Listen to this conversation with Samantha
at the edge of the end of TCEA 2025 Convention and Exposition.

Read the Interview Transcript

I thought it might be fun to read the transcript of the conversation, so here it is below. I ran the audio from Voxer through Whisper Desktop, then dropped the transcription into Mistral.ai for clean up (add names and quotes). I only made minor edits to get the result below:

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Miguel Guhlin: “Hey, it’s Miguel Guhlin. I’m here at TCEA 2025. It feels like we’re on the edge of the end here. So, but before we start the last session of the convention, or one of the last sessions at least, I have the good fortune to be here with Samantha Sanchez from Northside ISD. Samantha, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into all this work that you’re doing now and what do you do now? And then we’ll, I’d love to get you to share. But remember, we are on a time crunch because the session in this room starts at 11 o’clock.”

Samantha Sanchez: “So I’m the academic technology and instructional support teacher. Sorry, that’s very long and obnoxious for Northside ISD high school social studies. I’ve been in this role for four years. And I, you know, went this way because I love seeing what tech can do in the classroom and for teachers and then also for students and getting them more engaged. So it just, it floats my boat.

Miguel Guhlin: That reminds me of another Northside guru, I don’t know, prophet on the mountain. His name was John Hayes. He says, if it doesn’t light my fire, I’m just not going to do it. And that’s a great response. He really gave me permission to tell my, my, the next boss. Yeah, that doesn’t light my fire. Sorry, that’s not going to work for me. So what have you been presenting at TCEA?”

Samantha Sanchez: “So this year I just did one session that was called Game On, how to gamify writing in the classroom and just really both tech and non-tech ways and just getting the kids up and moving and engaged, but also focusing on those skills that, you know, we see a little bit of struggle with. So writing in short bursts, getting them comfortable and how can we do it in a low stakes, fun way. So yeah, it’s been really great. And I’ve seen a lot of awesome sessions kind of focused on gamification too and learned a lot.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Samantha, can you give us just one for, one of those for folks that might be listening who cares about Game On that you could, you know, give us a little bit more detail on? Does that make sense?”

Samantha Sanchez: “Yeah. Well, so one of the tech tools that we highlighted was Short Answer. So if you haven’t looked at Short Answer yet, definitely check it out. But gamification is incorporating game-like aspects into your teaching and what you’re doing. So Short Answer is having kids peer review writing and it’s got the leaderboard and the points. So that’s the gamification piece and it’s short, quick, easy, and the kids have a lot of fun with it. So that was one thing and a lot of teachers are really digging it.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Well, I appreciate you sharing. I also want to ask you, this is a little bit off topic on what I said we’d be talking about, but what’s going on with AI in your district? I know y’all are some of the, I guess, one of the leaders that I was just chatting with a magazine author the other day and he asked me and I said, ‘Guardrails.’ Yeah. And I was really quoting John, a conversation I had with John Moran, Moran. Moran. Thank you. And Stacey Patnaut. And then we’re going to get those right.

So John and Stacey from Northside, they’re the ones that talked to me about guardrails and they were part of the early conversation that we had about responsible AI adoption in the five phases that later I ended up writing a blog and several blog entries about. But how are y’all, just give us a quick snapshot from your perspective because we’ve got their point of view, but I’m kind of curious, what’s your perspective?”

Samantha Sanchez: “Yeah. So I know a lot of teachers are really open to the use of AI. However, I think in Northside, our approach is more, we’re going to, we need to walk before we run. So we need to really make sure that our student privacy is there and that we’re just, that we have no guidelines or anything like that. So we’re, I know the academic tech side is really working hard to kind of set those things up. And for teachers, our AI use is pretty open for the most part. And we’ve gotten a lot of teachers buy in for what they’re doing in the classroom using things like Magic School and Chat GPT and things like that. And now it’s a matter of thinking about how we can use that for students, but doing it in a safe way that everyone’s going to feel comfortable with.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Do you, are y’all mostly still using free AI tools? You haven’t settled on a particular purchased one yet?”

Samantha Sanchez: “No, no. So we’ve got teachers using Magic School. We’ve got Chat GPT. Jim and I just got added to our portal, which everybody loves. Notebook LM, everybody really loves that. Canva. So we’re Canva district that’s on our portal. So we have a couple of platforms that, you know, we’ve kind of pushed and then teachers have found their own. I like Perplexity and Claude AI and have talked to teachers about that. So right now there’s not like a single one. It’s kind of, again, whatever floats your boat.”

Miguel Guhlin: “That’s great, especially as you’re exploring the different possible solutions and options and trying to figure out how everything fits together. I know in my own work with AI, I’ve really sort of, I’ve moved away from Perplexity. I know this may become a shock, but I don’t use Claude as much. And I’ve really locked into using custom GPTs with Chat GPT because I can set it all up and then turn it loose and let others use it and take advantage of it. So that’s been a lot of fun. I’m moving away from a lot of the free tools except for a few select ones like Napkin AI, which I absolutely love and probably should pay for. So I know that’s the, that’s the, I love Chat GPT. That’s my go-to. However, I haven’t, I think my husband would divorce me if I purchased any more EdTech anything. So I need to maybe, if I can purchase Chat GPT, then I think that would probably be my preferred tool. Yeah. It’s funny. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t add a new one until I take an old one off. So to switch to Chat GPT, I gave up Perplexity to, you know, it’s not a bad policy for streaming services too, you know, paramount. It seems like I have all of them. There’s not one that I don’t have. So, you know.”

Miguel Guhlin: “Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much and thank you for attending TCA 2025. What do you think about it being in San Antonio next year?”

Samantha Sanchez: “I’m extremely happy being from San Antonio. It’s in my backyard and I don’t have to drive to Austin. I love Austin. Don’t get me wrong. Austin’s great, but I’d much rather have it in my backyard because we have better tacos.”

Miguel Guhlin: “I’m thinking the same thing for exactly the same reason. So thank you again. Take care.”

Samantha Sanchez: “Yeah.”