At the end of Day 3 of TCEA 2025 Convention and Exposition, while walking out of the Exhibit Hall, I ran into David Mendoza from a K-12 Texas school district. We had a great conversation and you can listen in. Some interesting ideas popped up, and kudos to David for his insights, some of which he expressed after the recording ended.

Listen to this voxercast from TCEA 2025

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Read the Interview Transcript

Miguel Guhlin: “Hey, it’s Miguel Guhlin. I’m here with David Mendoza from Brazosport ISD. And you know what, David, how many times have you been to TCEA convention?”

David Mendoza: “Probably five, five to six times.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Five to six times. What sets this particular one, the 2025 convention, the last one that will be held here at the Austin Convention Center, aside from all the others, what makes it more exceptional, I guess?”

David Mendoza: “Just all the AI sessions that are here, cyber security, legislative sessions, leadership sessions, I think it’s, it has a lot more to offer than it has in the past. And that’s really enjoyable.”

Miguel Guhlin: “So, you know, you mentioned AI and legislative, and obviously there’s a lot of changes coming down the pike for legislation and government and governance and all of that. What are you looking for in regards to AI? Go ahead and governance? In any area.”

David Mendoza: “Yes. Well, the AI for me was just how are they using it at the schools, how we can use it in our role and so forth. But the other big piece for me is like policy. Like I want to see who has a solid policy, where it’s pushed down from the state so we can kind of follow that. Because right now it’s like we’re just trying to figure it out, you know, and we want to be able to give, do more and, you know, be more ethical and, and, and, and, and protective at the same time. And then also data privacy and keeping it secure.”

Miguel Guhlin: “I think you’ve hit on some of the key really important issues. A lot of schools are jumping into AI and they’re using a lot of the free AI tools, but they haven’t really given a lot of thought to what the data is. They’re usually, I mean, I’ve seen some school districts actually say, okay, do not put any personally identifiable information into AI. But if you do an informal poll of teachers, they’ll tell you my school district doesn’t have a policy whatsoever, but I’m already using AI for my daily work. Have you experienced that or seen that in your?”

David Mendoza: “Oh yes. Oh yes. And, and the other piece is I don’t know who all is using AI. And, you know, I’m hoping that all of them are, are taking that in and trying to be, you know, not putting in sensitive data, knowing which ones will capture your data and it’s not protected. So that’s something that, you know, as a tech director, when I bring back and be able to give that informative information, maybe you have to do like a campaign and go to every campus and just give them tidbits of the facts of what to, how to utilize it. You know?”

Miguel Guhlin: “Well, I’m going to bet that you probably haven’t heard of the just announced like today. So it’s called the TCEA AI Journey in Education. It’s a whole new program where we guide and work with school districts and partner with them. And we cover all of that, working with teachers and school leaders to sort of figure out where are we going with AI and put a policy in place. And we start out with a district assessment and then move forward from there. I’ll include the link to all the resources in the show notes, but David, had you heard about anything about that yet?”

David Mendoza: “I have not heard about that. I know that when I was in the sysadmin conference, you showed us some really, really useful information there. But yeah, that’s new to me.”

Miguel Guhlin: “So that’s, this is the evolution of what we showed you in the sysadmin conference. There was, there’s obviously a need for that. And it was so, I think, relevant to what people are doing, but there was also the whole classroom component. And I think at sysadmin, we were really focused on assessing technology plans and cyber safety disaster recovery, as well as some of the other, you know, TCEA Protect and using that things that we appear in our TCEA Tech Notes blog. But now we have it all packaged together in a way that’s comprehensive and guides schools through whatever stage they need to go through. I appreciate all that. I appreciate that.”

David Mendoza: “Well, thank you for letting me share it with you. And again, it was just today that was announced. So what are your plans for the rest of the convention? And was there one particular takeaway that you just blown away with, whether just today or the last few days that you’ve been here?”

Miguel Guhlin: “One of the sessions I attended was learning how to use Notebook LLM, I think it is, Google, and I was just blown away by that. And I just did some sample tests and I was just, I was like, it just like blew my mind. And I’m like, wow, it’s very powerful. And so I want to be able to go back and show that. I’m sure somebody’s already using it, but I’ve never seen it. And so I want to be able to go show that to anybody and everybody, you know, hey, think about how you can use it in your in your role and throughout the campus and school district.

Yeah, I think that going forward with AI, it’s going to be really one of the keys is going to be creating experiences for students. And that’s why it’s kind of cool to be able to, I mean, teachers are going to be using AI tools, but then they’re also going to be creating student environments that students can go in and participate in learning. I can think of two vendors that have set that up, made that possible already. Magic School has something they call Magic Student. And this is not a plug for any one vendor or anything. And School AI has also come up with that. So they have a School AI student spaces that are specifically designed.

Now, there’s there’s some dangers with that because, you know, somebody I think somebody took School AI and they took Anne Frank and they made it into a thing. And of course, the AI didn’t know how to handle such a sensitive topic. But I think as we go forward and we vet these resources a little bit more, it’s going to be powerful to see. Because I mean, that I don’t know if you’ve tried this yet, but I take chat GPT and I create a custom GPT about a subject that is difficult and tough and maybe curriculum oriented or technology oriented.

Imagine a tech director being able to drop everything there is about network topology into a GPT and then say, OK, explain this to me. And how do I do this? How do I configure a Wi-Fi hotspot? Help me out. And you know, you don’t have to have a CCNA to do this.”

David Mendoza: “Yes. Yeah. And one of the sessions they talked about that and they were like saying, hey, if you want them to help to build your subnets and keep it all nice and clean, like you plug that in there, you tell it what you want and it’ll design your whole topology. And I’m thinking and I’m thinking, man, I know there’s work that we want to do. And so I want to plug in all of our current, you know, IP domains and schemes and then tell it, hey, I need some additional subnets. You know, can you give me that? And like you said, I don’t need a CCNA to come and help me do that. I can already plug that in and then get that information populated into our into our network.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Yeah, it’s it’s you almost it’s like we’re we’re inside of a box and we have to keep busting down the walls of the box to think different and to borrow that old Apple thing. But just so that we can imagine what’s possible again, we have to reimagine it or rethink how we would do something because we now have a tool that really augments our strength.”

David Mendoza: “Yes. And the other piece of that is that I feel like if you don’t use AI, then you’re not going to you’re not going to you got to practice it and practice it and you get better. And then and then you know how to talk to or, you know, prompt it and so forth. And so for me, hitting these sessions and seeing how they’re prompting it gives me and Google had one where they had this is how you set it up. And it’s like, OK, this is how I’m going to start prompting it. So I get more better information coming back to me. So I really it was really good. It was really good.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Well, thanks so much, David Mendoza from Brazosport ISD. And folks, make sure that you reach out to David. David, if people have questions about all the exciting things that you’re doing or about to do, what’s a quick way to get a hold of you? Are you on the new social network Blue Sky?”

David Mendoza: “No, I’m not. No, I’m not. I’ll just give you my office number. You can call my office number. 9797307113. That’s my office. I’m at Brazosport ISD. You can look me up at the main school district website and connect me there.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Folks, thanks for listening. This has been another quick Voxercast from TCEA 2025. Look forward to seeing you online. Make sure to visit the TCEA Tech Notes blog. And remember, this is an unofficial Voxer cast, not approved or sanctioned by TCEA. So if I messed anything up, boss, I’m sorry. Take care.”

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