On cloud 9!

My saviours of the first term in the UK - Cloud 9 is a web based development environment.  Despite the UK government waking up after the Goog meister +Eric Schmidt  prodded the sleeping lion with a sharp stick, prompting much needed curriculum change. Some schools have however been slow to follow, and even schools which have made big steps have been fraught with problems.

I believe that the school I am at falls into the latter category the big step makers.  When most ICT teachers seem to be running scared and panicing at sudden massive upheavals we are pretty much three years off being compliant.  Why three years?  Because you can't suddenly change a curriculum.  Students don't suddenly learn the stuff they missed, just because it wasn't compulsory when they went through that year.   Three years is a comparatively short period of time for a school, but by the time the current changes take hold, it may well be too late, The next four changes will be in.

So what are the big hold ups?  The primary one is the technology itself.  For many years the norm has been to steer to safety.  Keep dangerous minds away from dangerous tools.  The fear of the hacker has caused much more damage than anonymous could ever actually achieve.  Because many people don't know exactly what a hacker can achieve, or how long it takes to achieve it. Many people lock down education networks unnecessarily.  An easy target for worried network administrators is scripting software.  It has taken me a long time to persuade people that its okay to let kids loose with a tool that they still fear.

Cloud 9 has been a great tool for this.  Not only do I now have a web based storage, editing and collaboration platform in github, but cloud 9 allows students to clone the repository, run it, see the results, and then delete the workspace. Or at least that was the work flow I taught first up.  However once you let slip that a little git can push the repository back to github, students quickly found that magic little command 'git push origin master'  by themselves, as well as the git documentation.  The pleasant irony of my current classroom is that I push the python documentation every lesson.  They hardly use it.  I tried to sweep git under the carpet, and work around it using just the interface of github.  They are avid fans of the git tools, and use the documentation like it were Harry potters magic map.

The second great benefit is that running the program in a linux shell in a web interface allows my students to get to grips with the bash shell.  I tried to work around the linux as well, fool that I was!  but the kids are doing their own research into linux as well.  The service may be slow, but this simply gives thinking time. 

If I could improve the service - I would ask for python3.  Maybe this can be installed from the Linux interface. I haven't really tried that one!.  I went with keeping it simple to focus on the python, but ended up getting students a much better knowledge of the whole software stack. 

So thanks Cloud 9 folks - you have established an easy way for my hardware guys to sit back in the knowledge that the kids are not wrecking the web from their hardware.  You have enabled learning, and made git mysterious and fun to learn.  You were a great find!