63: Where Are They Now? A Conversation with Ross Young, Executive VP of Linewize

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1:48 Hello everyone, and welcome to another, fantastic episode of Ed Abed Tech. My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host. And today we have a very special guest with us again. We are recording a. Where are they now? Episode with Ross, young, who is the executive VP of line, wise, and North America? He was previously on episode 47, way back in March of 2022. Ross, welcome back to the show. It's all it's great to be here. We had so much fun last time that we want to have the party again. Yes, absolutely. This is always a good time. We had really good conversation last episode. So I'm looking forward to hearing updates about line wise, and what you've been up to.

2:35 But first, tell us, what are you doing? Personally professionally, any new hobbies. What's been going on? Wow, yeah, a lot like you said, we were talking a little bit earlier and March feels so long ago, even though it has Not been, but a lot has been going on. Personally I have two teenagers so that has oh my really kept me on my toes you know, with sports. And what I do for a living is quite relevant to them. I always say Dad, why do you have to work in content filtering and block me from getting to where I want to go? So that's been a lot of fun and then professionally, we've completed two Acquisitions just since March. So we merged with two other companies and really aligning that with our mission, so things have been quite busy. Yes, I have a teenager little sister. Can I can tell you the story another time? But she's 26 years younger than me and boy, teenagers are something else.

3:27 They are just a different kind of creature. They are. They're figuring out what creature they're going to be. Exactly. Exactly. So before we jump into, what you been up to, at line wise, for the people who haven't got to listen and go back to episode 47, which I definitely encourage the audience to do. You give us just a brief overview of what line wisest and tell the audience that they've never heard of it before. Yeah. Great. So our mission is to protect every child's digital Journey from school and home and everywhere in between so that's the elevator position on. What do we do? Well, how do we do that? We have six main products. The core products are web content filtering, so we stop users from being able to get to inappropriate content online. We partner with schools to do We have a learning classroom management tool that really helps with learning helps teachers control and see the screens of all the students in their classes.

4:26 Keep them focused and then we have a full-blown student safety solution. That includes a plethora of different products. Yeah, no, high-level. I'll leave it there. We can get into the weeds. Yeah, we're definitely going to. We're going to start hopping into that now. It's know. It's hard. Sometimes it's like it's like a trailer in a movie like you want to know what's happening next and you want it, you're gonna go see the movie when it comes out, but we have to take steps and we have to keep the audience. Since wanting more, right? So, tell us about what's been going on at line wise, you mentioned the two acquisition. So what were those Acquisitions? How are they impacting the work? You're doing. So step us through that. Yeah, so we merge with a company called custodial, which is one of the global leading parental control applications on the market. And that was so that school districts could start to provide visibility and some control of the devices that they're In families, homes, for example, School, District issues, a Chromebook to a student, sends them home with that. And there are honored at 2:00 in the morning, while their parents are asleep and maybe it's the only device that particular house.

5:30 There's demand from parents to say. If you're going to put this in my home, we need some control over it. So we partner with custodial to do that since they really understand, you know, how parents interact with content filtering and whatnot. It's been a great merger and they're out of Barcelona Spain. But right around. 80% of their customer base was here in the North America. So that was a great merger, that sounds like a great acquisition for you and coming into line Y. So how is that impacting when we get into the second acquisition house, it really impacting what you do and kind of how you shift. I'm always curious when an ed tech company acquire something. What do you have to do you behind the scenes and then show it front of the curtain?

6:11 What's happening there? Like there's a lot of different moving Parts Ryan, but there really is. So the inside Fall of a of an acquisition is most of the baseball-reference. I love it, I love it. There it is. It's the people saw it right. People Whenever there is an acquisition, people are concerned. What is my future look like here? How am I going to align? Is there a redundancy in my position? What does that look like? So I believe the most successful Acquisitions don't change anything right out of the gate. Typically, there's small tweaks to things and you work together to build the New Vision. So it's really what we've done. Overtime is, what are you doing, really well? What are we doing? You know really well, how can we learn from each other and keep the business going in parallel?

6:56 But ultimately their goal is to really Empower as many parents to be the best digital parents that they can be. And then ours is really to protect every child's digital Journey. So those two really working together in partnership with the parents. They so it's been very smooth. Said least, I'm glad to hear that. I love hearing. Especially when you can work together and build that Synergy between the two companies and it feels like you did the right thing, you know, right? Yeah. All right tell us about acquisition number two. Yeah. So we merge with the great company called educator impact and educator impact really is a well-being and analytics and surveying tool that looks at the whole health of the child. So it's a check-in tool that checks in once a week. For example, at the child to say, how are you You feeling today and then based on the answer that question will ask a series of other questions that covers their nutrition and covers how they're learning and covers how they're doing with their peers.

7:58 And essentially it's a proactive student safety tool. So, one of the products we have is called line wise Monitor, and it's very reactive in the sense that have a student types. In, for example, I'm want to bring a gun to school. Okay, it'll pick that up and immediately contact schools and authorities and try to prevent, you know, tragedy, that's very reactive. It's looking. Problems of already happened. So that the tech that we're going after is more on the well-being side and trying to get to those things or get to those children. So their they don't get something picked up on monitor so that there's early intervention there. So it's really about partnering with the school district. Once we do, what's called a student safety on it. To look at, hey, what are some of the core issues that we have in our school from a mental health perspective, and a student safety and vigil, well-being, and how can we change some of those particular numbers?

8:47 Numbers. The pulse product gives you a pulse basically on the student body by grade level and what some of the potential issues can be in that grade level to give you the visibility to make decisions on what programs you need to roll out to ultimately have the best digital citizens, and get to them before. Potentially something tragic happens or they reach out for help. Oh my goodness, I can't tell you. It's so I don't even know how to say this in a way that's I can. He was happening here with the school, shootings and everything. It's really hard pill to swallow. I used to be a high school teacher and I cannot imagine being there, you know, obviously protecting my students and what kind of situation like things in Texas and I was a junior in high school when Columbine happened.

9:39 I always go back to that. I feel like that was the I don't it was the start of something that should have been dealt with a very long time ago. I'm not going to go into my whole belief systems about Gun control and all that. But I just think Technologies like this are so important so that we can protect our children. We can protect our teachers and the staff that work in the school. They should not be afraid to go to school. They're going to school to get an education. It's like their job and they shouldn't be afraid to go to their job and something bad happens to them. Yeah, it's I mean, it's a tragedy. There's already been some this year and obviously you've all the last year and Oxford and unfortunately almost everyone that happens.

10:19 We turn around and we do an investigation. We say hey there is a clue there if we have that information. Yeah and it's usually like maybe we could have prevented it. So people are secular or feta or that colleges and universities. No longer have to choose between rare credible, resources and innovative. Knology academic Librarians across the globe partner with Gail to connect students and faculty to digital sources with built-in features. That drive effective research and learning from interdisciplinary databases to interactive instruction tools. You can make knowledge more accessible across campus with Gail learn how at Gail.com GA Ellie.com.

11:04 So there's Technologies out there that can put the right people in the right position as quickly as possible for these types of things and that's reactive, right? That's a monitor does. But the proactive side is checking in with children and allowing them to reach out for help and really educating about how to look for those types of signs and and that they are worthy and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. It's really something great. And I could actually see my sister School putting into practice and play the Counseling Group. I'll share something personal because when you talk about This technology makes me think of my experiences Will trauma and being a younger person. So I lost my dad, took his own life when I was 27. But my sister most recently, her dad passed away last summer and he was very young for passing away, but he didn't reach 50, you know, and now she's 13 and I'm thinking about her and then all the other families that are impacted by these events and how much support somebody who still growing and going through all the stages of puberty.

12:04 Life and transitioning and high school and all that stuff. How much support they really need? It's not just the parents, the schools got uh support them. The community has to support them Technologies like yours. This is like a have to have absolutely yeah it's sad rights. I mean suicides the number two cause of death for people under 24 and early intervention is the best intervention. You know they say that you may lie to to a friend or a spouse or whatever but you don't lie to A Google, you put a lot of times in which you're actually seek and feeling in certain cases, a lot of our lives are now operated, you know, and isolation on a digital screen and there's Clues there for some of that. So if we can get to a child quickly and there is a process for some of that we were intervening in suicides every day.

12:54 It's really unfortunate that the numbers are way up since the and Emma and Technologies like this are absolutely needed. Yeah, I agree with you. So I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Sure, being the pro that you are, you can do this. So if you had to give an educator or say a school, like three pieces of advice on what they can do to mitigate some of these issues, what are the things they can put in the play? Besides obviously, getting access to your Technologies? How do they deal with these situations if you could give some advice based off your experience? Yeah, it's great. Thanks. No problem. Being on the spot with that. Yeah, I knew you could do it. I had complete faith. Yeah, so not, so number.

13:34 One is, we have to have some processes in place to deal with these types of issues. So what is your protocol? Probably have one for school violence and threat like the Sandy Hook or the? I love you guys Foundation or there's a few, you know, respected Frameworks out there that needs to be in place, but you need some for mental health as well. Most districts don't have a what? I call a mature student safety program. So step number one with that, is saying, what would we do when a child is potentially at risk? For depression or suicide ideation that we are aware of. What is our plan there for that? For cyberbullying, and for digital education, how are we going to educate these kids.

14:14 So have a plan in place for that. I'd say is number one. Number two, find out what are the actual issues going on, in your particular District that you can potentially have an impact on, it's important to an audit of that. There's multiple companies that do students safety audits us being one of them just a little plug there. Where we partner with the district, ultimately to look at the data and then basically, say, here's what we're seeing across our district. The last portion is to have measurement of that, you need to absolutely be having some goals in mind and measuring to say, how are we at the beginning or the end of the school year of middle school, year last year? And how are we now?

14:55 And what type of programs can we put in place to try to change some of this, right? Do we need to do education around, cyber bullying? Do we need Until more counselors available. Do we need to adjust our policies. We need to do a review of our student safety program like going back, like it's not set in stone right? Like three different things shifted, especially in culture and laws and different things that happen within different states. So definitely need to go back and revisit that from time to time, right? And there's funding available. Now, the safer communities act by that saw the Divine Administration put out. There's over a billion dollars for these types of programs, specifically aimed at school safety and my Total Health, that's that's awesome.

15:36 And I didn't know that and I'm glad to share that because I'm putting that in the show notes for everybody to know. So yeah, some really great advice, surrounding what schools can do and how they can help Learners the Learners of the center of a road really when your Educators or you're teaching in higher ed, and we just want everybody to be happy and have the best chance of the best life possible, Right? Absolutely. Yeah. All right, so we're getting down to the last two questions here, and I ask these two questions every episode. So I want to know, did we miss anything in the updates? Do you have anything else you want to share? And now that you've had some Acquisitions, you're growing your dabbling in different sorts of products.

16:17 And, you know, you've been out there doing things, I want to know how your vision of what Ed Tech in the future is going to look like, is it has that changed or you still kind of have the same vision? So, Anything, we miss things you want to add. So yeah, we covered a lot of ground, I think it's really important. Again, going back to your questions of through advice. I think it's incredibly important to have some sort of a mature student safety framework that you follow a lot of schools and districts to try to say what technologies do we have, that can tell me what a kid typed into Google, that's just not good enough anymore. It's important to have some sort of a framework. There, we've coined and design one that we've been applying across District.

17:00 So, I'd say that's probably what has fueled a lot of the Acquisitions and whatnot that we've completed so that we can we're student safety Consultants that offer products as well. And we're seeing a lot of districts and we roll student safety audit out there. They say, we are not prepared for this type of data that we've seen. What do we do? Please tell us. So we're just seeing a lot of districts that aren't prepared for it and I would say that given everything going on and In this world, it's important to really focus on that since when are we didn't fully cover? But I think that that's important for for your listeners to hear that. I'm glad you mentioned that. I'm glad you brought that up. So that's why I love that question. Can I gives you the opportunity to speak?

17:42 What else is happening? Because it's so much. Yeah. And the future of attack, I think the future I would attack a really is around analytics, the sense that there's been billions of dollars thrown around and in the Ed tech industry, lots of fun. Ending that's been there. Lots of applications that were purchased for emergency purposes during covid and things of that nature. And now districts are saying, well, where's my Roi who's using these applications? How is this impacting testing scores? How many different versions of this category of Ed Tech to have out there? So they're looking to consolidate and say, what's our total edtech spend and what are we getting out of it? So I think there's a big push in the analytic side of the house. There's been some recent Missions. Even by Google and brought my bright lights and some of the others have been acquired catch almost acquired. Learn platform has been growing a lot, so I think you're seeing a lot of push towards analytics.

18:39 We provide some of that as well but I think that's kind of where it's going. People are saying, does this really work and how can I measure Absolutely. We love seeing data and proving things that we know could happen do happen with the hard data. So Ross I'm so happy I got to have you back on the show and thank you for reaching out again and coming on and talking to us about all the wonderful things that you're doing at lying Wise. It's really been a pleasure. Thank you, Holly. It's always a pleasure to connect with you and look forward to, at some point. Maybe even doing it again. Yeah. Third time's a charm. I can't wait to see what you do next. I mean literally March, April May June July, and it's October. It's like five months and you've done amazing stuff. So great job.

19:23 Thank you very much. Thank you. You've just experienced another fantastic. This episode of Ed up. Ed Tech. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to check us out on our website at Ed up. Edtech.com keep yourself in the know about all the latest and greatest edtech happenings. See you next time.