In School...
Since my last post I’ve passed my Google Educator exams and have delivered whole school training on Google Apps for Education, several people are picking this up and we look set to roll out across most subjects. Win!
We’ve now student tested our Raspberry Pi’s with the giant LED’s (buy from @pimoroni) and the Pi-Stops (buy here) which were really successful! We were having problems with getting our Pi’s on the school network but thank to the support of @jrobinson_uk from the Raspberry Pi Foundation we now have PiNet installed on a laptop ready to test out this week.
Some of my students caught a budgie on the playground last week and so I am now the proud owner of a very pretty little bird called Nip. We have set her up with her own Twitter (@budgiecam) and my Y10 group are being tasked with programming a Raspberry Pi with a motion detector and Pi camera board to take a picture when the motion sensor is triggered and then upload this to Twitter with a randomised comment. The Pi will then go home with me to be attached to Nip’s cage. Watch this space….
CamJam (@CambridgeJam) 06.06.2015…
As always Mike and Tim had a jam packed schedule of talks from PiWars to CannyBots and a host of show and tell stands - my favourite being the giant space invaders!!! It was great to catch up with @MissPhilbin and the gang from the Foundation and there was a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator meet up which was a great opportunity for us to catch up with our other Picademy graduates!
Coding Evening…
The wonderful @CatLamin has started up a Coding Evening (website here https://codingevening.wordpress.com/) in her area (Putney) which is an informal meet up in a local pub for Teachers and other interested coders to talk about coding in he new curriculum and share resources and ideas. Some people bring along their projects and demo them to the group and it’s just a good all round evening for like minded people. I’m now starting a Peterborough Coding Evening event and details can be found here. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/coding-evening-peterborough-tickets-17304832219
New Website…
My latest personal project is to set up a website on which I can incorporate a place to share my resources (these are covered by Creative Commons licenses so can be adapted in school but not then shared by the user), host my blog, post helpful articles, websites and events and set up a monthly newsletter. The address for the site is www.geektools.biz and the business is called Geek Tools for Schools. Please visit and have a nosy, there is a suggestions form at the bottom of the home page for people to feedback or suggest resources they could use. You can also sign up for the blog and join the mailing list for the newsletter. The resources on the site are currently free, I will be starting to upload them over the next few weeks. 
