, something that really is worth pointing out is that even though you as a teacher and the student are using the app called CISA class like CISA the learning journal class app for parents and family members, they wanna look for that app that has the word family in the icon. Okay, so they wanna find the family app to connect that's different than the class app that you might be using as a teacher or that your students are using. Of course, everybody can log in at app.cisa.me. So if you're on a computer, you can use app.cisa.me but we just always wanna make sure that parents and family members know if they're using like their smartphone that they need that family app. Okay, I showed you how to print the invitations in different languages. So we looked at that a minute ago. We're talking now about that family app. You're gonna see that word family and big letters. Parents can connect to their child CISA class right from that app, but it doesn't work for them to log in from the CISA class app. So you just wanna help be really communicative about that and make sure you're avoiding that frustration cause if they get in the wrong app or if they open the wrong app, they're not going to be able to get connected. In fact, when I was making these slides the other day, I took this screenshot on my phone. So I had an iPhone and I was looking in the app store for CISA and right away you can see CISA class app is an option and CISA family app is an option. So a parent, if they're typing in the word CISA in their devices app store, they're gonna see both options and they just need to know that what they want is the family app. And if they don't know that and they accidentally hit the class app, that's going to maybe lead to some frustration for them like trying to log in when they really need to be in this app. Now we're not gonna take the time to play this now but this is what it looks like from the family app. And I really recommend that for you later to take a few minutes when you get these slides to watch that video because as a teacher, if you're connecting families to your class and you're not exactly sure what that's gonna look like from their perspective in the family app, walk through that, take the little tour video, just a short video but that way you at least can see what it's like. Now I have children and they use CISA in their classroom. So I get to use the family app a lot as their parent. So I get to see things that they post in CISA. And so it's really helpful when you have some perspective as to what it looks like from the family app point of view. So I definitely recommend that for you as well. Now what I was telling you about earlier when I was doing the live demo is you just wanna make sure you match the right student to the right paper invitation because you don't accidentally want to send the wrong invitation home with the wrong kit. Now once you send that home though, up to 10 family members can get connected using that same invitation. You don't have to keep printing new ones. And you might be thinking, well, how would 10 family members wanna connect to one journal? But you never really know. A student might live at home with two adults and then have two other adults that they spend some time with people who are co-parenting maybe in a different household. Maybe they have grandparents or aunts or uncles. So you definitely have no obligation to try to get every student connected with that many family members. But just know that it's an option in case you have some students who would benefit from that and you don't have to keep printing new invitations. This same paper will work for everyone. What I love about this paper invitation is all of the helpful info that prints out. Remember, CISA is magically creating this for you. You don't have to do it yourself. You saw me do it just with a couple of clicks. I love how it explains to family members. If you're on a smart phone, do this. If you're on a computer, do this. If you already set up an account like maybe last year, for example, here's what you do, really great step-by-step instructions. And if a parent is in that family app, they're opening the family app to scan this code and then they're automatically connected. It's really cool. So you have to scan that code. This code, it's a unique code for each kid. You have to scan that from the family app or if you'd rather type in the URL and URL just means web address. Like you're typing in a website. It'll take you right to a class list where you select your student's name. And then that process, the teacher just approves. Like says, yes, this person really is this kid's parent. And after the teacher checks that, then that person is connected to you. So this is the really fast way to connect from the CISA app, but the computer is pretty quick as well. The teacher just has to approve the connection with a quick check. Okay, this is my favorite part of the presentation. Everything I talked about up till now is true for kids at any grade level. K-12, they're gonna all connect the same way. But these are some unique tips that I wanna share with you because it's a little bit different when you're working with older students. Like I said, I was working with 12th graders. All of my students were 11th and 12th graders, mostly 12th. So people that were getting really close to graduation into college and the way that I would communicate with their families was a little bit different than maybe what you would do if you were teaching say first grade. So I wanna share some tips with you that worked with me with older students. I do wanna tell you though and be really honest and tell you that the connections I had with families and the way that I was able to open up my classroom was different than anything I had ever done previously. And in those last few years of my teaching, I really had a transformative experience getting families connected to my class. With big kids, I was never really sending home paperwork, newsletters, anything like that. I mean, I was emailing parents now and then about grades. And of course I was communicating with them at things like parent teacher conferences. But I wasn't thinking too hard about high school seniors and how I was sharing their creations and their work with their families. And so the way that families were able to connect to my classroom and see little things that their students were doing, whether that was speeches they were giving or papers they were writing or even just pictures and videos of what we were doing in class. It was really a great way to, you know, take down some walls in my classroom and really open it up to parents and families. And that was really special for me. So I wanna encourage you to do that. I know if you're in this webinar, that means you're teaching older students and it might be hard to think about connecting parents and how much would you want to involve parents? But I want to assure you that it can be like a really great experience. So I'm gonna give you some tips though that will work well for you when you're working with those older students. My first tip is to take those paper invitations and snail mail them home. Okay, so put them in an envelope and mail them home. And what's actually even better for big kids is have them address the envelope themselves. That's a skill that a lot of students, it's kind of, you know, I don't know, you think that every kid knows how to address an envelope, but what I found in the last few years is that's a skill that kind of needs some refreshing. It's, you know, in some ways becoming maybe a little more obsolete as more paperwork and bills are handled digitally. So it's just a good reminder to kids how to address an envelope. And what's neat about that is if you can provide some envelopes and maybe your school will pay postage perhaps, then parents would be receiving in their mail at home a letter hand addressed by their own student. And that's pretty cool. I'm gonna tell you the reason I recommend snail mailing home paper invitations is that no big kid is going to take something home in a folder or backpack and take it out and give it to their parents. I think the data and research shows that a lot of paperwork with big kids is gonna end up crumpled in a backpack or locker or end up in a trash can. So I knew that if I was handing them a paper invitation, which is what you would do, like if you were teaching first or second graders, that would work, you know, parents are checking folders and backpacks was not gonna work for 12th graders. So I had a lot of big kids snail mail home paper invites. When that didn't work, I personalized the email subject line and I'm gonna show you what that looks like in real time in just a second. And then another tip I had, especially when I had big kids using cell phones and cell phones were not contraband in my school, students were allowed to have them if stored appropriately in class. I was able to actually have them text their parents to have them join. And that worked when I could shorten the URL. And I'm gonna show you that. I know that probably sounds complicated, but I will show you that in real time here in just a second. So those are my three best tricks that really did work for me with 11th and 12th graders, but I am going to show you all of those tricks. So remember it's snail mail paper invites, personalized the subject line, shorten the URL. Okay, let me pop out. I'll show you back in the class. Okay. So remember just a reminder, we started with plus families and then we're gonna print the paper invites. And this is what I would snail mail home. Okay. So when I say snail mail, I just mean put in the mail let the postal system deliver it. In this case, I'm gonna say, I don't even need to print the first two pages. That's just information for me. So I can actually tell my computer, my printer, I only need to print a certain number of pages. I could set it a certain way. And then after I had these printed, that's what I would have the students fold and play an envelope and then address home to their families. Okay. Snail mail them home. Big kids aren't gonna take them home. They're gonna end up in the trash. I had a lot of luck with that. So after we sent home the invitations though, if we had a handful, two or three kids in every class whose families weren't connected, I went to my next trick, which is to send the email. I am gonna tell you to be honest with older students, again, with kind of that idea that they're not necessarily getting paperwork home or even something that comes in the mail for some parents would not be something that they were that excited about opening and following the directions on. I'm gonna tell you I did have a lot of luck with the email.  So what I'm gonna show you is when you click that button, you get this suggested email here, right? And I can hit this copy button or I can use my keyboard command to copy this. I'm gonna have to paste that into my email. So I use Gmail, you use whatever your school's email is, you're going to have to paste that in. And that's gonna tell parents everything they need to know. But it's this subject line that I recommend that you change. So you can see that CSAW has this subject line, sign up for CSAW to receive important updates from, and then this is the name of the class. It's gonna be whatever name your class is. But what I would recommend is that you actually manually enter a different subject line. And what worked for me is to mention the student's name in the subject. So if I said something like, you have got to watch Alonzo's speech that worked every time. They recognize their own student's name. The email was coming from me. They saw their student's name and they saw something referenced in the subject line that referenced the work they were doing in my class. That worked every time. So I had a lot of success with that and with getting parents connected. So you have the option to print the paper invitation, but when you view that sample email and you're copying and pasting this in, I recommend a different subject line. Okay, the other suggestion I had was about the URL. And URL just means website, okay? So this is the web address. And what I recommend, because that's so long, like if I was telling you to log into it, I'd be saying app.csaw.me, backslash, S, backslash. You see what I'm saying? It's super long. I always wanted to shorten that and get that as short as I could. And then if I needed to have a big kid, literally just text that home to mom or dad to say, hey, can you connect to this class? It was actually much easier to type that in manually. So if you have never shortened a URL before, a couple of quick ways you can do that. I've copied it here using my keyboard commands. You could go to like a web shortener. This one's called tiny URL. I could go to a web shortener and I could say that I want to make this tinier. I'm not sure if it's just generating it here. I have had this open for a while. Okay, so it has shortened it. So it shortened it just to this. I could paste that in, a student could text that. Or another way that you can shorten a URL. So that's tiny URL. Another way is like if you have the Google Chrome extension, I think if I paste that URL in, this was my URL for my class. This is what I mentioned too, where a parent has to choose their own name off of a list. Okay, so you can see this is the class list. So I could say, yep, I'm Bruno's mom. That's what it looks like. But what I would recommend is taking this and shortening it. And this is my Google Chrome extension for a URL shortener. I know some of that is probably confusing, especially if you've never heard of shortening a URL before, but I just wanted to suggest it to you as a possible tip, because what you're gonna find is this is a lot shorter for a kid to text. So URL shortening is not super important unless you're just trying to have a student type it in something. And I found that when I did that, it was much easier to get parents connected really quickly during the school day. I would call a student over to my desk, I would have them type that into their phone and quickly send that text home to their parent. And then within literally just a matter of minutes, I was noticing that those parents were getting connected. So that actually was pretty foolproof for me. Again, I was teaching 12th graders and so that was something that wasn't out of the norm for us, but it could be something that wouldn't necessarily be a perfect solution for you. Okay, let me pop back into my slides and see if there's one other thing. Make sure I'm still on track here. Okay, so here was my list. Yep, we did the email personal subject line, the shortened URL, I showed you that. Oh, and then this is what I wanted to say too. Sometimes you might be teaching some students whose parents just don't have access to technology and that's fair and fine too. We like for students to use CSUN school when they have access to school devices, but if you have family members that just don't have access to that and that's not gonna be convenient for them. I wanted to make sure I shared some low tech or no tech ideas for you. If your students are creating awesome things in CSOT and you wanna make sure that their parents and carers can see those, here's some things you could do that do not require parents logging in. They could just visit your classroom or maybe you have a library or media center where you could just host an event and have the adults come in and the students sit side by side with the parent and the school device and go through their portfolio together. Remember that's still a great connection that you can make with your students and their families even if they're not checking CSOT every day from home. I actually was a part of a couple of events like that and it was really successful. It's nice when you can get the parents connected of course and checking in daily or frequently but even if you're just hosting an event once a quarter or once a semester where parents can use a school device and look through their students portfolio that's actually a great connection as well. Also think about making your parent teacher conferences more of a student led conference. We also did that in my building that was actually a seven through 12 building. So seven through 12th graders were doing this. They had their parents sitting beside them at the conferences and went through some of their wow work, some of their best work in CSOT and shared it with their parents. That was a really great experience too. And then another thing I had some luck with too and this is again with 12th graders. I had classes where almost every kid had a parent or family member connected but if I just had one or two left and it was making me kind of feel bad about their situation and I wanted them to get some feedback. I just asked another staff member if they would join my class as that student's parent or family member. I cleared it with the student first. Like I would say things like, hey, would it be okay with you? If I asked Karen to join as your parent or family member so she could give you some feedback. And Karen was the real name of one of my secretaries or one of the secretaries at the high school and she played this role for several of my students and did an awesome job and she checked often and gave them great feedback. And as long as the students were okay with it and kind of thought that that was a cool idea then she was happy to do it. It gave them some feedback. It let them know that they were creating for an authentic audience but when it wasn't feasible to get one of their parents or family members connected it was great to know that there was someone else in the school willing to do that. And I think you would probably find that was true too that you would have adults that you could ask other stakeholders in your school who could play that role. So I ended up in all my classes every kid had somebody connected. If they didn't have someone connected then I asked someone else in my school and I never made a big deal of it and I never called that out in front of other students. It wasn't a big deal at all but it just made sure every kid was getting some feedback and that was a really cool experience too. I wanna remind you about translation. This is one of the things that I think makes CESA really worth it as far as communicating is that it's gonna automatically happen if your device is in a different language than what the note or announcement is posted in. So like if you're reading this if like if you're receiving this announcement but your device is set into Spanish then it's gonna translate it for you. So like I as the teacher am typing this but a parent might see this if their device is set into a different language. So as an example in this screenshot it's set to Spanish. So you don't really have to do anything to make that happen. It just has to do with the native language of the device. So it's a device settings thing and how the device is set up but if you're sending something out to parents and families and it's going to devices that are set to different languages then it's automatically gonna translate and the same is gonna work for you too as a teacher. So if a parent messages you back and they message you in a different language then it's gonna translate it for you into English if your device is set into English. There's a whole set of there's a bunch of information about C-SOS translation and you can learn more about that here. When you get these slides you can just open this and read all about it. I think it translates into 55 different languages. So that's really helpful for you if you are corresponding and communicating with family members that speak a different language than you. Let's talk briefly too about the difference between the student's journal or portfolio versus the communication that's available to you from the inbox. Okay, so here's a couple of ways to delineate this. What your students are posting to the journal would be the work that they've created or captured and that they wanna share. If you're using C-SOS activity library their responses to the activities you've shared with them are going there as well. And then if they're taking photos or video that's also going in the journal. I taught speech class or public speaking where students were standing up and giving presentations and speeches. So a lot of what was in my students journals were actually recordings of speeches. So that's going in the student journal. It's something that we want students to be able to have access to so that they can see their growth over time. They can read those old papers or watch those old speeches. They can see that work that's waiting in their journal. The inbox which is that communication tab and I can remind you again in the class show you where that tab is. That's kind of that grown up to grown up communication. So I as a family member can send something to the teacher or I as the teacher can send something to the family member. And it's not saved in the students portfolio. It's correspondence, it's communication. It's not staying in my students portfolio. So I as the teacher though might find that that inbox is really handy to send an announcement, to send a message. As a teacher of 11th and 12th graders I was not necessarily needing to send a lot of these types of things but I did send home things sometimes that were conversation starters. It made more sense to me than a newsletter. I was only seeing the student for an hour a day but what I liked to do was send like some conversation starters, ask your student about this. So I could help facilitate some conversation at home beyond just what did we do in school today. Couple of other settings to remind you about if you're thinking about, well who can see what's in the journal and who can see what's in the inbox. Remember students only see each other's work if this button is turned on. You find that button in the wrench which is at the upper right of your class. If this is turned off then no student can see any other student's work. But if you turn this on then students can see each other's work. Reminder families are only gonna see their own child's work. If you have commenting turned on again that's a decision you make in the settings. You have a lot of decisions to make when you click that wrench in the top right. You have a lot of decisions to make. If you choose to turn on comments then anything that you approve any student would be able to see a comment that a family member made if students can see each other's work is turned on. And families can see all the comments made on any of the work their child is tagged in. This slide is actually really helpful and you could probably refer back to it as a resource later. Because if you're working with other teachers in your building who are new to CISA and they're asking about, well who can see this and if I turn this on what can people see this is a really helpful set of reminders here. Or in the inbox tab you can send an announcement to everybody. Announcement can go to all family members. I do just wanna remind you because this question comes up a lot. If a family member gets connected to the CISA class they're not gonna see old announcements. They're not going to retroactively see announcements that have been posted previously. They'll only see the new announcements that are posted after they connected. The private messages are only visible to the teacher who sent it to that one family member or vice versa. So an announcement kind of goes like to the whole class the private message is between one family member and the teacher or vice versa. And if you have a co-teacher on your class they cannot see those private messages either. Okay, let's pop into this class just so I can remind you. Remember we connected families from here. The journal, the portfolio, the feed view these are the student creations that I can scroll through that's in my journal tab. But when I click the inbox is where I go to all of that correspondence or communication. So I can send an announcement to students. And I actually didn't send announcements to my students this way. I think it's a great tool for communicating with families but you might have other tools that you use to message students. I can send a message to all families. I can type it here or I can click this add button and send an announcement from here always too. What I wanna show you just to make sure it's really clear, remember this is my journal. These are my students posts. In my journal view, these are my students names. When I taught six, well you guys are all six through 12th grade teachers. I taught 12th graders, they logged in with email. These are all their names here. When I'm in the inbox what I'm seeing here is the name of connected family members. So when you're looking here going wait, who are these people? These are connected family members. So I can send an announcement to everyone two ways. I can click send family announcement from here or I can always hit that green add button and send an announcement. But when I want to privately message, I can click on that person's name. This is a connected family member. It's telling me my student's name has been but this is their connected family member. I can send a message right to that family member and that's a private message. My own kids teachers have been using CSAS inbox this year. So I've been receiving announcements from the teacher and I know those announcements are going to everyone. But if I reply, that's a private message. It's going just from me to the teacher. Me as a parent, I don't have the option to send something to everyone. Whatever I'm sending is private to the teacher. I as a parent cannot send an announcement. So as a teacher, I can send an announcement to families or to students. I cannot send an announcement as a parent. So what's cool when you're in CSAS, you actually can, you can choose here as my announcement going to all students, all family members are both. I'm guessing if you were doing this, you would be probably picking all family members at least for the purposes of this webinar. We're talking about family communication. But what's cool beyond just typing a message, you can also use all of CSAS creative tools here. And this is what my kid's teacher has been doing, sharing photos and videos from the school day. So if you as the teacher want to add something to an announcement, that's how you do it. So you can choose to send to who you're sending it to. You can type info there and then you can attach. Right from your device or from your camera roll. This button might say camera roll if you're on like an iPad or an iPhone, for example. So that's pretty cool that you have the option to attach. Okay, so I showed you that inbox tab just to make sure you kind of knew where it was. I think this slide is really helpful for a reference who can see what in each of those two tabs. Don't forget, we also have a really great back to school night or family's website. The link is here or if you click this later, you'll see it. It's just something you could have displayed. Maybe like you have a projector in your room and you're showing it on the screen or maybe you have it open on a couple of devices in your classroom. If you're ever having parents and family members in your classroom, it explains what CSOT is and it explains how to get connected. So if you have an opportunity to have families in person in your class get connected, it's really helpful. Something else I like to suggest to teachers too is make sure that when you connect family members, there's something waiting for them in the journal. So if you have students creating something, writing a paper, taking a photo, whatever you have that your students have done, if it's waiting for them when they connect, at least parents won't get there to an empty journal. My students were older, obviously. So a lot of what they were putting in CSOT was coming from Google Drive. It was things they were creating using other Google tools. But like I said, we also had a lot of recordings from speeches that they were giving in my class and presentations. We also have these activity collections and the activity library, these getting started collections. So if you're not sure what your students should post or how they could get started with CSOT, I definitely recommend checking out one of those collections. For older students, I would say probably it's less important for you to do a welcome video or a picture of your classroom. But whatever you would normally do to introduce yourself to your students, families would be appropriate there. I'm gonna save a few minutes for questions, but I wanna remind you that if you are ever stuck with something related to CSOT, the Help Center is your first stop. Help.csot.me, you have three different places, you can ask a question, you can type something there, you can submit a help request here, or you can also search here with that little CSOT assistant button that's at the bottom of the screen. Like I said, I'll take a few questions so you can type them in now. As I'm looking in the question box, I'm just gonna leave this slide up on the screen. It's reminding you how you can get connected with our CSOT community. We're very active on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. There is a CSOT teachers group for high school teachers and there's one for sixth through eighth grade teachers. And I definitely recommend you join one of those depending on your grade level, because it's a great way to share tips and ideas with other people in the community who are using CSOT with older students. I'm gonna actually pause our recording, but I'll stay online for a few minutes to answer questions. So feel free to type anything in the question box that I can help you with. I'm happy to help you with ideas and tips for older students using CSOT. And you will get a survey that pops up on your screen in just a few minutes. So if you can, please answer those questions because we really value your feedback and it helps us make our PD better. So like I said, I'm gonna pause the recording. I hope to see you again here really soon, but I will stay online to answer questions. So type those in if there's anything I can help with. Bye-bye.


What's up Hoover, this is how you got to travel downtown look I'm on Granville And those right there Everybody travels now with masks here This is the way it goes So today victory square technologies exploded on FD I interviewed them last year I interviewed them last year in September at around 25 cents today. They exploded on use of FD approval. They exploded 500% that's right. They went up 500% I brought you the pick last year last September at 25 cents today. It's at 87 cents So just another one winners man It's just another one of the winners It's almost getting too easy guys. You're not winning. You're probably not watching Want me to take this off? See my real face But yeah, this is this is what it is here in Vancouver.   I don't know. We'll see how high it can go Kind of reminds me of QSC Went from like 10 cents to a dollar and then it went all the way back down So I would just say be careful wouldn't you think 500% it's not my style I brought you the pick for 25 cents last year and it exploded today So anybody who got in the 25 cents or less congratulations But I'm not gonna sit here and tell you guys to chase the stock that just went up 500% I'm not here to say it won't Happen again. I'm not here to say they can't go up again tomorrow. Anything is pop then. Oh, it's a 500% Let me get in now. Not really my style, but hey man to each his own. I wish everyone success and You guys all get a chance to win. That's the name of the games. We play the game to win the game, right? So when we're making investment You're always trying to win and when you have an opportunity to take profits take those profits Sell on open and then buy the tip Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of hype because of FDA approval Uh, it seems like a little late to be coming up with a cove in 19 test kit I mean you've heard that story before but Clearly it wasn't for victory score technologies that exploded on the news. So We'll see It's been for a long time And was beat down really badly I didn't actually even see this coming but I'm glad that it happened I remember like doing interviews with companies that go down And obviously after I interviewed company got an opportunity to make some huge returns today massive massive massive returns today And sometimes guys I'll do videos and I'll bring you guys a pic and it just doesn't go up right away Sometimes it takes a week. Sometimes sometimes it takes three months. Sometimes it takes a year Victory square technologies is one of those picks, you know, it's more of a long-term pick Look 500 gains for whoever was in that's pretty big. So if you got in today at 20 cents My goodness, you had a chance to uh make a huge return on your investment and congratulations to everybody who did Yeah, hpq man. That's my pick too. I brought hpq last year And it gets to 8 cents hpq hits 70 cents Every time it goes under 40 cents around 37 38 cents. I'm calling the buy So I think it's a buy around 37 38 cents. That's where I'll call the buy if I don't see it Under 40 cents. I'm not really interested in buying it That's kind of what I'm thinking about that stock every time for whatever reason it gets to that 40 cents or lower range It seems to go up. So in my opinion, that's the entry point For hpq silicone You want to get into that pick you want to get into that pick? at 37 38 cents and when you hit 37 38 cents, I told our entire community I'm rich tv live Now's the time to load up and anybody who did got a chance to win. So congratulations on anybody who took advantage of that move I'm just in downtown Vancouver right now You guys can see the big buildings I could go to the water I'm a little early Let's go to the water I'm a little early I get rich rich fill straight up brother. How you like doc a hpq my pig Walk down to the people for the public And talk about victories 500 you know, we're going to talk about it Especially when I interviewed that company first last year last September So just go on youtube search victory square technology is rich to be live and you'll see what i'm talking about You'll see the interview Where I interview the CEO of the company first Before anybody else on the planet Your kids are dragging down your wi-fi Yeah, I think everybody's wi-fi is a little slow right now Everybody's on wi-fi Everything's running a little bit tighter because everybody's on their wi-fi So we're going to walk right down to the water here in beautiful British Columbia show you guys some views of what it looks like here End of august beautiful sunny day And I had some time to kill so I figured As we just go live talk to the people Talk to the public Let the people know what's up I let them know.  Oh, yeah gax y call that too Gax y explosion doc explosion hpq explosion vst explosion We're all over it, man CXI shareholder they had a nice day today village farms had a nice day today. So nice to see come august And turn them on after market I think genius had its run, you know people keep asking me about genius now. Yeah, it might be a good time to start positioning yourself But I think it's lost its luster Genius had its run This is all about momentum for me And once a company loses its momentum I'm not as interested It doesn't mean that it can't go well and do well in the future, but it just means that it's going to take some time and I just don't know. I just don't know if I want to hold on to that stock right now um Especially considering if you look at their If you look at the degenerate shorts, there's tactics every time they want to Prove a point they put lawsuits on these companies and then if you go to the company's news all you see is just lawsuits in their news I don't know why this is allowed. I don't know how this is legal to just Riddle your news with lawsuits. Why is that allowed? I have no idea But this is the tactic of the shorts and because it's very effective because once you start putting a lawsuit on a company and got like 10 20 50 100 press releases in their news about lawsuits What do you think investors are gonna do? They're gonna sell the stock So these tactics that the shorts play are absolutely disgusting and I think it should be illegal I think it should be illegal. I don't know why it's legal. I don't know why they're allowed to play these games But for whatever reason they're allowed to do it.   Or else you got views like this This is the downtown in Vancouver. These are the views you get in downtown Vancouver We're investing in a better company. You're getting better The people that are joining the community Investors that are joining our community are getting better We're winning more and more often And winning is almost becoming like expected Losing is not Winning is the only option failure is not even an option So I've already called out the shorts.  Why? Why and how is this allowed to persist? I'm going to expose them all.  Who is the securities and exchange commission? Protect Are they supposed to protect the investors? Okay, if I invest in genius and then genius has got lawsuits and then I go to genius's news and all I see is lawsuits How is that going to help me as an investor? Explain that to me. How does that help me as an investor when the the the news is riddled with lawsuits? Very confused Very confused with why that's allowed Check this out All right, guys, so I just wanted to talk to you about victory square technology relations to all the members that got a chance to win And if you didn't don't worry stay tuned All you got to do is holler at your boy and we can give you access to our trading academy We get access to all these picks first and if you'd like to learn more you can email me at lab email com I'm actually on my way to our office here in downtown Vancouver And I'm about to interview another CEO of a mining company. So stay tuned tomorrow Some more big things happening. Um, I will be talking about telemedicine stock dock Which is another one of my picks that's up well over 100% brought to that pick at 50 cents that I hit $1.23 Congratulations. Once again to all members And I also am going to be talking Pacific 11 Eastern I'll be speaking to Delta resort Delta Delta nine cannabis CEO John Yeah, so I'm gonna have a busy day tomorrow Busy day today Still on my way to the office right now And I thought I would just go live and just talk to you guys a little bit about victory square technologies That's some of the stuff going on If you guys aren't winning you're probably not watching we've been bringing winners and bringing it to first three years since 2017 Congratulations on everyone and all your success, but I promise you this is just the beginning Just the beginning Victory square technology is just another one of the picks that we brought you First and today went up 500 percent on FDA approval of coronavirus test kits All right guys. I'm out


Strawberry Fields Forever Festival is just this welcome of those that have been called to this deep path to come together and I always like it. We just seem to come in touch with people in such given ways and then invite them and yeah, such a joy to meet them in the field, that's part of the fun of why we put this on. Take the time to put it on because there's a welcoming. Welcome and sometimes we hear their music or we have interaction like with Maddie Zee or you and Ricky had a beautiful encounter with him and yeah, it just warms the heart to think of some of the ones that are going to be coming and joining us there, Neta, Voan and these different ones that have been called and from our community this is just such an opportunity to extend the gift that they have received and bless everyone and be blessed themselves so you know it's really precious. It is, it is, it's like each of those musicians that you mentioned they're all like deeply devoted to the course as their path as well and just that, I mean the devotion to the course it's such a deep path of undoing the self-concept and being willing to let go of everything to serve, like to serve Christ and serve the spirit and so that's part of what I feel so honored to invite them and have them come and share their gifts because I know what they've gone through even to be able to receive the music they've gone through a lot of letting go and clearing their mind and devotion to the mind training and so to have them come and share their experiences and you know for most of them their songs have come as an effect of the miracle or as a desire for the miracle like it's part of a prayer like I need to feel your love or help me release this, help me change my mind, guide me, show me or then the effect of going into a mystical experience and so the songs we're going to be blessed with at the whole festival are that they're purely experiential all about the awakening from the awakening for the awakening and an invitation to be in it together and it's not a performance like you said it's like none of us are going there to perform for an external audience it's it's the intention is to be in the presence and allow that to to bless us and everyone at the same time and I feel that's what in some ways is probably different about this to most even concerts where there's a real focus on the perfection of the form and of course we're going to have incredibly high quality because that supports you know the the music and we already have a team of volunteers friends who are very specialized at working with sound and so all of that's going to be there too but at the end of the day you know if the sound if the electricity went out you know we would all have the exact same experience whether without the form of it you know it's it's all about the presence and the fact that the spirit wants it to happen and and it's the spirit doing it all and so nothing can actually stop that experience or to feel that in any way nothing can go wrong