Professional Development

CompTIA Unveils Free Raspberry Pi Webinar for Teachers

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 11/09/15

The Creating IT Futures Foundation, CompTIA's philanthropic arm, has launched a free, on-demand webinar designed to help teachers introduce Raspberry Pi computers to their classrooms.

Raspberry Pis are small, single-board computers that cost less than $50 each.

The organization has been holding workshops to introduce teachers to the technology in Illinois with the sponsorship of the Illinois IT Learning Exchange. The new webinar brings one of those workshops online in an effort to reach more Illinois teachers along with educators from outside the state.

"The half-hour-long webinar incorporates peripheral devices such as a camera with Raspberry Pi to make a video," according to a news release. "The webinar aims to provide guidance and commands to get the device configured and create the web platform to store a stop-motion video."

"Raspberry Pi is a great and inexpensive tool to help get kids playing with technology. Teachers can create lesson plans that work with various subjects and projects — from watching seedlings grow to building news stories," said Joan Matz, senior grants manager at Creating IT Futures, in a prepared statement. "The workshops were the first step in teaching teachers about the technology. Now we've created a webinar based on one application taught in the workshops, and next spring we are running a contest for students to show us applications they've built using Raspberry Pi. We hope that Raspberry Pi will increase student interest in tech and creative problem-solving both in classrooms and after-school clubs."

The webinar is available at comptia.mediasite.com.