Learning and Leading - August 2012

Cool Tools, Cooler People

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One person’s cool tool is often another’s useless gadget. Witness my 86-year-old father, who is on Facebook, compared to my 82-year- old mom, who won’t even use a computer for a doorstop. But as you L&L readers well know, how cool a tool really is has more to do with how and why it is used, not its mere presence.

I came across what I
think is a cool tool called
Raspberry Pi while attend-
ing an event during the
Computing at School meet-
ing in Cambridge, England,
UK (computingatschool.
org.uk). Why is it called a
raspberry, you ask? Because,
I was told, “It’s neither
blackberry nor apple.”
All kidding aside, Raspber-
ry Pi is a computer that is
only slightly bigger than an
Altoids tin. The $25 device,
according to the creators’
website, “plugs into your
TV and a keyboard. It’s
a capable little PC which
can be used for many of
the things that your desk-
top PC does, like spread-
sheets, word processing,
and games. It also plays
high-definition video.” Or-
ganizers want to see kids
across the globe use it to
learn programming. Find
out more about this project
by reading the FAQs on the
Raspberry Pi site (raspberry
pi.org/faqs).

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—Kate Conley is ISTE’s periodicals director and the editor of L&L. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and a bachelor’s in English. Conley has worked at ISTE for more than 13 years.

❝From start to finish, this project has convinced us that using iPads with at-risk learners creates an environment that meshes nicely with the learning styles of our youngest digital natives.