pauljtw@gmail.com

Virginia Beach school leaders have drafted a policy that would eliminate Chromebook use for pre-K and first grade students and restrict it for second graders beginning next school year. The proposal follows parent surveys and school board discussions about screen time in early childhood classrooms. One parent’s comment to News 3 captured the concern plainly: […]

A new report from Sapio Research and Foxit found that once validation time is factored in, executives using AI in document workflows gain just 16 minutes per week. End users lose 14. Time saved generating content is being absorbed by the time required to trust it. The researchers call this the verification burden. Foxit For

Instructure has paid an undisclosed ransom to the ShinyHunters group, which breached Canvas twice in the span of ten days. Inside Higher Ed. According to Instructure, the hackers returned compromised data tied to roughly 275 million users across more than 8,800 institutions and provided digital confirmation that the data had been destroyed along with assurances

On May 7, 2026, the ShinyHunters ransomware group breached Instructure’s Canvas learning management system and exfiltrated an estimated 3.6 terabytes of data affecting roughly 275 million records tied to students, teachers, and staff worldwide. Virginia is not on the periphery of this story. It is at the center of it. Virtual Virginia, the Commonwealth’s primary

275 million student records. One vendor. One breach. This is why Division-Managed AI environments are not optional – they are the only architecture that keeps your data from ending up on a leak site According to Malwarebytes the security firm, Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management system (LMS), confirmed a cyber incident and

The education sector now outpaces both healthcare and government as a target for data security threats. In one recent year, ransomware attacks on K-12 districts more than doubled — with data stolen from nearly 1,900 schools. NEA The new Division-Managed AIS laws require Virginia school divisions to sign vendor agreements prohibiting student data from being

Before any school division deploys local AI in a meaningful way, the data question has to be answered. Not all of it at once. Just the part that matters most first. Roughly 20% of a typical division’s data is personal and sensitive. Student records, IEPs, disciplinary files, personnel, health information. This is the data that

IDC forecasts that by 2028, 60% of organizations with digital sovereignty requirements will have migrated sensitive workloads to environments that reduce risk and increase autonomy. Computer Weekly Hard analyst numbers.  Kate Hanaghan, chief research officer at IT analyst house TechMarketView explains “As is the case in the public sector, regulatory pressure looks set to accelerate

Procurement News Leave a Comment / Virginia AI Watch Virginia’s largest county is moving. Henrico County has issued a $100 million RFP for artificial intelligence technologies and intelligent automation solutions, structured as a Master Agreement through the GovMVMT Purchasing Cooperative — which means participating public agencies across Virginia, including school divisions, could access approved vendors through this

The debate between local AI and cloud AI is the wrong debate. The real question is which data belongs where, and the answer drives the architecture. Sensitive data, personal records, anything with privacy or compliance implications stays on site on local hardware. General reasoning, heavy compute tasks, and broad analysis go to the cloud where