My AI Tech Stack as an Educational Diagnostician

You probably need less than you think

When people ask me which AI tool I use for evaluations, I want to be honest with you: I use several, and you do not need to.

I have built out a workflow over time that uses different tools for different purposes, and that works for me because I also build dashboards, train other diagnosticians, and run a consulting business on the side. My setup reflects all of that. Yours does not have to.

If you are an evaluator who wants AI to help you write better reports, organize your thinking, and reduce the repetitive drag in your workflow, you probably need one tool. Maybe two.

The most important question is not which tool is best. It is which tool lives closest to where you already work.

If your district runs on Microsoft, start with Copilot. It is already in your ecosystem, it connects to the tools you use every day, and it does not require you to manage another login or another platform.

If your district runs on Google, start with Gemini. Same logic.

Either one can help you organize referral information, clean up repetitive background language, revise a dense paragraph into something a parent can actually understand, and keep your tone more consistent across a long document.

That is enough to make a real difference in your workflow.

You do not need to master every platform. You do not need a elaborate system. You need a tool that fits where you already work, a strong evaluator profile built into your settings, and a clear sense of what you are and are not asking AI to do.

Start there. Build from there only if you have a reason to.

The one tool I would add to that short list is NotebookLM. It serves a different purpose than drafting or writing support. I use it as a second brain for the reference material I need to know cold: Texas Education Agency (TEA) guidance, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) compliance timelines, dyslexia and dysgraphia protocols, procedural safeguards. You can load your actual district documents, state guidance, and training materials directly into it and then ask questions against your own sources. It is not generating generic answers from the internet. It is working with what you gave it.

For an evaluator who wants to stop digging through PDFs every time a compliance question comes up, that alone is worth it.