Like most, birthdays sometimes creep up on us, but for this, we’ve been keeping an eye on this date for some time. Since EduGeek was created on June the 8th 2005 (the domain was registered) but the site didnt go live for a couple of days as back then it would take over 24 hours for new domains to propagate around the world.
To celebrate this, we have asked our sponsors, both past and present to help us out with organising some competitions for you all, and we thought it would be fun to have a potted timeline of events and milestones for you to look at.
Please keep in mind that when we started, some schools were still using Windows 98 and NT 4.0 servers!
For a small hobby site that founder Chris Byers thought would only have a couple of hundred members, it was never anticipated we would be where we are today with over 114k members and millions of edtechs being helped globally each year.
Now on to EduGeek over the years on the next page
Timeline:
9th June 2005: EduGeek goes live with the aim of helping EdTechs with the problems only those who work within the education sphere encounter day to day.
The original EduGeek logo. Thankfully it didn’t last very long 😊
June 9th 2005: We have our first thread created by a member posted up - https://www.edugeek.net/forums/topic/2-hmmm-beer/
June 10th 2005 : EduGeek gets our first members joining
November 2005: We have a new logo! We’re not sure who did this for us, it may have been @SYSMAN_MK
Much better and a step in the right direction
April 2006: We hold our first ever (small) conference at Rochdale City Learning Centre. Sadly, no pictures of this event can be found.
October 2006: EduGeek holds its second conference of the year in Camden CLC.
November 2006: EduGeek gets its first sponsor with RM sponsoring the MIS forum for 12 months. This is followed a week later by SCL sponsoring the Hardware forum.
January 2007: EduGeek has a ‘presence’ at the BETT show at London’s Olympia where @Grumbledook and @Russdev had started to spread the word about EduGeek. This was also the first time I had met either in the real world.
September 2007: EduGeek Gets a new logo!
A very nice design courtesy of @SYSMAN_MK
24th October 2007: EduGeek hosts its second conference at a school in Kettering, kindly organised by @GrumbleDook and @russdev. It was here that RM demonstrated the first netbook in the UK and we were very impressed with it for the time #imissnetbooks
January 2008: EduGeek has a real stand at BETT! Thanks to the efforts of @Grumbledook and @Russdev, now site admins, we ran the BETT Technical Help Point whilst BETT was still being held at Olympia. One lesson we learnt is that you shouldn’t borrow lots of kit to have on the stand as the people you borrow it from are often not around to take it back after! And what should be a half hour stand take down has us standing around for hours after the show has closed.
We also found our stand was next to a small company called Smoothwall. I wonder what happened to them?
*Check out the old site logo on the t-shirts!
November 2008: EduGeek hits 10,000 members
February 2009: EduGeek receives over 1 million visitors per month
June 2010: EduGeek Goes to the ISTE conference for the first time. Thanks to a kind invitation by Smoothwall to join them on their stand at Denver. This was quite an education (no pun intended) as to how conferences and the education sector works in the US.
December 2010: EduGeek is at 30,000 members.
Jan 2011: We took on a monster challenge and exhibited at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference and then went straight into BETT. It was a very long week for all involved, especially as @Dos_Box had to remain in London for an interview on the following Monday.
March 2011: Our logo gets updated…
Much more professional!
July 2011: The EduGeek Conference is held in an old nuclear bunker at Preston!
January 2012: EduGeek attends the last BETT Show to be held at London’s Olympia. The end of an era.
November 2013: EduGeek hits 1,000,000 forum posts
June 2015: We attend ISTE at Philadelphia
May 2017: Wannacry, an encryption virus, hits the globe. Working with Microsoft and others, we get a very concise and informative article out to help members make, and keep their systems safe
July 2019: We now have over 100,000 members!
April 2020: The covid lockdowns begin and EduGeek goes all out to help members suddenly having to setup remote learning and storage facilities and provide extra support for companies helping schools to get this up and running
March 2022: We attend the first BETT since lockdown. A much smaller affair than usual and those of us that hadn’t caught covid previously all went down with it
We gave away this NHS themed AFK badge during the show to celebrate their work during the ciovid crisis
October 2022: EduGeek hosts its first post-covid EDIT Conference at the Royal Armories in Leeds
March 2025: EduGeek upgrades the site, moving away from Vbulletin to the Invision Community platform, allowing us to offer much better facilities for members and sponsors.
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