Hi, I'm Tracy Tagomas-Binosa and this is part two of Making Classrooms Better, a summary of the information in my new book based on Mind-Branded Education, Science, and Practical Applications for the classroom. We're going to start off with some filters. Basically the first of the practical applications has to do with actually how giving people the tools to choose better activities.  It's out to tell you how, based on my Mind-Branded Education science, you can actually make better choices about how to plan, evaluate, and execute your classrooms. So one of the first key premises to this is that there's a very strong belief that without memory or without attention, there is no learning. Now if this is true, then the first filter, basically, any activity that might enhance memory or enhance attention would then probably lead to better learning. So if we look at this, the first practice then would be to plan activities that actually grab attention. But this is not as easy as it might sound. According to Posner, there's at least three different systems of attention in the brain. There's an orienting system, an alerting system, and the executive functioning system. And each is stimulated by different things. For example, if you hear a clap like that, you know, that's an alerting system. But being able to, you know, sustain attention for a long time, orient it correctly over the course of a learning period is a different system, as is executive functions, making a decision about or prioritizing what needs attention at what moment. So it's very important for teachers to plan activities that grab attention, but also understand that just getting that initial attention isn't enough. We have to have activities that sustain it over the course of the learning moment. We know that, you know, getting kids attention or kids who have problems with attention, their alerting system is on high. They just can't sustain things or their executive functions of choosing what's important might be calling attention to something that's not necessarily the most important thing for that learning moment in the class, or at least according to the teacher. So we know that kids are always, the brain is always paying attention. What we have to do is to help the students orient that attention. We as teachers play a big role in that and actually saying, hey, now, okay, so this is really important to pay attention. That's not cheating. That's like, you know, directing kids attention. That's helping them focus to the right things at the right time. This also means it's very important to realize that attention is also highly connected to affect. So kids in a good fielding situation are probably more likely to pay longer and more sustained attention than kids who feel ignored or bored or anxious or worried about the classroom situation. So attention, you know, works very closely also with emotional states. There is a concept in psychology called primacy recency. It means that you remember best what happens first, second best what happens last, and the stuff in the middle can be a blur. So if we know that somebody's an average attention span is maybe 10, 20 minutes, we know that a normal class period is not 10 or 20 minutes. It's usually much longer. So we have to sort of organize our time based around attention spans of our students. And the second point, the second classroom activity has to do with memory. Remember, the big partner of attention is memory and learning. We know that all learning passes is through sensory perception, right? You first feel something here, something, small something, and that will either stimulate a return to a memory that you have as something or you'll identify it as novel and you will learn in that method. But basically we know that all learning happens through the senses or memories of the senses. But memories is very complex. There's many levels to memory, right? What's very important, we know that there's short term memory and there's working memory and there's things that are triggered by emotions. But what's most important for learning is long term memory. So how do you get information into long term memory? And that's a real key trick for teachers because let's just say you teach something in a class and then at the end of the class period you test it. That's not going to tell you if it's stayed in a long, I've ever got to long term memory. That's just a, you know, sustained working memory. So it's not a good time to test that knowledge. You should actually wait, you know, 24 hours, 40 hours before you can nearly see if that's taken hold as long term memory. So since we know that all learning passes through the filter of prior experience, what does your brain do with that?  It's primed to recognize things that it remembers from before. If it finds a pattern, it hooks onto that and it can actually facilitate learning, right? But if it doesn't find a pattern, then it actually looks for novelty. And novelty is equally important in learning because things that stand out that are slightly different help the brain re-categorize and broaden its understanding of certain concepts when things actually fall. They don't fall into the normal pattern of things. When we think about the way that memory works, it's a bit more complicated as well. But all teachers should really know there's this general process of connections. Neurosynapsis, when there's neuroplasticity, connection between different groups of cells in the brain. There's a gap between these different groups of cells. That's called a synapse. And those are connected by neurotransmitters, which are electrical and chemical. Usually there's a chemical firing and then there's either a leaser or inhibition of chemicals. And when the right combination occurs, then those connections can happen and those groups of neurons can connect together. That's basically learning in the brain. We can facilitate this or we can have problems with this. We know that kids under high stress situations, that proper combination of neurotransmitters, those chemicals needed to make those connections with the brain aren't present because high degrees of other chemicals in the brain, like cortisol or high stress things, will prevent the natural connection between those neurons. So learning in the brain is basically the new connections that are made between groups of neurons. When we use a variety of ways of getting the same piece of information into your brain, very interesting, these are in slightly different but overlapping neural pathways which strengthens the way that we can understand something.  A kid might have a mental schema of a dog as being like the poodle, right? Because they've only seen a poodle. But the more different types of dogs that that kid sees, that strengthens his mental schema of dogs. It can be broadened, right? He can see toy dogs and he can also draw a dog and he also sees a Doverman Pinscher as opposed to a poodle. So that mental schema is broadened in a similar way. If we put information about the same concepts learned in classes, for example, you want to teach a historical event, but you teach it talking about the actors in that event or the time period or contextualizing it in an economic structure or whatever. Different ways that you can put that same concept or those key concepts into the kid's head, the easier it is for retrieval because now there'll be several places that that kid can look for those connections in their minds. The third key best classroom practice has to do with spaced versus masked practice. This has a little bit to do with memory as well as for attention. They're very closely connected. But there is now evidence that shows that very clearly in since the 30s there's been studies going on, but now you can actually see the brain and how it actually does better when you space learning moments out rather than massing them all together. So a kid who has the chance, you know, let's say that you have five hours that you can study in a week, if you decide to do all studying together, you're not going to be nearly as well off as you if you spread that at a bit or even spread it out several times over the same day in different spaces, right? So spreading out into smaller chunks of learning moments is better because what is it doing? You're reinforcing these connections that you're making and that facilitates retrieval. So spaced versus masked practice is definitely the way to go. We also know that when you're able to revisit concepts and this would be over time. So maybe from first grade to second grade to third grade to fourth grade to fifth grade, when you constantly go back and reinforce those connections in new contexts, this is what helps kids transfer knowledge from one context to another. So when you're able to revisit the same learning concept, say you learn a math formula in one way at one level and that's reinforced, that's great. But then later on, you can actually see how a new application of that same formula can be applied. You continually strengthen those connections and you show the child that there's a broader application or broader use of those concepts and therefore they're remembered better, retrieved faster. We also know, though, and this is kind of interesting, easier concepts need less amount of time between learning moments, whereas more complex concepts need more time or more space between each of the learning moments.  Then you get a bit harder into fractions and then you start doing higher calculus. We find that you need more time between those bigger concepts in order to reinforce and it seems like it needs a lot more time to sort of settle those concepts into your brain. So the harder the learning test, the more time and space needed between learning moments. In a fourth best classroom practice, we would like to encourage teachers to incorporate more repetition. Very interesting, if you look at brain scans, that when somebody is trying to learn or to memorize something new, they'll often say it to themselves over and over again. This is generally combined with also a visual sketch pad. So basically you'll see something and you'll be hearing it. And that's the way we're pretty much, you know, trying to drill that into our own heads over and over again. We know that the variety of ways that you can do this then helps. So seeing something and writing it and hearing it is better than just seeing it or just hearing it, right? So when you try to remember new information, you either repeat it over and over and then you can also even see that visually. Those are slightly different ways of putting that same piece of information into your brain. So that repetition actually helps recall later on. This is very closely connected to taking advantage of variation and transdisciplinary thinking. So if you're trying to get a single concept into your head, that same concept is touched on in different disciplines. So if you can coordinate with the teacher who's doing the literature class and the one who's doing the art class and the one who's doing the math class to reinforce the concepts, then you have a real transdisciplinary way of connecting those concepts. And instead of a kid having that in their head, you know, a single siloed way, they actually have a greater link of that idea in a broader context. This means that teaching to slightly different memory systems really reinforces the rate of retrieval. So it makes it faster for us to get that information back out of our head if it's reinforced in multiple contexts. We also know, unfortunately, that most of what's going on in class is only pretty much in an oral context. There's like, you know, this teacher spewing at the students. So it's a uni-directional and it's also a single modal way of teaching. So the idea would be to keep in mind that all of your senses should come into play when you're trying to learn different concepts. It just makes sense because it reinforces the way that you can retrieve that information at a later time. Best classroom practice six has to do with planning authentic lessons. We as teachers spend a lot of time in teacher training programs learning how to plan a good lesson and to offer, you know, great logic and they should come first and then this should come second. That's terrific and that's very important. However, we need to spend equal amounts of time trying to think about, you know, how much does this relate to that kid's life? You know, how how can they use that? How do they see it? And this is what gets to the to the heart of really authentic lesson planning, trying to make it real and come alive for the student. We know that when things are more student-centered, when the student feels that this has an application to something outside of the classroom, then it's easier and easier to learn and more strongly reinforced in their minds. Best classroom practice seven has to do with implementing formative evaluation. We spend a whole lot of time talking about summative, you know, standardized tests and very little talking about the great importance of ongoing feedback. One of the best books in the field right now by Dylan William is wonderful in guiding us and thinking about how our activities can actually be assessment practices. So we're always giving feedback, constant feedback to the kid. The kid only has feedback, you know, every couple of weeks. He really has a hard time knowing what he needs to be improving. But if we find a way to constantly be giving him hints at what he could do better or, you know, praising what's going well, but also saying that he can do something else on an ongoing basis, not just waiting for that, you know, final, you know, end of unit test, then that kid will be learning better because he will have his faults called into play more clear. He'll know exactly what he needs to work on and then he can improve better. We know that, you know, a huge part of learning is just knowing how to self-correct. And you can do that once you have a habituated sense of how do I review my own processes.  This is something you can always improve on. How about trying this way, you know, have you ever thought of whatever? That guides us. But as we grow up, we're able to do that by ourselves so we can self-regulate. So the idea would be as early on as possible to inter-corporate far more embedded formative assessment into our practice.  If everybody knew everything, then we would need to go to school. So when you're in school, you're there to learn. And when you're learning, you're bound to make mistakes. And that's okay. In fact, that's to be celebrated because it actually shows that kids have the intellectual courage to try. So we need to create a space where we have a culture of evaluation that helps a kid think that anytime somebody's giving him feedback, it's to help him get better. It's not to hurt him. It's not to cause any damage. It's to actually say, you know, that's a, I never thought of like that. You know, how did you get that answer? Terrific. Have you thought about it in this other way? Guide them in the right way to think about things. But celebrate the fact that they're even trying because that's half the battle. The best classroom practice aid has to do with also with evaluation and the idea of using product, process, and progress evaluations as Buski recommends. In education, we tend to focus mainly on a product, you know, the end test score or the final presentation or whatever. What Buski tries to remind us is that we should also remember to acknowledge a student's progress and process. A student can also have, you know, great product and their process is totally lame because they go to the internet and they copy everything, right? So that's a bad process, a good product. But their progress oftentimes in the mind of their own student is far more impacting and influential in their further or in their future motivation than in then even the final product.  Acknowledging that progress is huge to a kid. So hopefully we remember to keep all three P's in mind when we are doing assessment with students. Now, having said all those things, you know, nasty about standardized tests, it's actually been shown that testing can improve learning. But it's not because of the test itself. It's because of what we do when we test. Helping kids think about how to prepare. How do I summarize that information? How do I, you know, can I, you know, put it in my own words? Can I actually bring this to the forefront of my mind really quickly? The forced retrieval of information that occurs when you practice for a test is really, really important in actually consolidating that learning moment. So hopefully you can use maybe ungraded tests, but the idea would be to have frequent testing that also reinforces learning moments. Best practice, 10 has to do with developing shared explicit learning objectives. We need to be clearer with the students. There's a lot to be said for great communication in classes, but if everybody has the same goal, then we can all be working towards the same thing. However, when it's not clear to a kid, and especially a kid who might have some difficulties focusing their attention or whatever, what, what is really important? What is the real goal of this? If that isn't really explicitly shared, then many kids will have a hard time reaching that goal. So the teacher can say, okay, listen, this is where we're starting from, this is where we want to get to, so this is what we're going to do. That shares, you know, the goal of the class, and that's really, really fundamental in arriving. All of this has to do with teacher clarity. We know that teacher clarity can be broken down into many different pieces, but it has to do with, you know, the precise words to the kids understand the vocabulary that teacher is using to explain those directions. Immediacy, I mean, is the timing of the delivery of the information correct? Is the nonverbal communication that teacher uses to share that information appropriate? And how does that stimulate more motivation on the part of the individual learner to actually execute that task in the right way? Some teachers like to say the information, ask the student to repeat the information. They oftentimes write the information, especially in classes where you might have several second language learners. It's really important to be clear about what is expected. One way to do that is to maybe use the smart guidelines, for example, you know, choosing objectives that are specific, things that are easily measurable. They can be achieved. It's not out of the grasp of the students that's realistic and that is well timed if the timing is appropriate for that particular objective. Best practice, 11 has to do with clarity and immediacy, which is connected to the first point of sharing the objectives. But this has more to do with clarity of speech and the communication process between student and teacher. We know that some students can actually totally tune out to teachers. Some kids need to see things written to remind themselves. They need to keep checklists. You know, that other classroom structures might always have a written or a digital record of what's expected or steps for the students to take depending on their ages. So that's, again, to reinforce the idea of teacher communication is really important. Cheeseboro and Mikralski break this down into things that have to do with fluency, precision, the way the classroom units are structured. That there's sufficient amount of time allowed for those instructions, as well as for execution and feedback. And that vocabulary is precise. We know that teachers' words sometimes don't match their body language. And so you might say, you know, oh, you're doing just fine in my class. The words are fine, but the way it was delivered, the students gonna pay far more attention to really, to that quick notion of the feeling behind that word, those words, as opposed to what was your intended message. So we have to be more conscious as teachers to reflect on that and to think about the ways that we're delivering our message. Are we being clear enough? Are we not being kind of sending? Are we being encouraging, but we're not being, you know, too soft in the way we're saying things? So that balance is really difficult. And most teachers find wonderful teaching tool is videotaping. I mean, just watching yourself in a class and interacting with students, it's a great way to give yourself feedback about how to improve your communication skills with students. Best practice 12 has to do with mastery learning. So to give feedback in order for a student to achieve X level of competency, that doesn't mean passing a test or, you know, maybe a measure of competency could be, you know, showing that you understand a formula or it's used or whatever. But the idea is to get kids into a habit of designing mastery goals for themselves. They know what's going to be expected. What is a demonstration? What is evidence that a kid has mastered X? You know, the colors, the periodic table, whatever it might be, you know, certain moments in history or certain literature genres. What are you going to accept as mastery evidence of that? So once that's decided is to help kids actually see how they lay out those goals for themselves, okay? They know what they have to show. Now what do they have to do in order to be able to have that evidence of mastery learning? Best classroom practice 12 has to do with, again, with this idea of mastery learning, but also for continual improvements so that the students don't just see, they don't just see learning in the class as, you know, passing that particular class. It's to actually reach a level of mastery that has transference. That can be transferred to other aspects of their lives. This also has to do with just this overall, general, continual, forever, iterative cycle of feedback from externally and then also metacognitioning, understanding how to regulate myself internally. We oftentimes send messages and we're not even aware that we're sending those messages. Teacher feedback happens all the time and even when the teacher's not even aware that they're giving feedback. And this is true for negative moments as well as positive moments. So we know that there can be kids who really try our patience.  That took less than five seconds to say, but it will probably, you know, ruin his thoughts forever about coming back to class or wanting to be a good student or thinking of himself as being capable. So size communication also has a lot to do with these things of motivating students and for their continual self-improvement and learning and for designing their own mastery level skills. This is also connected with this idea of mastery is not like getting the stickers. We are sticker crazy. Sorry to say this and we overdo this all the time. And if everybody gets a sticker, then it's like nobody gets a sticker. So what was the point? So if we're going to give praise, it should be well-merited and it has to be authentic. And kids really only appreciate it when it's sincere. If it's canned feedback, it doesn't help. Motivators within classroom context actually build those self-established goals. There's a lot of, you know, wonder right now or debate still about whether or not you should motivate using carrots or sticks.  I mean, that's been the longest debate in education forever. We know that people can learn in any of these quadrants, right? We can learn negative extrinsically when the teacher says, you do this or you're not going out to recess. Okay, so that's negative extrinsic and you can learn. What's really interesting is to know that when things are learned in a positive intrinsic way, the probability of replication, the probability of reuse is much higher. So if I throw you in a swimming pool and you don't have to swim, you know, I can force you to sink or swim, right? But the likelihood that you go back to the pool happily and jump in by yourself is really low. So what we want to try to do is teachers be more strategists, you know. How can I want, how can I get this kid to want that learning moment for himself? Best Classroom Practice 13 has to do with nurturing student-teacher relationships and this has a lot to do with the concept of affect in learning. We know that emotions are critical to learning. You cannot separate decision-making from learning. All decision-making involves emotion at some level. So this goes back to the same thing of teacher clarity. When a teacher might, you know, have this kind of a face and they say, you're doing great, you know, that doesn't mean the words are right, but the way that's delivered, the connection between the teacher and the student isn't there. So we know this is really key because it's a survival mechanism. The brain is not going to stick around and let the body get hurt. So if there's any threat around, we know we want to run. We want to run from that. So it's very, very important that teachers learn to measure their body language and actually in the tone of voice and the way they, their facial expressions when they're trying to interact with students. We have some wonderful information from Hattie that has to do with the concept of expert teachers versus experienced teachers. There's a big difference. Experienced teachers will just do what worked once upon a time over and over and over again. Whereas an expert teacher tends to be able to tailor their interactions with each student based on the student. So that's really, that's an art. That's the art of teaching I think is being able to tailor and make those, those interactions with students. This is also connected to the idea that when a student feels supported, we know that a student who feels like they have a good relationship with their teacher is really positive. But there's now some wonderful evidence that has to do with collective efficacy. When several teachers recognize a single student or when the group recognizes individual efforts, that reinforces the motivation for a student to continue what they were doing beforehand. So when several teachers can get together and give a pat on the back to a student who has come through something difficult or whatever, that has a huge impact on student learning outcomes as well. Classroom Practice 14 has to do with accepting that, you know, the brain is plastic and it's, and ill-intelligence is fluid and you're going to learn at different times, right? And that you can believe in your students. It's impossible for the brain not to learn. So the idea is to believe that in your students, even those that, you know, really try your patience, they are going to be able to learn, you know, we have to find the way, but we have to actually believe that it's our role to, to make those changes in the students' own perceptions of themselves as learners. The problem that Hattie identifies is that we are often very unaware of our own prejudices about teaching and learning, about kids who come from ex-neighborhood or, you know, oh, it's, you know, Johnny's brother or whatever. You, you have these judgments and that colors the way you interact with the students. So your relationship with the student is already almost defined sometimes by your own prejudices. So we're challenging teachers to actually look and, and think about what it is that they already think they believe about learning. And this is really, really important because it has a lot to do with labeling. Teachers who say, oh, yeah, that's right. Well, he's, you know, he's got attention problems or he's that learning specialist kid or he's whatever. By labeling kids, we condemn them, you know, to actually only succeeding in that level because they themselves believe that you don't believe that they're going to learn. So they don't even try. This means that teachers, okay, so students who think that their teachers think that they can learn do learn. But the opposite is also true. If a student thinks, even erroneously, if the student thinks that the teacher thinks he can't learn, then they're not going to try. So we have to be very, very careful about the messages we send to students, spoken or unspoken. Really wonderful book that I highly recommend. Norman Dodge's The Brain That Changes Itself really celebrates this notion of plasticity.  A damage brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can substitute. The circuits can be what, rewired. It's not, you know, fate.  Things change. Okay. In the final section about filters, about planning and evaluating and practices, the activities that come in at the end are kind of lumped together. There are some things that are techniques, some things that are strategies, some things that are actions, and some things that are activities, and others that are methods. These things we sort of, as teachers, we mix up these terms all the time, but I think it's worth, you know, sorting those out a bit, because they do speak to different levels of intervention in the classroom. Best classroom practice 15 is to foster metacognition and mindfulness. So we, if we want students to end up being lifelong learners, we have to choose appropriate methodologies and actions and activities that help improve deep thinking about things. So becoming more conscious of your own thinking, like metacognition, thinking about thinking, is probably one of the biggest challenges we have in school. But it's also one of the easiest, because it can be incorporated as a daily activity. Just asking a student, hey, that's the right answer. How did you do that is having them reflect on their own thinking processes. So we can strengthen metacognitive skills just by those simple actions. So there's some wonderful research in neuroscience now that actually shows how connections between areas of the brain are strengthened through simple metacognitive reflective practice. Very interesting also in neuroscience is that decision making and metacognition tend to have overlapping circuits in the brain. They're very similar. So we know that decision making is highly connected to metacognition. So understanding why we think about things or how we think about things actually helps us think better in the future. Training in metacognitive skills is wonderful because they can definitely be improved. There's a lot of evidence that shows that metacognitive skills can be enhanced. If this is one of the overall goals of teaching, of learning, of our whole formal education process is to have people who understand themselves better. I know how I think about this. I know when I learn best, I understand how to get to the solution. Those particular habits have to be reinforced continually in our classroom. It's not like, okay, I got that right, move on to the next thing. We need to take advantage of successes and failures in the classroom and ask the students in front of us to think about how they got that answer. That's really huge in the greater picture of what we're looking for in long-term, lifelong learners. Very interesting is that there's two ways. And remember, I think most teachers are very clear about feedback and how important that is. But that's an external way to help you know what you're doing. Metacognitive skills development is the internal way of doing the same thing. Okay? So metacognition is helping us basically learn how to give ourselves feedback. Best classroom practice 16 has to do with using Zimmerman in colleagues practice when filtering to select activities. Very interesting study. Zimmerman, Daniels and Hyde tried to figure out what were the best things that teachers could do in their classrooms and found that activities in the classroom that had at least one of these characteristics ended up being better than activities that had none of these characteristics. And that activities that had several of these characteristics were even better. If you reflect on this from an MBE perspective, you'll find that the reason this is a great way to filter activities is because they either enhance memory or they enhance attention. Since we know attention to memory are fundamental to learning, very interesting. If an activity you're choosing does not have at least one of these characteristics, don't do it. But if it can have several of these characteristics, it's probably a really good indicator that it's a good activity to include into your classroom planning. 17, develop students' ability to identify similarities and differences. This comes from Rasano's work that's really very simple in its concept and it's something that we ask three-year-olds to do. But we ask people to do this throughout.  So it's one of these first intellectual habits that we try to form in kids. But this has to happen continually. Why is this so important? Because remember how the brain looks for novelty as well as for patterns. Very, very helpful to kids to get into the habit of asking themselves, what do I already know about this? How is this different from what I already know? This gives us a really strong construction of foundation upon which students can learn new things. So being able to spot differences to identify similarities can be developed throughout the lifespan. 18, develop students' ability to summarize and to note take. Taking notes is hard because, and we think that, we all, I think, ask our students to take notes. The problem is, you know, none of us have probably ever taught our students how to take notes. Everybody presumes students know how to take notes. And it's not natural. It's not natural. Summarizing and being able to synthesize your ideas into your words. I mean, somebody else's ideas into your words is not easy. And this has to be taught. And hopefully you will take the time in your class to actually help guide students in this process. This is so important because if you're just going to copy what the teacher says, you're basically working really low on the level of thinking. But if you're able to synthesize what they're saying, connect it to prior experiences, and potentially, you know, be able to come up with something new on your own, that is higher order thinking. And that's what we're looking for. So just getting kids to copy doesn't help. You do anything but improve membership. 19, reinforce effort and provide recognition. Maybe over done, over said. Very different though from feedback, which is really important. Feedback tells a kid and gives them sort of a plan. You know, what do I need to do next to improve? Whereas when you reinforce effort and you provide recognition, you're basically just investing in that kid.  I see how hard that was. I see how tough it was to, you know, to make those connections, to make that link in your head and congratulations. And that is really a very important thing for us to always remember to do. It's not like, oh yeah, obviously they should have done that. That's what I'm here for. They should know that. No, we need to celebrate that. We need to say, you know, well done. Gosh, you know, that was, I know that was hard. Good job, you know. That's what students really hope for from the person in authority, you, when they actually master something. 20, provide professional homework and practice. We know that different people will have different experiences with different concepts and core concepts are necessary to build, you know, higher order thinking and mental schemas. So the concepts are really important. The problem is different people, since all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience, some people might have had a lot of prior experience and need very little homework or practice. Whereas other people, the concept might be totally new and they need a lot of homework and practice. And we need to create structures in our classroom where we have that flexibility, that variety, that not everybody has to do the same type of homework or get the same amount of practice because different people will need different things. But it has to be meaningful. Kids know when, you know, this is like, you know, busy work. It's not homework. I would often ask my kids, did you actually have homework? And they say, oh yeah, it's Mr. Smith, you know. He, don't worry, he never checks. He never uses it. It's never used in the class. So if you're going to send homework, use it and make sure that it's structured in a way that those kids who need more practice can do more practice and those kids who need less practice don't have to do as much of the work. 21, prepare students to set personal objectives and give themselves feedback.  This has, this is very closely linked to that. Slightly different. Because metacognition is sort of developing these habits of mind reflection over time throughout your lifespan. When you're giving yourself feedback, you're basically giving yourself kind of an internal rubric and different level skills. Okay, I'm going to get to this. I'm going to get to that. I'm going to get to the next one. So you're helping kids develop a ladder towards success for themselves where they can actually give themselves, you know, the carrots they need to get to the next level. This means becoming more autonomous and having them take the time to reflect, you know, what is it that I want to do? How am I going to have success with this? What do I need to plan? You know, what resources do I need to get there? And it's a planning process. So it's basically, you know, laying out the steps towards success and helping the kids, you know, work through that and practice that throughout their lifespan. 22 is to teach students to generate and to test hypotheses. I know we begin to do this maybe around, you know, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade and you say, you know, what do you think will happen? That's terrific. But this is something that I notice even in university students, they oftentimes don't understand the natural next step. I've identified a problem. I think this caused the problem. I think this could be a solution. I'm going to apply this. I'm going to analyze my results. And then I'm going to rethink this, you know, just go through this general cycle of scientific experimentation or of inquiry is something that is fundamental to anything, any field and any job that people are going to have in the future. So we need to constantly reinforce practice and helping students understand how to generate and test their own hypothesis about things. 23 is to use cues and triggers. These come from Marsana as well. Basically saying, you know, we're not out here to answer questions for students. We're out here to get the students, you know, to find their own ways of thinking about things. So rather than tell them, you know, what the right answer is, can we lead them down the right path? Can we offer them enough cues or can we give them some keyword triggers that might help them stimulate that connection of memory to the information that they have so that they can reinforce that themselves. And that can be their own way of thinking about things instead of something, an answer that's been, you know, digested by the teacher. So in summary, those first best classroom practices have to do with planning, evaluation activities. This is using a backward designs idea, right? And this means, you know, enhancing or remembering that memory and attention are very important that we have to include repetition, variation, significance, depth and authenticity in the planning of our lessons. When we evaluate, we have to always consider product process progress. As we do this, we have to consider also teacher clarity and communication as well as the role of feedback. On the activities we use, we should really focus on continually developing those metacognitive skills and using the filter of best practices by someone to be able to come up with better filters for activities that stimulate memory and attention. And then we should use the right activities and choose the strategies that actually reinforce these basic core concepts of things that help us remember and pay attention better and that we should also use Marsano's instructional strategies that were mentioned in the last and seven concepts there. Okay. That's the first half of this. Hope you'll tune into part three. Thanks.


Hi. I'm Madars. This is joint work with Aran Traumer and Marianna Raikawa. This is not a song. It's talk about zero-knowledge, but building upon previous talk. So zero-knowledge proofs have seen enormous deployment in recent years, mainly thanks to the blockchain. We now have privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, smart contract systems, and so on. Many of them recently covered in the ZK-proof standardization workshop that Mutu will be talking about. And in the blockchain scenario, you need a particular kind of zero-knowledge proof. Ideally, it's non-interactive proof of knowledge, and especially useful if it's succinct one. So ZK-SNARK. But which SNARK should you use? Well, the most efficient ones are based on quadratic arithmetic programs, and they have extremely fast verification, just milliseconds, but they require a common reference string, or using this new terminology from the workshop, a structure difference string. And the soundness of the proof system crucially depends on SRS being correctly generated, and then the private randomness getting destroyed. So who should do this? Well, you could delegate to someone whom you trust, or you could use a multi-party computation ceremony. And the best ceremony is scaled to hundreds of participants, and this is, for example, what ZKR did. But ideally, you would want to use a proof system that doesn't require a common reference string of TAL. And we have such, for example, PCP-based systems, such as the SNARK system. They are asymptotically succinct, but generally have large constants. So the proofs are much larger in practice. If your statement is sufficiently simple, you could use a non-succinct zero-knowledge proof, say bullet proofs or high-racks or lecaro or ZKBOO. But as statement grows, so does the verification time, and in blockchain scenario, that might be unacceptable. So let's take a look. There's Alex and Steve, your favorite Minecraft characters, and Alex wants to send a transaction to Steve, and it includes zero-knowledge proof. So as transaction propagates through the blockchain, sorry, through the node network, to be included in the blockchain, it needs to be verified by every single node. So if verification is slow, Steve will see your transaction after a delay. It might seem like a usability problem, but it's actually a security issue, because miners, if the transaction verification is too slow, after a certain threshold, they'll just stop verifying them. So they'll include transactions in a block that are, in fact, invalid. And this has happened before in Bitcoin, and rational miners do this because they get a head start. Why should I verify if most likely it's going to be okay? And moreover, people will build upon your block and mine another invalid block. So in this work, we present a system called zero-knowledge sharks, succinct hybrid arguments of knowledge, which are short proofs that have dual verification mode. You can either verify them prudently, which is linear time verification, just like bullet proofs, but no SRS, or optimistically, which is fast, just as fast as snacks, but relies on an SRS. So in your favorite blockchain scenario, this is as good as snacks, because everyone will just verify everything optimistically, and the miners, during the proof of work, will do the prudent verification. This is incentive compatible. Note that we did rely on SRS, so what happens if optimistic verification succeeds, but prudent does not. It yields to an immediate detection that your SRS has been compromised, so you can go back and retroactively audit your old proofs, and you can recover by first revoking SRS, checking all the old proofs by doing the prudent verification, and after that, regenerating optimistic proof pairs. Note that if you just concatenated an ISIC and a snark, you wouldn't get this property. I go for five minutes. Oops. I'm sorry. So in a sense, we get the proof systems that combine best properties of music and snarks, compromise the SRS, doesn't yield to a break into the system. E-Princes for coming, but there is some local media coverage about sharks already. Thank you.


Welcome to the journey. Today we're going to talk about how to get Pinterest followers for your business. Social media has become vital for any business or organization that wants to promote their brand and engage with their customers. But it's not just about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, believe it or not, depending on your business, gaining Pinterest followers is important as well. And it's more than just recipes and wedding planning. If you're looking to reach a wider customer base, build your authority and brand, increase your website traffic, establish expertise, connect with customers or track new trends, Pinterest is the place for you. Yeah. And if you're exploring how to use Pinterest as part of your marketing efforts, but you're not sure where to start, not to worry. We'll walk you through a few strategies to boost your Pinterest followers, starting with how to get started marketing on Pinterest. Now Pinterest SEO is a long game. The more great content you create, curate and pin, the more rewards you'll reap via sales through Pinterest and organic traffic to your site. And if you haven't already, create a business account. When you create your Pinterest account, make sure it's a business account. You'll also verify your website and install a Pinterest save button so visitors can pin content from your site directly to their own boards. Now it's on to creating compelling original images. And there is a definite lack of original images on Pinterest. I'll tell you that. So to boost your repins, post original imagery like photographs and infographics, however, remember that repinning original images isn't enough. They need to be high quality, attention grabbing images, choosing photos with Pinterest in mind is definitely the way to go. So consider whether each photo to be pinned is engaging and interesting. And take time to ensure there's something eye catching about it, about your image. And even if that necessitates reshoots, it's worth it in the end. Dark or grainy photos will immediately deter your audience. So be sure all your images posted on Pinterest are bright and crisp. And yeah, images are absolutely important, but writing captivating pin descriptions is just as important. A strong image on Pinterest just is not enough. You need that great description to match. And if you're aiming to craft compelling pin descriptions, there are just a few considerations to keep in mind. First add text overlays in your pins to detail any special features in your pin product. And then you need to make your description detailed. You can include up to 500 characters on Pinterest. And the site recommends that you add as much helpful information as you can. However, as the first 50 to 60 characters are the only ones that are likely to show in people's feeds. These are characters that are arguably matter the most. With that in mind, in your intro, focus on what is most relevant to your audience. Totally.  So your visitors know what you want them to do next. Absolutely. Now let's talk about keywords and hashtags. So when writing your descriptions, add your carefully researched keywords, along with a quick reason Pinterest users should want to learn more about your products and services. Optimizing your pins with keywords help your pins show up in search engines, driving Pinterest followers to you naturally, without you having to search for them. Keep it organic. You'll want to include both keywords and relevant search terms. If you need some help with this, use Pinterest search tool for details on the top searches and most relevant keywords. I know that helps me a lot when trying to find which hashtags to use on social media as well. And while you're optimizing your descriptions, don't overlook your images. Optimize the alt text of your images and your profile to further increase the chances of your content being found. And as for hashtags, Pinterest is not a social media platform that responds to hashtags for keywords. So with Pinterest, the proper technique is to simply use the keywords in your pin description. So no hashtags there. One of the easiest ways to gain Pinterest followers is to add social sharing icons to your website. And when you do this, it makes it far easier for visitors to share your content. You can easily add sharing icons to your website by adding Pinterest save button and including it in the images and product lines on your website or blog. And now Pinterest offers two save buttons, an automatic button or a hover button. Use whichever one best suits your needs. But once a Pinterest user has pinned your content, their followers will get to see it, helping to give your pin a wider range and gain more impressions, hopefully getting you more Pinterest followers in the long run. Yeah, hopefully another benefit of adding the save button is that you can use it alongside Pinterest analytics. And this is really cool. It allows you to determine your most popular content so that you can create more of it. And finally, to reach an even wider audience, share your pins on other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now this next way goes with a lot of different platforms, but cross promote pins in your other content. So include recent Pinterest links in your newsletters, email signatures, maybe even an IG story or a tweet. Doing that along with a strong call to action gives you the best chance at as many eyeballs in your content as possible. And be sure to follow your competitors followers. Might sound backwards at first, but although it won't always be the case, often if you follow someone, guess what? They're going to follow you back. And an easy way to approach this is to find competitors profiles. For example, if you write about arts and crafts, search under this term, then choose the people option. And this will bring you to a list of all their competitors. And you can look at your competitors profiles, find out who their Pinterest followers are, and then follow them. And then to further increase your followers, you must share content that will interest them. You can do this by looking at what your content competitors are sharing and what is getting the most interest. The more repins it has, the more likely it is to resonate with your audience. And now there's no denying Pinterest success. And with such a vast audience of active users, there's ample opportunity there for you to engage with your Pinterest followers and promote your content. However, however, to ensure your content is seen by as many visitors as possible, you need to introduce some effective strategies to build your Pinterest followers. This includes using keywords to make your content easier to find, adding share buttons to your website and being consistent. With all the strategies detailed in this video, you've got to know how to get more Pinterest followers and reach a wider audience. All right, that's a wrap. You just learned how to get Pinterest followers for your business. Be sure to comment below and subscribe to our channel. Hey, don't forget to ring that bell to get these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.


Yo, hello from me too. Sorry about that. So, I talk a little bit about automation, infrastructure as a code. Mainly I will show the tools Terraform, Packer and Ansible. First of all, who's me? I'm Stöpps. I'm with Linux for ages. Who's born after 1994? Yeah, it's long. So, I work mainly with application servers, but since a year or so I do more and more DevOps stuff and so on. I love Vim and never got into Emacs. So, I stay with it. I like Tetshell, like Lyra. So, let's start. No, I want to greet and thank some guys. So, I want to greet my family, which is very, I hope they sit at home and watch the live stream. Thanks girls for supporting me. Thanks for the organizing team of the Gulasz program. This is a great event. I'm a first timer here. So, but now let's start. So, my history. I started in the last century as an administrator, mainly with bare metal servers. So, really hard stuff with special weight. We had special shoes to run to all of our servers. We had to update them when we wanted to get new application. We always had to order new servers or new metal and deploy on these machines. Network was slow. So, mostly the servers were in-house. So, we traveled all around the town and watched our servers. Then we started with virtualization. I think we started with VMware shortly after 2000. That was the first time where we could deploy stuff without ordering hardware. Quite nice. But we still worked like before. So, provisioning, deployment, still everything was manual. So, a little bit easier. But I would say more work. Because now, before we had an operating system with our application and dependencies, now we have or we had an operating system, a hypervisor, and in each VM operating system which needed updates. So, this huge amount of servers, when you start with virtualization, is named service sprawl in infrastructure as a code. So, the count of servers made it impossible to deploy all patches all around the network. So, most of the time we only deployed high security risk or if a special application needed a special fix. So, like a new Java version for Jira applications or something like that. Or there was a new zero-day exploit. So, we deployed the fix. When we look on the other side, we were two administrators. We mainly installed the same software, but when two admins installed two times or three times the same product, it always looked different. So, even when you have a good checklist and you hook everything, there will be something different. So, latest on the next update, something will break. This phenomenon is configuration drift. So, how did we try to solve that? So, first I tried to write some scripts, shell scripts, patches, silent installation files, then we started installing application servers with graphical interface. So, we had to document each step, each click has to be packed into a screenshot. I saw documentation for installing stuff from company with three characters, which was, I think, 1,000 slides long with 1,200 screenshots or something like that. Just to install one product, it was horrible. When something broke, we had nights and nights troubleshooting. When we deployed updates on production servers, the behavior was completely different from our tests, from test servers. What was the reason on the test servers? We normally deployed all fixes which were available. So, we installed fix one, two, three, four. And in production, sometimes it happened you install only fix four. It's cumulative, so fix four should contain all fixes from the fixes before, but the behavior was different.  So, these differences which creeped in over time, yeah, how did they, how did that happen? So, sometimes a database server needed a special fix. I think Oracle was a classical product for that. The new ticket system needs a new Java version, the application server, get more traffic, so you need different configurations than the other ones just to handle that traffic. It's no problem. When we look at infrastructures, a code, this special server configurations are special snowflake servers. That's one server with one special configuration. It's not bad, but you need to capture that. You need to work around to get that reproducible. So, you want to install a server and you want to install it quick when it fails. So, you need something to automate and get that server reproduced in a failure. Difference is not bad. You just have to understand what makes that server different and how can I rebuild it. And I think, as I said, I'm an administrator since I'm 20 years or so. An operator or administrator team should be confidently and quickly rebuild every server in his infrastructure. I think everybody who is in IT for several years knows that famous servers. So, there's a server under a desk of an old administrator. Don't touch it. Don't point it. Don't even look at that server, please. I think I worked at five or six companies now in my history and there was always one of these special servers on one of these desks. Age is old. Windows NT three-point something. Old network cabling. You know that stuff. So, everybody heads us. But, latest when the hardware breaks, you need someone to replace that service. But how? Automatic deploy is available since years now. There's Chefs, there's Puppet. I think Chef is available 10 or 15 years now. But most of the administrators, I know, use that team, that tools only to initially deploy a server. Nobody will run that against a server which runs already two or three years. Because maybe there will be something break. So, don't touch it. No. Maybe a colleague was there and did a manual change. So, I will break it when I run the automatic tool. So, nobody wants to do that. Only few of us. Why? So, this fear spiral is why are our servers inconsistent? Because we make changes outside of the automation tools. And I'm afraid to run my automation tool. Maybe I break something. And on the other side, the server is inconsistent. So, I'm always turning around and around and around. So, there is, well, it's around some years now. The infrastructure is a code. When I read the wording the first time, I thought, what the fuck? I'm not a developer. So, why should I write code? It's just server. But think about it. Our virtual environment already is code. Our virtual machines, it's just code. There's a virtual network. There are virtual disks. All definitions are just, it's a little bit of code. And what is code? Code is text. So, Python is text. It's just how I interpret it. You know what I mean. For code, there are tons of tools available to work with it. There are editors. There are version control systems. There are build servers to work with it. And our developers work since ages with text and code. So, I think we can handle that too. So, the principles of infrastructure as code is, systems need to be easily reproducible. Systems are disposable. So, when something breaks, I can just exchange it. Systems need to be consistent. Processes are repeatable. Design is changing. Yeah, sure. And our processes should be as simple as possible to meet current requirements. I think, and when we need a change, it must be able, we must be able to deliver it safely and quickly. So, when I look at companies or my company, when I need a virtual machine, it can need some days until I get it. Or I have customers where I wait weeks for a virtual machine. And I would say, when I do that, weeks, I need six weeks for a firewall rule. You know what I mean. So, I would say, when you think a little bit about automation with server deployments, you can get a virtual machine in two or three minutes. Maybe you can generate a self-service to get a virtual machine for your colleagues. How can we achieve this? We need definition files where we can describe our environment. Nobody likes to create documentation. So, maybe we can get a process to document everything automatically within our process. So, the script generates the documentation too. When we put all our stuff into a version control system like Git, we have a history. So, no need to document that too. We can build test and production environment which are completely equal. So, we can really test an update. And when we monitor the environment, we can just do that during the night or very easy during the day when everybody is working. We just need to provide a testing that everything works like before. There are two kinds of tools. One kind is immutable tools. The other kind is a mutable tool. The immutable ones completely replace a server. So, when a server needs a new IP address, a new version, a new operating system update, it will be completely replaced. So, I have really, when I have a test and a production server, they will be completely equal because we learned some slides before when we update with three or four fixes or with one fix, it will be different. So, there we can test a complete update because but when we use an immutable system, we have to think about what happens with our data. So, maybe a storage system but we can solve that but don't forget there is some data which maybe should be saved before you throw a server. A good example for immutable is containerization like Docker. They just have an image, they fire up a new container when the work is done, they throw it away. The other kind is mutable. Mutable is still automatic deployment but they don't replace. So, there it can happen that we have a configuration drift. Mutable software is something like Ansible, puppet chef is mutable. So, there it can happen that production and test is behaving different. Think about a server life cycle. There is, I think the first thing what we do when we start with infrastructure code is building a template. So, we start building a small kind of server which we can clone. From the template we create the server. A server needs to be maybe updated. Sometimes I can delete it. Sometimes I have to replace the server. That's five kinds of server tasks I normally work with. So, which tools do we use today? First of all, some of the code is really simplified. So, it's not that secure. When you want to do that in production, please have a look at that. I will show some clear text passwords. I wouldn't do that in production. But we have only an hour. So, we need to do that a little bit quicker. It will run on a normal VM work station. I use a vSphere cluster to deploy the stuff. I use Pekka Terraform on Ansible to get everything running. So, not that hard. And, yeah, for example, it needs a license. The other three tools are free. It should work on a Mac 2. I haven't tested it. So, just it's years ago that I used a Mac. So, I don't know. All files are stored in a Git repository. There's the link. The link will be in the end of the talk. So, just grab it there. I think that's pretty much all here. Some dependencies. When you use Terraform to provision a template, we need to have the OpenVMware tools and Perl installed in the template. We need a connection with SSH and Ansible for the later customizations needs a Python. Python 2.7 or 3. So, we have to put it in front in our template or it will not run in the end. In my Pekka template, I use a temporary password, which is named password, but I disabled the login in the end of the process. So, I hope that's secure in the moment. But when you use that in production, please don't forget to remove or change the password. So, what's Pekka? Pekka is from HashiCorp. HashiCorp maybe is known from, they have several tools for automation. Vagrant. I think they started with Vagrant. Now they use Pekka and Terraform. Pekka is licensed under Mozilla license. So, I think it's open source. It's easy to install. It's just a download of a binary and put it in your path. And there are hundreds of templates on GitHub and GitLab to deploy Windows, servers, clients, or Linux machines. So, you can find nearly everything. I will do a CentOS deployment here. So, that's all builders Pekka can use. So, you can do nearly every cloud template, Docker templates, Kubernetes, VirtualBox, VMware, QVM, LXD, Hyper-V, who wants just a file. So, that's pretty much all. You can provision each template with standard shell, local shells, Windows shell, PowerShell, Puppet, Chef, that's pretty much all, and Ansible. And as a post-processor, you can just upload it on a Docker registry to a cloud provider, on a vSphere machine, on a vSphere cluster. VMware ESX, I think so, is there, or Vagrant. So, a ton of tools, how to do that. First of all, I created a kickstart file. So, that's standard. We can use kickstart files to deploy Rated or CentOS, I think, since 3.0 or so. I started with 3.0. I would say, yeah, since 3.0. The only thing I changed here from the standard kickstart is I changed the keyboard to German and the time zone. Everything else is just there's a swap partition. And one thing here is an encrypted password. That's password encrypted as short 256. So, you can put here your password, and even when you put that on to Git, it should be safe. So, we will start our deployment with that kickstart script. How is the deployment of, or how do we build the packer template now? The builder is, we use VMware ISO. And the most important one here is we want a boot with our kickstart script. So, the packer script will type in the kickstart script during the boot process. We communicate with SSH. The guestOS is sent to a 764 bit. We use minimal ISO file. We have the hash for the ISO file as a download tool. And we have a root user and a password to shut down the machine in the end of the deployment. That's this. Then we want to provision it. After the process of deploying, I start some shell commands. Within that shell commands, I install the open VM tools. I tweak a little bit of the SSH service. I reboot the machine. I do an update, a kernel update to 5.1. Because normally the sent to a machine is coming with a 3.1 kernel. So, that's just everything in the template. And I install open VM tools, Perl and Python. So, when the template is finished, I can work further with Terraform and Ansible. Here is an example of one of the scripts. The bottom of the slide. So, it's just a YAM install open VM tools, install Perl and then restart the VM tools service. That's pretty much all. It's important that the PECA template restarts one time because the vSphere cluster won't recognize the open VM tools without that reboot. Now, that's a little bit, that's something to think about. Then the post processor. In the end, I just upload the result of my template process to the vSphere cluster. So, I need a server name, a cluster name, the disk where it's stored and then it starts the update. The username is fake and there is no password. Yeah. Okay. And in the end, I showed we use builders, provisioners and post processors. It's one file. It's a JSON file. Just copy the three slides together or use the GitHub file. And then we can run the PECA command. First of all, validate it. And there's an error. The build command is not validated. It's built. And all variables we use within our JSON file can be set on the console. So, I set my vSphere password on the console. I use a time stamp for my template name that I know when I build that template. And that's pretty much all. And I hope. Yeah. That's all. I used, where is it? Here? No. There. We used just one disk. So, I haven't changed anything in the default settings that the VMware will build on, I think, 40 gigabytes single hard disk. But we can change that with Terraform later during that process. So, that's, I think that's a minimum to start with Terraform and Ansible with that template. So, what happens here? I hope you can see that. Too small. So, it's PECA build. I already said, normally, the PECA is executable. You download from the Haschicorp page on Fedora. You have to rename it to PECA something because there already is a tool named PECA. So, I name it normally PECA.io. So, you see, I start the build process on the right side. You see my VMware workstation starting up. You can start that headless that you don't see that process, but I want to show that here. And that was too quick. So, let's start again. So, there's the download. Normally, when the ISO file is already in the cache directory, it will not download. And here you see that the process will type in our kickstart file. So, it gets the IP address of the machine. It says you get your kickstart file with HTTP of the host and then fire up the deployment of the server. And let's speed it up a little bit. So, that's a kickstart installation. And now on the left side, you see the deployment with the shell scripts. Now, all updates are deployed. In the end of the deployment, I run a cleanup to remove all temporary files, to remove the repository cache, to remove the SSHD host keys. Because when you don't remove the host keys, all of your virtual machine will have the same SSHD host keys. So, now that's secure. And in the end, so, that's the final process. It uploads now to the vSphere server. That's a process. I would say that's 15 minutes. And you have already installed Linux something. And you can do the same with Windows. So, you can create all templates you like. Everything is on GitHub. So, that's a Packer build. Now, we have a new template on our VMware machine or our VMware server. Now, let's go to Terraform. Terraform is also from HashiCorp. It's also Mozilla public licensed. And like Packer, just download, unzip and put it into the path. So, Terraform knows around 160 providers. I hope I can show them. No, that's Packer. So, it's a long list. I don't copy it. You can do nearly everything. You can use OpenStack as a target. You can use a Kubernetes GitHub. There are plugins for monitoring systems like Icinga, Grafana, Prometheus. So, you can do really everything during the deployment. So, even register a new DNS name, configure the virtual network, upload to a cloud provider and so on. So, it's not limited to VMware. You can do everything. So, here's an example we use. And it's on the Git repository too. Terraform has its own configuration language. It's HCL. It looks nearly like, I would say, YAML. It's a little bit different. It's a mix of YAML and JSON. But it's not that hard. I have a built Terraform file where I normally store the information of the systems I want to deploy to. So, my cloud provider or my VMware environment, the GPN 19 server 1 and 2 are two server definitions. We will generate two servers. The .terraform file is just a plan. Ignore it. The .terraform are the plugins. When you just have the TF files and do a Terraform init, Terraform downloads all plugins which it needs to deploy the stuff. The TF state files will appear when the first deployments are ready. So, when I deploy something with Terraform, the state is stored within a Terraform TF state file. And in the end, I have a variable file where I provide some information about the environment, like DNS domain, passwords, and something like that. And a version Terraform file, there is the version where you define that stuff. So, it's looking like that. So, that's our variable definition. We have our vSphere server name. We have our vSphere user and password and data center and so on. And I think we have a look at it live. Is that big enough? So, readable from... Let's start with the build one. So, provider vSphere project folder, which data center? So, that's all VMware stuff, network, in which folder will it be deployed? So, that's the first things. Then the variables, DNS server, Stringless. So, that's my DNS server. What's my admin password to get to it with SSH? Which template name and my SSH public key that I can work with Ansible and that machines. That's this. And half an hour. VMGPN server one. So, that's server definition itself. So, the server name in line one, which pool that's a variable. Four cores, four gigabytes of RAM. We have a 100-gigabyte disk. That's the IP address. A gateway. Our provisioner. With that provisioner, I just deploy my SSH public key into the root user that I can work with Ansible and that account. And in the end, because we created a template with Packer where the password was password, I lock the root account with lock. So, nobody can lock in with the password, but we can still lock in with an SSH key. That's all. So, that's this. So, we saw that. We saw this. That's the main commands. When we are ready with our environment and our Terraform files, we do a Terraform plan. We can set some variables there, like our vSphere password, like the template name. So, we can use it in a build pipeline and needn't change anything in the file itself. It generates a plan file. In that case, the name is rebuild Terraform. And when we run Terraform apply, the servers will be generated. Destroy means everything in the definition files will be destroyed. So, hardly deleted from VMware. And with taint, we can just decide which servers will be deleted. So, we can say, okay, we define 10 servers. One of them is a little bit creepy. We can taint that one server. So, it's marked for deletion. The next time when we run a Terraform plan, it's marked for deletion apply and it will be deleted and automatically new deployed. And we have a fresh installed single server, even when 10 servers were defined. Some videos. I don't want to show any host names and passwords. So, that's the reason for the videos. That was Terraform plan. You see here the server name, the folder name, where it's deployed. The plus means it will be generated or created. It created an output file. And it shows the command to really install or really create the servers. Now, creating. I speed it up a little bit. I would say that process generating two or let's say 10 Linux machines on a normal VMware cluster will need about two to three minutes. And it's always the same. Two servers need two and a half minutes and 10 servers need nearly the same. So, it's just a parallel task. You see here, two minutes, 34 seconds. And the folder and two machines were created. Ready. So, now the taint is too fast. No. Server 2 was marked as tainted. When I do the plan again, it will show me speed a little bit up. One add, one to destroy. So, it will destroy my server 2. And in the same task, it will generate a new one. So, always check the output of this plan. Question? Why is the second server destroyed? I marked it for deletion with taint. I just said, okay, there happened something. So, maybe an update failed. So, I can't just say, okay, I taint one server even when I had 10 definition files.  So, like, the two servers, I just can say, okay, that one server, please create it again. So, taint it for deletion or taint it for recreation, run the apply again, and then it kick away the old server and create a new one, maybe with a new template, and that's all. That's the main reason. Just to show it here. I have an application server deployment with LDAP, two database servers, two web servers, load balancer, and I would say three or four web sphere servers in the background. So, there are 10 definition files, and sometimes I just to kick away the LDAP or something like that. And so, I can say, okay, taint the one server, recreate it, and I can start from the beginning, but the rest of the environment just stays. And the complete destroy, that's the fastest one. I would say, destroy is a thing of 10 or 15 seconds. Type in yes. So, it shows us three things will be destroyed, two servers and the folder. So, return now. And now that's fast. Okay, 20 seconds. So, for a deletion of two servers, and that's the same for 10 servers or so, too. One thing is still there, the folder, because I have no clue how I have to create the definition files that the servers are deleted first and then the folder. It always tries first the folder. It's missing because there are machines within the folder, so I run it twice, and then everything is away. So, we created and destroyed two servers on a cluster, I would say, in eight minutes or so. So, now I have, think about, I deployed it again. So, we have two servers on the VMware environment now. Now, let's start with Ansible. Who uses Ansible already? It's a lot.  With Ansible, I have several advantages. I can run it separately against the environment, but I can include it to my Terraform files, too. So, there is a provision for Ansible there. So, when Terraform is ready, it can start Ansible. I split that process in my demo environment just for testing reasons, because when something fails, it always deletes all servers, and so I can just go back to something else. So, why Ansible? I like Ansible, because it's clientless. I don't have to install any server. It's just pure SSH, and I can do everything what I want, but there is no Windows version. So, I hope that's no problem. One thing we always need to remember when we do infrastructure's code or automatic server deployments is idempotency. That means when you run a script or process multiple times against the same server, the behavior is not allowed to change. So, like, when I do an echo of IP address in the host files, and I run that script twice or three times, I will have three entries. So, that's not idempotent. Oh, yeah, that's right. Thanks. Yeah, perfectly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the comment was that command is really idempotent, because we have only one greater sign, and so the file will be overwritten each time when we start it. So, there must be two of them. That's right. That's a typo. Just a small example what you have to recognize here. That's a small example for our two servers. So, we will see the inventory where we define some server groups. We will see some group variables in the group variable folder. I defined two roles, a common role, which will be deployed to all of the servers, just an LDAP role where we deploy an open LDAP to one of them. We see some template files with Jinger 2 templates and the side YAML file with the whole definition of the Ansible task. Inventory file, I defined a server group GPN19 and LDAP. So, only on server two, we will deploy open LDAP. The common tasks will run against both servers. That's the side YAML. So, we see here the all group. So, hosts all always meant all groups, even when they are not defined, and the hosts group LDAP will set the role LDAP for deployment, install open LDAP here. The variables, I learned that some weeks before. In group variables, the all folder contains variables which are used in all roles and all server groups. When you define a group name folder under group variables, it's only valid for the group name. So, I can have a GPN19 group name here and then we have variables which only are valid for that group. In my example, I put the passwords for LDAP into the variable file. I would say best practice is to use an Ansible world. Don't use that in production, please. But we see here, we define the LDAP domain and the password. And we use some templates. Templates are copied from our local machine to the deployment, and all used variables like the LDAP password variable or the LDAP domain variable here are replaced with the real value of our variable file. So, copy it to the server, replace the string and run some commands. That's a role just as an example, but that we will look in the real files Ansible. So, in common, first five lines, we disable the firewall service. So, the state is stopped. It's not enabled. So, even after restart, it's off. I disabled S-Linux for testing purposes. For production, I would enable it. I heard that. Sometimes. So, we change some limits. So, number of open files, number of processes. We install some additional tools like Ansible and WIM. I update the SSH configuration like X11 forwarding and in the end, we restart the SSH service. And for the roles LDAP and for the LDAP task, we install open LDAP server and client. We enable the SLAPD service. We copy the chinga templates. The text parse means that our variables are replaced. We copy the sample configuration. The sample configuration is already on our deployment because it's installed with the open LDAP server package. So, we need the remote source yes command here. So, the process will copy machine to machine folder and the config script where I start the LDAP service or configure it and in the end, I remove the config script we used here because there is the password in it. I just delete it here with that task. So, I think that's pretty much all here. So, that's the example here. We saw that. And when you have installed cow say with your Linux machine, Ansible always use the cow. You can disable that with a variable in your BESH RC or ZShell RC. You see it runs through now. We see which server is changed. The limits changes here. VI is installed. Here it was a little bit fast. And now the open LDAP is installed. The open LDAP task in that case generates a new server with 20 users, 20 passwords. And in the end, I think I restart and that's all. So, that's a deployment of open LDAP with two servers and only speed up a little bit. So, that's normally three minutes. So, benefits. Why do I do that? Because I already said it. All servers are always looking the same. When I need an update, I just generate a new template, run my scripts again and I have the same environment with all actual patches. So, when I want to test something, I build a test environment, test all updates. Maybe I get the data from our production. I can test everything. I can script it. And in the end, I know when I run that against production and I rebuild the production environment, it will run again in the same way like the test environment. Normally, nothing should break here. Administrators don't like to create documentation. So, the process should document nearly everything itself. It saves a lot of time. Yeah, that's pretty much... Yeah, I know. Best practice. I would codify everything. I know when I look back to my history, how I installed servers. Like, I think my first test environments on VMware, I installed one server, a second one. I configured them nearly the same. Sometimes I just cloned the machines and you have to adjust settings like IP address, host names. You forget something. Most of the time, you have the same MAC addresses when you start with that process. Then I started to generate snapshots that I can go back when something happens because the process to install was just too slow. I don't do that. A snapshot needs a lot of disk on my machine. So, I normally work on that notebook. A snapshot, when I install application servers, needs gigabytes of disk storage. It's slow. I just deploy it again. I think I did a sample test environment some weeks ago. Eight or ten machines, two Windows 1, six Linux, have an hour of work and the stuff is just working. In the end, when you are ready, you just throw it away because when you need it again and have an hour of work or one night running and the machines are restored, you have the same again. Nothing what I have to copy on backup disks or something like that. It's in the version control system. I can reproduce it. I have a history. It's documented. It's modular. So, when I need some of the stuff on another machine, I can just reuse it. That's pretty much all. You need to think about some things. I know I often get questions like, why not using the cloud? The cloud are just servers of other persons? So, someone have to install the clouds and there's nothing against installing his own cloud. So, when I look the last two years, what we are doing with Kubernetes or server testing or rollouts, test server deployments, I think I say 50% of my testing time. And on top of that, what I show today, when you register DNS names, monitoring and some testing tasks, it can run automatically out of pipelines. So, even it just tests itself. Just write it once or test it twice and then you can automatically run the stuff. And a little bit too fast. So, we have time for questions. Awesome. Thank you very much, Jobs. Other questions? Yes. When you clone the machines, you remove the SSH keys. Do you also remove machine ID and system ID? During the cleanup? Yes. There are several things. The SSH host key, the caches, some temporary files. I think I reset the repository fastest counter. So, you get the real fastest repositories when you deploy the stuff. There are several things. The script is in the Git repository. Just have a look at it. Further questions? I have no mana, so that's a reason, no questions. Yeah, think about that. I normally give beer away, but today, today, and next time. Yes, just a second. Run. No. Run for us. Too many accidents happen when we're running, so no running. I see there's some feature overlap between Terraform and Ansible. Can you give some best practices, which tasks you give to which tool, especially setting up a server software and configuring it with Ansible primarily or better with Terraform? It's a personal thing. So, I know several people build different templates for different servers. So, that's the first thing where it can start. So, you can have a different template for, let's say, database servers or web servers. I decided to just start with one template with Packer. Then I went to Terraform. In Terraform, I normally deploy my SSH keys because it's not only me who works with the server. More people will work with that server, and sometimes a web server needs another SSH key like a database server. So, it's a good place to store the SSH stuff there. You can already deploy things in Terraform. It speaks nothing against it. So, in the moment, I try to move a lot of stuff what I formally did with Ansible to Terraform because Terraform, for me, is the youngest tool because I started at latest with it. Ansible is, I would say, software which is used by a lot of people. So, there is a lot of stuff around the Internet. You will get a ton of documentation. But from the view of infrastructure as a code, I would try to get a lot of stuff into the Terraform. Just, yeah. But it speaks nothing against it that you remove the shell script provisioner from the Terraform and just point the Terraform to your Ansible. So, the Terraform task just stalls Ansible. So, when it's tested, it's perfect. Good question. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Just a second. But no mana left. Hanuta next time. I don't know. I'm quite confident the answer is yes. But is there stuff like if and else stuff in Terraform? Sorry. Is there stuff like if and else? There is a ton of stuff like if and else you can have loops so you can create a single definition file for 10 servers but just a counter steps up. So, there's a lot of stuff. So, yeah. And there is if else. As far as I know. Any further questions? You will be around for another half hour or something. A little bit around. I think the whole evening. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. If there are no further questions, I would say thank you very much steps and another round of applause for steps please. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Some Amazon warehouse workers in New York and Instacart workers nationwide have announced on Monday that they are going on Strike because since they're considered essential during this global pandemic Well, their health and well-being should also be considered essential But they are saying that their employers aren't taking their concerns about coronavirus seriously Hence they're striking until their demands are met So for more on this story we go to Alina Salika and Shannon Bond of NPR who report Some Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York and Instacart's grocery delivery workers nationwide Walked off their jobs on Monday They're demanding a stepped up protection and pay as they continue to work while much of the country is asked to Isolate as a safeguard against the coronavirus the protests come as Amazon and Instacart have said they plan to hire Tens of thousands of new workers online shopping and grocery home delivery are skyrocketing as much of the nation hunkers down And people stay at home following recommendations from federal and local governments This has put a spotlight on workers who shop pack and deliver these high-demand supplies Companies referred to the workers as heroes, but workers say their employers aren't doing enough to keep them safe The workers are asking for a variety of changes workers from both Amazon and Instacart want more access to paid sick time off At this time it's available only to those who have tested positive for the coronavirus or get placed on mandatory self-quarantine Amazon workers want their warehouse to be closed for a longer cleaning with guaranteed pay Instacart's grocery delivery gig workers are asking for disinfected wipes and hand sanitizer and better pay to offset the risk They are taking workers at Amazon Staten Island facility have said that multiple people at the warehouse have been diagnosed with COVID-19 Some of them plan to walk off the job on Monday to pressure the company to close the warehouse for an extended deep cleaning at Amazon which employs some 800,000 people workers have diagnosed positively for COVID-19 and at least 11 warehouses forcing a prolonged closure of at least one warehouse in Kentucky now what they're asking for I think is perfectly Reasonable so these demands shouldn't be very difficult for these companies to meet and I would encourage all of you to not cross the picket line do not shop at these companies as they as they have these negotiations and You know, we have to show solidarity with the workers. These are things that should not have to be asked for They should just be automatically provided to workers. But the fact that we have Amazon a company where They're literally asking employees to donate their sick time to people with COVID-19 rather than just offering extended paid sick leave to everyone It's just we shouldn't have this happening Now, of course, we need to have federal protections codified into law But the mere fact that workers have to ask for these things Hand sanitizer extra paid sick leave during a global pandemic. It shows you The priorities of corporate America. They don't care about their workers to them Their workers are easily replaceable, right? It doesn't really matter if they get sick or they die even They see them as just cogs in a machine that they can easily replace with someone else Who's desperate lots of people are losing their jobs So likely, you know, they're going to turn to these types of jobs in the gig economy, right uber eats Instacart so right now They probably don't really feel like they have to pay attention to their workers Because they're not going to do it just out of the goodness of their heart But if we all choose to not shop at these, uh outlets Use these services until they meet the demands Maybe they'll actually take their employees seriously now I do want to share a video of the protests And um, just let you see what they have to say at least one amazon worker has to say I think that this is perfectly reasonable So I don't feel safe I mean Who hears her and thinks how unreasonable is she being? Why should these workers put their lives on the line For an employer who doesn't respect them? Why should they do that? The answer is they shouldn't do that. They shouldn't do that And you know, finally as someone who formerly worked in fast food and retail, it's nice to see people Finally pay lip service To us and say, you know, uh, hey, we really appreciate you, you know, brave in the storm so to speak and working during this crisis um Well, if you believe in that then definitely support Workers rights support increases in the minimum wage the same people who basically denounce a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage Are the same people like tommy laren for example Who are talking about how heroic the grocery store cashed years are? All right. Well, if you believe that then actually acknowledge their full humanity acknowledge that they deserve paid sick leave a livable wage Vacation time that's paid where you don't just take it off and have to save money Not just for the vacation but extra money to cover the bills most instances you just don't get a vacation, but I mean It's time that we acknowledge how valuable All of these workers are not just during a global pandemic, but just all the time All the time if you are a fast food worker You deserve a livable wage if you work for an amazon warehouse. You shouldn't be forced To uh piss and bottles to make sure that you meet your strict delivery guidelines I shouldn't even have to say that right So I really hope that these demands are met But if they are not we all should not cross the picket line Do not support these companies if they are not going to support their employees because if they know that this Protest isn't going to affect their bottom line If they know that customers are still going to shop there and not pay attention They're going to replace all these workers and just hire other people because there's lots of people looking for work currently because they're losing their jobs Because of this pandemic and in these industries and amazon and instacart and uber eats They're going to be booming currently these delivery services So they can't you know Capitalize on this crisis By just you know, uh treating their workers like garbage. They have to acknowledge That we see as consumers what they do and how they treat their workers and we will respond Accordingly if they don't choose to value their employers So I hope that this is effective and I hope that they get all that they want And more because they deserve it everyone deserves this


This study found that among community-living Chinese-speaking individuals aged greater than or equal to 65 y with at least one high-risk condition for severe IPD, those who perceived pneumonia to be more severe and believed that treatment can control pneumonia were more likely to have higher PV uptake. Additionally, having negative emotions related to pneumonia was positively associated with behavioral intention to take up PV. This article was authored by Xixing Wang, Yuang Fang, Willa Dong, and others.