A PE teacher who kept shipping.

In 2008 I was a PE teacher in country Victoria, Australia. I started writing about technology in the classroom on a blog called The PE Geek. There was no plan. There was no audience. The audience compounded by accident, because I was solving a problem real teachers were dealing with — getting technology to do useful work in the gym, on the oval, around assessment, planning, and reporting.

The blog became a podcast. The podcast became invitations to run workshops. The workshops became invitations from associations in other countries. Eventually, when teachers kept asking "is there an app that does X?" and the answer was no, I started building them. Fourteen products later, the apps have been downloaded over a million times across more than 80 countries.

Around 2018 it became obvious that the highest-leverage thing wasn't another app — it was a platform. ConnectedPE launched as a membership platform for PE teachers. The same year, the first ConnectedPE conference ran. It is now the world's largest PE-specific event.

In 2023 AI started landing in classrooms in a way that wasn't theatre. I shipped AI lesson generation inside ConnectedPE and PE Games — anchored in curriculum, year-level and the school's scope and sequence. Teachers used it. Adoption stuck. Most of the AI features I see being bolted onto other edtech products do not.

The pattern I kept seeing across the industry — generalist consultants writing decks, engineering teams pointed in different directions, education companies losing ground to startups built by operators — is what the 5A Method exists to fix. The Modern EdTech Roadmap is what happens when I run that method inside someone else's org for six weeks: mobile, web, AI, content, monetisation, adoption — wherever the gap actually is.

The whole career has been bootstrapped. No venture capital, no board, no equity-for-strategy deals. That's not ideology — it's because the buyers I serve are teachers, and decisions made for VCs and decisions made for teachers eventually pull in opposite directions.