Angela Mackenzie, Director of Innovation and Learning Technologies at Saint Margaret's Episcopal School, discusses unifying library services, educational technology, and computer science. She shares insights on managing AI adoption, maintaining data privacy during vibe coding experimentation, building faculty trust, and launching student-led innovation programs for emerging technologies.

Saint Margaret's Episcopal School — Independent preschool through grade 12 school located in San Juan Capistrano, California.

Google Gemini — Enterprise AI platform utilized by the school to protect data privacy during staff operations.

School AI — AI tool designed for safe educational interaction in elementary grade levels.

Claude by Anthropic — AI assistant used by Mackenzie’s faculty for advanced text processing and vibe coding experimentation.

Google NotebookLM — AI research and note-taking platform

Otter.ai — Speech-to-text audio transcription service

Welcome to Talk Technology with Atlas, the show

that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders, all through a unique independent school

lens. We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the independent school community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

Welcome to Talk Technology with Atlas. I'm

Lauren Merrell, Director of Innovative Learning and

Technology at Preston Hollow Presbyterian School in Dallas,

Texas,

and I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey.

We are so excited to be here. I get to bookend my

summer with you, Bill. I started on the podcast at the beginning

of the summer, and we talked about where it was going. And

now here we are at the end of the summer. How are you?

I am in denial that it's coming to the end of the

summer. I know you down in Texas, you've got these earlier

starts than we do up here in the Northeast. I'm still holding on

to the last few weeks of this because we have new teachers

coming back in about three weeks.

Okay,

and then teachers coming back just before Labor

Day, and then you know we start with the students the day after

Labor Day. So we've got that. I'll call it the traditional

movie script start of the school year that isn't in the middle of

the summer, but still, it's like I've gotten all my vacation

done.

Nice.

I'm now in my seat and going to be here for the

rest of it. So, the anxiety over, like, all right, what did

I do? What did I miss? What do we still need to get done? And

then getting all of my team's vacation in. Yeah, I'm losing

more hair. Is what I'm doing. Losing more hair and going

grayer.

Yes, yeah. My own kids start sooner than my

school, so they start on the 10th, which is pretty early.

Man, our school doesn't start back till the 26th, so we have a

couple weeks. It's still pretty quick, and new teachers start

next week, so we're excited. We have a pretty large group this

year of new faculty, so I'm excited for new energy and get

to find out what they are interested in. And so here we

go.

Somebody needs to give me a really good

explanation of why schools in the South start earlier when

it's hotter. It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I don't

get

it. Yeah, I think maybe it's because it is hotter

because there's nothing else to do with them, and as we were

talking about earlier, the pool is no longer enjoyable. So,

yeah, we

don't get out earlier than anybody else. So I

don't know the reason. Anything else new with you?

Just got back from visiting my oldest down in

Georgia. Haven't seen him for a few months, so it's like the

first time of this. And my wife went down, and she hasn't seen

him since February, so she didn't want to leave. I had to

kind of pull her back, you know, wrap her up, and put her on the

plane to get back up, and she wasn't happy about that at all.

You know, while our youngest has been home the majority of the

summer by himself, so we've been absentee parents to him as we've

traveled around and done all these different things.

Yeah, it's been good here too. So we've traveled

and had all of the enjoyable moments that we wanted to have

with our kiddos, and so we're on the other end of the spectrum

with little ones still. So

enjoy it because it goes by in a heartbeat.

Yeah, we are excited to jump into this

conversation with our guest today. We have Angela McKenzie

here, and we can't wait to learn more about your experience in

the tech world. So, welcome, Angela.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super

excited to be here. I am the director of innovation and

learning technologies at Saint Margaret's Episcopal School. We

are a preschool through grade 12 in San Juan Capistrano,

California, and part of my role. I wear many hats, like many of

us do. But underneath that umbrella, I'm also the director

of our library and library services, and I am our computer

science department chair. I am about to enter my 11th year here

at St. Margaret's, but this is my 24th year in education. I'm

just really excited to be here with all of you. It

sounds like you have had a really big role with

many different hats, as you said. How did that come to be?

That you are over all of those different areas.

It's really interesting, and it's definitely

been a journey, but a great one. I will share that I started my

career as a first grade teacher, so I started in the classroom,

and after a few years of teaching, I ended up going back

to graduate school to get my master's degree in educational

psychology and instructional technology, and from there I got

a job as an assistant technology instructor. And what's

interesting about that is I was the teacher that was, we'll say,

resistant to technology. Early on, and so going from that

mindset into being a technology instructor just completely

opened up this whole new world of technology and all of the

potential that it has to impact the learning experience of our

students. When I came to St. Margaret's, I started as the

makerspace manager, and then moved into the steam integrator.

And then, after a few years, my head of school invited me to

apply for. At the time, it was the director of library and

digital literacy position, and his vision was that the library

would become a place for emerging technologies, and so

with my background in maker spaces and STEM and technology,

I ended up being offered the position, and I was thrilled.

And as these things happen over the years, it just continues to

evolve. So the running joke here is that I have a new title every

other year. No one can ever remember what it is because it

changes all the time, and I just sort of keep adding things

underneath that umbrella, and it keeps things exciting and fresh.

So, what is the size of the school and the size

of your department?

We are preschool through 12. We have 12

150 students total, four divisions: early school, lower

school, middle school, upper school, and we are all on one

campus, but spread out over about 35 acres. So we're a

fairly large campus, and we each have kind of our own sections,

if you will, for me and my team. It's an incredible library team.

So, some wonderful librarians that also partner with me on

educational technology because we did bring those two together,

and so there are two people that are part of that team, and then

I have two digital literacy teachers that teach at the lower

and middle school levels, and then I have three computer

science teachers. So a lower, middle, and upper school

computer science teacher. That's on my side on the IT side, and

she and I partner very closely together. The IT department has

a very robust department of nine people, so it's a pretty large

technology team overall. But my side was the academic side. That

sounds great.

One question about the libraries. I'm very curious

about that, given the size of the campus itself, so people may

know we're a three division school, but we're spread out

through the town of Montclair, so we're geographically

separate. So we actually have three distinct libraries: one at

our primary, middle, and upper. Are you dealing with a single

library, or do you have grade level specific libraries?

We have a single library with multiple

spaces, so we have one side, which is for our early through

middle school, actually, and it really houses the majority of

our book collection, and we have it completely genrefied and

sectioned off according to just what's developmentally

appropriate for each division, and then on the other side is

our upper school library, and that really is set up more of a

study and collaboration space. There's a smaller book

collection there. We have a group of individual study pods

on that side, so our upper school students are very much

coming to us for that type of space.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the

overlap that you have created? It sounds really interesting,

and I don't know that all schools are using that type of

model. My campus has done some work because we're elementary,

so has done some work with the library and educational

technology overlap. But that's, I think, a really interesting

model, and I think that many schools could benefit from

thinking about literacy and research and all of the things

that come out of the library space and how that could impact

these other areas that you're talking about. So just be

curious.

What I've realized now, being in this role

for over eight years, is libraries and educational

technology specialists really do many of the same things. There

is quite a lot of overlap, and to its core, the library is a

space for people to come and be connected, connected to the

resources that they might need, the people that they might need

to support them, and so we really took that philosophy of

having one place for our faculty and our students to be able to

come, finding the resources that they need and get support, being

connected to who they need to be connected to, and now everyone

knows it's all run through. Our library program. When I stepped

in, my librarians didn't consider themselves to be

educational technology specialists, and so we did do a

lot of work together in building that level of comfort. And I

think that the team, over time, did realize that they were

already doing this. People were already coming to them, or

students were already coming to them if they were struggling

with something on their laptop. And so, it became more of a

communication and branding piece, so that it was clear to

everyone that we serve multiple roles in this capacity of the

library.

I love that. It's great to hear it because it's a

model we've embraced similarly across all three campuses. At

the upper school, in particular, we did a huge renovation number

of years ago, and that became our academic learning center. So

that's where you went for learning support. The IT staff

was there. The ed tech staff was there. The librarians were

there. So it was this central hub for everyone to come into,

and you didn't have to go anywhere else. The IT support

wasn't off in the distance somewhere else where you were

going for ed tech help, or you know you needed any of those

things. It was this idea of really pulling them all

together. I've always looked to the work that we do with our

librarians, particularly around the research cycle, to support

the work that we do in ed tech, and we've been able to model

that at our primary school and middle school to some degree.

It's more adjacent and kind of space issues, and we're looking

at that going forward. But I think that blending of all of

those things in that single place really create that central

learning hub that I think schools really benefit from.

Yeah. Well, and importantly, I'll say I

didn't ask our librarians or our library team to completely

change its identity from being a library. So it was also there's

space and room for all of this, right? It goes together, and

yes, we're still supporting literacy, and we are still a

place where students can come and check out books, and we are

a space where students can come and get support with technology,

or teachers can come and lean into trainings. So it, I think,

opened up more pathways and a bigger world. I think for just

the library team in general.

Yeah, can you expand on that a little bit and

how this impacts instruction?

Like any big school with multiple divisions,

there are differences by division. But I will say, in

terms of digital literacy, we are lucky enough to have our

lower school students have a dedicated time in their schedule

every week for digital literacy, and so they come to the library

and they receive those lessons. And many of them, you know, it

revolves around digital responsibility, and it's aligned

to the curriculum that's happening in the lower school,

and in turn, our digital literacy teacher works with our

lower school teachers to ensure that they feel supported in what

they're doing in their classrooms. When it comes to the

middle school level, our middle school digital literacy teacher

also teaches, and she also will push in to certain classrooms,

depending on the unit, and that's very much in support of

research. If there's a research project or something along those

lines, as a whole, in terms of impact on instruction, I am a

department chair, and I also sit on the department chair's team

as a senior administrator, and so when we look at the upper

school levels, that's really where the teachers that I'm

working with, so that they in turn are empowering their

departments in this method, and we will also push in upon

invitation if they would like us to, if they need support in any

of these areas,

one of the things that I'm curious about because

of that blending of those different areas, so much of that

was work that was being done without technology.

Yes,

I know that you're interested in future proofing

kids so that they can do this work without technology. Can you

expand on what that looks like and how that work is taking on

in the school.

I'll give an example. If we talk about AI

with our upper school students, we've very much heard from them

just by engaging with them over multiple years and providing

opportunities for student panels and hearing their feedback that

they actually don't necessarily need our instruction on using

the tool. They want to talk about using the tool and how

they can better discern whether they should be using AI or not.

How is this going to affect their future? Right. These big

ideas and conversations that they want to engage in, and they

very much want to see how it plays out in the real world. So

I've been busy developing a new program that essentially invites

students to come in, and it's a leadership group. And so we're

going to be meeting throughout the year next year, and we're

going to be connecting them to industry experts so that they

can actually have these discussions with people that are

using the technology in the industry. It's not technology

instruction, but it certainly revolves around them feeling

empowered to be connected to an expert, hear what the pain

points are, how they're using it, and then begin to think

about how they might want to use it at their level, and also

hopefully share that information with their fellow students. And

is that at upper school level? Yes, it's at the upper school

level for now. Being you know this is year one, so we're going

to launch and see how it goes. We've always taken advantage of

the benefit of having a multi division school, which is our

older students working with our younger students. So eventually,

we hope to open up opportunities for our upper school students to

teach and coach and meet with probably our middle school

students, so that will definitely be in the future.

You've had many different titles, which I think

we've all experienced as we evolve in these roles. As our

schools don't always know what to call it, but being in that

makerspace or STEM education, what have you seen evolve and

change in your campus over the time you've been there, and is

that still a model that you deploy?

So it's definitely evolved over the

years. When I started here, we actually had a makerspace in

every division, and now at this point, it looks a little bit

different. We still have a maker space in our lower school, and

that's connected to our computer science and engineering lab. And

so they will go and experience different lessons depending on

the day and the unit. And the maker space is integrated in

that. And our lower school teachers are invited and

supported when they want to bring their classrooms in. At

the middle school level, we've actually transformed that

makerspace into our computer science classroom and lab. So

the tools still exist. The use of those has been integrated

into the computer science curriculum, and similarly to

lower school, if there's a middle school teacher that is

working on a project and they need support using a laser

cutter or support in the design process, that teacher will

support them in that. Our upper school, this is all just part of

what's going to be new. We no longer have a maker space in the

upper school, but we do have other spaces that serve a

similar purpose. It's a little bit more by department. So, for

example, we have a very robust arts program, and there's an

entire team of students that can sign up to be part of the set

design, costume design, set building. It's a workshop that

lives in the back of our performing arts studio, and

there's a dedicated person there to work with the students in

that. Similarly, for our visual arts department, they have a

room with laser cutters, lots of different tools, and so the

students that are participating in those classes have use of

those tools as well. So, not necessarily dedicated maker

space, but still spaces where students can access those tools.

A new initiative for next year is we're in the process of

completing any day now. It's a new center for technology and

innovation that is an upper school space. It's going to

house several classrooms: computer science, robotics, and

math, being some of them. And it's also going to be my new

home, which is going to serve as more of what we're calling an

innovation hub. The name of it is Impact Studio, and Impact

stands for innovation, mentorship, purpose, agency,

communication, and transformation. And so that

space isn't necessarily going to have the traditional tools that

a maker space does, but it is going to be a space for students

to come and engage in emerging technologies. Let's just take a

moment to acknowledge our good friend Hiram. We're so glad

you're here.

No, not. It was so much better when he was he was

playing with his new grandchild.

Absolutely, yes. It's quite a change going from

parent to grandparent, but it is outstanding.

Congratulations! It's the best excuse to have in

the world. Very exciting,

Angel. My apologies for coming in late.

They were just discharged a little while ago.

Hi, Hiram. How are you? Hi, Bill. We knew this was

going to happen. We prepped Angela for this. You would be

late, and then it would become all about you.

Hiram, I'm excited to catch you up.

Angela's been sharing about her wonderful program at her school,

and I was actually going to ask you as you were talking, and it

sounds like you have a really interesting space that's about

to open, but understanding kind of where do you think

education's going? I feel like your model is one that everyone

is exploring right now, trying to figure out what's going to be

the next thing or the best model for our schools, especially

trying to build something across a K through 12 campus is always

hard thinking about alignment, but do you kind of have a vision

for where you think we're going and how your model could

influence others?

Yeah, I mean, I what I always come back to is

obviously education is changing rapidly. It's an incredibly

exciting time to be in education, in my opinion, and I

have no idea what our kindergartners are going to

need, what tool they're going to need to know how to use by the

time they are ready for a career. But what I do know is

that they and the rest of our students are going to need to be

able to adapt to change, and they're going to need to be able

to lean in to knowing that it's okay not to have all the

answers, and maybe some careers won't exist anymore. The

Well, what are those skills that will help them

succeed in any career, regardless of what it is? And

so, my hope with the Impact Studio and what I'm calling the

Impact Fellows Program, which I described before with our

student leaders, is that it's going to empower them to think

about the things that interest them, be comfortable connecting

with an industry expert or a mentor outside of our school and

being willing to learn from them, and then also think for

Is there a problem that AI might help solve in

these industries in the future? That's really my goal: to

continue to build that comfort in leaning into the unknown and

being flexible.

So, to that point of the unknown, we just opened

last November our Inquiry and Innovation Center, which sounds

a lot like your Impact Center. And one of the things that we

have as part of our strategic plan is AI and emerging

technologies. And I know that you're focused on helping to

look at what is coming, what is the emerging technologies?

Because you mentioned the way in which you're dealing with your

maker spaces. At one point, those were emerging

technologies. I'm very curious because that, as I said, is one

of the pillars of our strategic plan. We've spent at nauseam

talking, as everyone has, about AI. I want to know how are you

looking at and what are you defining now as emerging

technologies, and how are you having those conversations to

kind of bring those things forward so that you can start

looking at those things and seeing which direction you may

go based on what you uncover.

What a great question! I will say we're in a

similar position to you in terms of having a strategic plan

initiative known as Empowered for the Digital Age. AI is part

of that, but it isn't limited to AI, and we did that

intentionally, knowing that we don't necessarily know all the

things that are going to be coming our way in five to seven

years. We just finished an accreditation year, and at my

request, we also have an accreditation recommendation

around this. Which having both of those things just really

helps move the work forward. I think if we're looking at the

world of computer science, quantum computing, and really

empowering our students to understand more data science is

going to be crucial in these coming years. We have not leaned

into that yet, but the computer science team and I definitely do

talk about that, and we've had several of our alumni who went

on to pursue degrees in computer science, share with us it's all

about quantum computing. So we have a sense that it's coming

our way at some point, but we just don't know what that will

look like yet, other than learning as much about it as we

can right now. And in terms of how I. These things forward and

make sure that we're talking about it proactively as opposed

to reactively. That's always my goal. I'm fortunate to have a

seat at the table at our senior administration meetings and

being part of that team, which includes our head of school, our

assistant head of school, all of the division principals, and all

of the directors on campus, and we have a wonderful, trusting

group where I know I can bring anything to them, and we can

have real conversations, and we can talk about what should we be

thinking about here, what should we be mentally preparing for.

So, Angela, what's interesting is if I look at this

in the continuum, you've got the LLM here, you've got quantum

here. Where is agentic in your continuum as a school? Are you

using it already? Are you approaching it carefully? How

are you all feeling about it?

Well, like anything, we're feeling all the

feelings, and I'll speak personally. I really see the

potential of harnessing tools. Let's say, for example,

harnessing vibe coding, right, and the ability to create any

tool that you might need and asking it to complete tasks for

you. I can see the benefit of that, in terms of where we are

as a school, we're not there yet. In terms of our faculty

embracing it, but we are getting to the place where we have our

early adopters, our folks that are really excited about this.

They're beginning to dive a little bit more deeply, they're

beginning to vibe code. They're starting to create more tools

that just solve some of the problems that they've had or

make their life easier. So we're approaching, I would say.

To follow up on that, when you said vibe coding,

I shuddered a little bit because I've got a couple faculty

members who came back from conferences, and they're all

excited to Vibe Cobe, and they want access to app scripts. And

I'm like, I yeah no, I know,

no, it's a real issue and challenge. I am

fortunate to work with an amazing director of IT, I do not

oversee IT, and she had the same thing happen. A group of us went

to a conference and just vibe coded our little hearts out and

created some amazing things that were able to complete things

that we hadn't been able to find anything else to do. It was sort

of these complex things that we need, and so it's a real

conversation in terms of just data privacy, and as a school,

how we're going to ensure that we are protecting all of our

data.

Would you happen to know? Did they just create a

security group for those of you that are doing the vibe coding

that have access to it, have they created sandboxes? What

kind of policies has UCool put in place in order to encourage

faculty members to engage in these practices?

Last year, we developed a policy, a set of

guidelines, really for our faculty, and what we say is we

have two tools that are officially our schools approved

tools. We have access to Gemini as a school, and we also have

School AI for our younger grades, grades three through

five. But any teacher can access it. And while those are

approved, we encourage our teachers if they want to try

something new, if they want to experiment with a different AI

tool, we say that they can, but they may not enter any data, any

student data, any personal data. The idea is one awareness. We

want our faculty to know the difference between using Gemini,

where our data is not used to train the model, and using

something else. But we also didn't want to stifle or shut

down experimentation and creativity. So, all that being

said, the vibe coding that several of our teachers engaged

in the summer was using Clod, and for right now, the tool that

we're going to sort of pilot this year, if you will, is going

to be an internal field trip request tool. Our director of

experiential learning met with our director of IT, and they

very much intentionally went through the tool so that she was

comfortable with it being shared just internally in that way. So

we haven't gotten to the place that you described yet, but I

have no doubt that we will need to this year because I think as

these examples begin to be. Shared and far and wide, I think

more and more teachers are going to be interested in trying

it. I saw Hiram get all excited when you said vibe

coding. You look like a kid on Christmas morning. It was

unbelievable, but it's interesting because that's the

line to walk, particularly with AI right now. Is this idea of

allowing room for exploration, but then securing things because

there's such anxiety over how AI is and isn't being used. I mean,

there's this ramped up expectation that schools need to

figure out what they're doing with it, whether it's pro or

con, whatever that is. But then you have these people that are

really getting into it, like you mentioned, going off and

creating pieces that you couldn't do before. I had one of

our music teachers create an app to teach some of the stuff in

music. Didn't know any coding whatsoever, and put all of this

together. And you want to encourage that level of

exploration, but understand to your point, you can't put data

in it. We had a really good meeting here at the beginning of

the summer, where we were talking about how, like you,

we've chosen to use and standardize on Gemini, so that

included Notebook LM. So we sat down with our heads of campus

and some of our top level leaders, and we walked them

through an exercise using Notebook LM to illustrate how

that worked. But there was questions about one of our

division heads talked about writing a speech for the end of

the year for students and was trying to do something where

they were entering all these different accolades about the

students and wanting to write it out. And Gemini couldn't do it,

but he was able to do it over in Claude very well. Claude took it

and really worked with it well. Well, what do you tell that

person? Is that personal data. How does that work? How do you

balance all of those things out? And I'm struggling with it

personally. I understand why we need to do this as a school, but

I'm also like, as long as you're not putting it in, and this is

the thing that I hate to say. It's like, do we trust you

enough not to put school data in there. How have those

conversations gone for you?

Oh, I mean, you just articulated the real

challenge of all of our roles. It's a conversation that has to

happen probably often and on an individual basis. Every

situation is a little bit unique, and I think this is

where that partnership between, you know, however your school is

structured in terms of academic technology and IT, but that

partnership is so key because I do believe, I know I can speak

for us, Nikki, our director of IT, and I sometimes we speak a

different language, but she and I are able. I'm able to

articulate this from the teacher perspective and sort of that

holistic. Here's the value of this. She's able to explain to

me the hesitation, and then together, in partnership with

whoever needs to be there too, right? Whether it's principals

or head of school, then I think we make that decision, or we

discuss. Okay, we're not comfortable with this. Is there

a different way? And we talk about how to have that

conversation with the person right that created it. And I

think it's hard not having all the answers, and it's hard for

me having people come to me and me essentially saying, "Okay,

give me some time. We have to work together to come to a

decision on this. Instead of on the inside, I'm excited, right?

That they're leaning into this, they're trying things, they're

solving problems. It's all of the things that we want our

teachers to be doing, and it is also our responsibility to make

sure that we're protecting everyone.

Yeah, I'm curious about professional development

and how the buy-in for your faculty across all divisions is

working. Obviously, upper school is kind of a different area

because computer science looks like a very specific thing when

you're in that division, but are you seeing that your teachers

globally across all of your grade levels are bought in on

AI? Are you still seeing some hesitancy? What are your

challenges and wins?

There's absolutely hesitancy still, and

I understand why. I think, as I mentioned early on, the fact

that I started my career as a classroom teacher-that was the

one that said, "Oh, I'm not good with technology. Right? That's

sort of how I started. I very much empathize with that

teacher, and I understand that mindset still. After all of

these years, we've taken a very intentionally slow approach to

this, and we've made slow and steady progress as a result. And

any time we've been working on anything, whether it's our

school's position and policy, the guidelines, our. AI

acceptable use scale, right? We have all of these things that

we've worked on throughout the years. The entire faculty is

always invited in to that process and those conversations.

I will say that not very many come, and that's multiple

reasons. Being a teacher is a very busy, demanding job, and

I've learned that just because a teacher can't come to that

after-school meeting to help design our AI guidelines, they

know that they can email me or catch me walking across campus

at any time and contribute their thoughts and ideas. So I think

that has helped. I know that we're at the point as a school

where we're very much leaning into now, I'll call it

department AI literacy and fluency. So what does this look

like in developmentally appropriate ways across the

grade levels, and then eventually when you get to

middle and upper school by subject. Our department chairs

have shared with us that they really need two things to feel

confident in this: they need dedicated time to learn, and

they need support because they're in turn being asked to

lead their department members in this work, and so this year

we've already actually carved out that process and that time

for them. We've identified 490-minute blocks of time

throughout the year, and we're actually working with an outside

consultant who's going to partner with me in leading

chairs through a series of what we're calling design sprints.

Each one will have a different topic. For example, assessment

in the age of AI. The department chairs will first get to do the

exercise themselves. They'll be asked to then do that in their

class, and then they're going to reflect on it and share the

process with their department members, and then we'll do it

again. And I will say that we shared this with department

chairs last year in April, and just sharing that this was

coming has helped with the buy-in. I think everyone's at

the place where they've accepted that this isn't going away. It

doesn't necessarily mean that they're comfortable yet, but

they know that it's time for the next steps.

So, Angela, you have a very healthy professional

development model there. I'm really encouraged by the

framework that you all have developed, I want to be a

devil's advocate here and say: Have you encountered any users

that have said, "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to use my

personal account and kind of do what I want to do and do the

vibe coding that I want to do and go from there. That's sort

of the challenge I'm hearing from other tech directors, well,

I'll take a step back. Recently, we attended a webinar, Bill and

I, where they say App Scripts is turned on by default. You all

need to turn it off. We're like, who knew that it was on by

default? So, of course, you do that. You create the security

group, and then you've got folks who all of a sudden realize that

they're not part of that experience anymore. They try and

find alternatives, no different than the students. How have you

all done that? Because I know you'd be able to enlighten so

many tech directors who are struggling with the very same

issues.

To be honest, I do believe that the way our

faculty policy is structured is helpful in that we do articulate

these are our approved tools, and you are welcome to

experiment. We also articulate that they must use their Saint

Margaret's account for any and all AI tools that they're

signing in with and experimenting with, which is

still, I guess, technically a personal account because we're

not managing it as a school. But I think it's this idea that if

you're experimenting, then this is all still in the spirit of

your job and your position here at school. I have not heard of

any teachers going off and sort of trying to bypass decisions

that we have made, and I'd like to think that we would know. But

I think at the end of the day, for us, it does come down to

this level of trust and this agreement and understanding that

as a school, we are always going to do our best to get you what

you need, connect you with the resources that you want to use,

and if we tell you that that's not possible, there's a really

good reason. So we're really trying to come from a place of

yes as much as we can, and that's a cultural piece where

everyone knows that if we say no, it just means we can't. It's

not because we don't want you to.

I think it's great because it talks about a culture

of trust that needs to be developed. It's one of the

things that I think is helpful that I've found at least is when

you take the examples and you take them out of the school

context, you ground them in personal experience, and where

you can then start saying, you know, all right, would you take

all of your banking information and put it into an AI that you

are not paying for? You don't know where the guaranteed

protections are. Would you just dump all of that in there,

because that is really, to some extent, what you're doing when

you start talking about any type of personally identifiable

information that PII that you'd be putting into these things. So

if you can take it and ground it in that, but to my point earlier

that I asked you about, can we trust people to do what we tell

them to do? And I think that's where we have to start from, and

it's the hardest thing to build because outside of the personal

piece, they have to understand the why. We're not trying to

make jobs harder for them, but the world in which we're working

in right now is much different and has only been exacerbated.

We'll talk about this all the time with regard to everything

that we just said yes to during COVID. Still, people remember

the open door. Yeah, use it.

Yeah,

you find something that you just go, and we're

continually pulling back from that. So I think it's an

important point that you make around trust.

I also find, I'm sure you do too. It's very

much in the delivery and taking the time to have that

connection, that human connection on these types of

requests and issues. I always try when I can to have these as

in-person conversations as opposed to an email, right, and

I'm sure you're no different. But I've found that that helps

build that culture of trust too.

Yeah, it sounds like y'all have a really healthy

community, and I think that your point of trying to come from the

yes-if people know that when they come to you, that there's a

good chance that you're going to help find a solution-I feel like

that builds a lot of camaraderie and collegiality, and that is a

big win for a tech department too. Because I think that

there's kind of an older cultural model of being the

gatekeepers, and I think that that's really great to be able

to open that up and make everyone feel really welcome. Is

there anything else that you would love to just share with

the community as we come to a close.

If I think about one last thing to share,

or maybe it's just what I'm looking forward to most for this

next school year. It's just our continued work partnering with

our students on this work, and I'm guessing that this has been

discussed before, but I have found just going back to buy-in

that it's hearing our students' perspectives and experiences

that has actually moved our community and our teachers along

the farthest. At the end of the day, we're here because we love

working with kids and we care about their learning experience,

and so I'm excited to continue to open up those opportunities

for our faculty to hear from our students, for them to lean in

and be comfortable learning together, which can be new. And

so, thank you, thank you for the opportunity to share what we've

been doing and have this discussion.

Thank you so much for being here. I think that's a

great message as we all enter the school year and put students

at the front of the work we all are doing in our institutions.

And hopefully, we will see a lot of interesting progress as the

year goes on. You sound like you have wonderful projects on the

horizon, and we'll look forward to checking in with you and

hearing more about how everything goes.

I would love that. Thank you.

This has been Talking Technology with Atlas,

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