<story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Adaptive</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m running a coding class right now that is almost entirely run over ssh on chromebooks to a linux server. Works beautifully.&lt;p&gt;No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.</text></item><item><author>dpark</author><text>Thanks for clarifying.&lt;p&gt;I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding.  I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding.  I think they can probably work there, but you&amp;#x27;re right that a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; computer is a better choice for that.</text></item><item><author>ux-app</author><text>&amp;gt; Also, where do you live&amp;#x2F;teach? &amp;quot;Year 7&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model.&lt;p&gt;My school is a little unorthodox. We&amp;#x27;re a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What to your mind would not be rubbish?&lt;p&gt;Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them to install native software is fine. I recently did a small unit on binary data. It was really handy for students to install a hex editor, inspect a flat text file in binary mode and map out the ascii table for themselves. I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s possible on a Chromebook.&lt;p&gt;I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful.</text></item><item><author>dpark</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see the move to them as a positive either.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What to your mind would not be rubbish?  I&amp;#x27;m a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don&amp;#x27;t see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn&amp;#x27;t do on Chromebooks.&lt;p&gt;Also, where do you live&amp;#x2F;teach?  &amp;quot;Year 7&amp;quot; is not high school in the US.  That is distinctly junior&amp;#x2F;middle school.</text></item><item><author>ux-app</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It&amp;#x27;s such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible.&lt;p&gt;Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, fewer than a dozen actually bought a physical keyboard. This meant that every task took 3x longer than necessary.&lt;p&gt;On top of this they are expensive. To anyone even remotely IT savvy it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a failed experiment. Unfortunately education, like most other things follows the fashion of the time and everyone had to learn the hard way that a traditional computer is superior in every conceivable way.&lt;p&gt;Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see the move to them as a positive either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baldfat</author><text>I have found that notebooks like Jupyter (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jupyter.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jupyter.org&lt;/a&gt;) and especially JupyterHub (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jupyterhub.readthedocs.io&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jupyterhub.readthedocs.io&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) are made to teach languages with a REPL from the browser.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;With JupyterHub you can create a multi-user Hub which spawns, manages, and proxies multiple instances of the single-user Jupyter notebook server. Due to its flexibility and customization options, JupyterHub can be used to serve notebooks to a class of students, a corporate data science group, or a scientific research group.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I have grown less and less fond of Python but I still use Jupyter with other languages and I have it running on my personal server.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Adaptive</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m running a coding class right now that is almost entirely run over ssh on chromebooks to a linux server. Works beautifully.&lt;p&gt;No fancy IDE, but lots of actual learning to code.</text></item><item><author>dpark</author><text>Thanks for clarifying.&lt;p&gt;I agree that Chromebooks are not the ideal learning device for coding.  I was thinking general schooling and glossed over your earlier comment about teaching coding.  I think they can probably work there, but you&amp;#x27;re right that a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; computer is a better choice for that.</text></item><item><author>ux-app</author><text>&amp;gt; Also, where do you live&amp;#x2F;teach? &amp;quot;Year 7&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in Australia. Nationally we are transitioning to a R-6 = Primary School, 7-12 = High School model.&lt;p&gt;My school is a little unorthodox. We&amp;#x27;re a private school with a 6-12 shared campus which is why I had experience teaching younger students even though I am HS trained.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What to your mind would not be rubbish?&lt;p&gt;Either Mac or PC is fine in my books. Anything that allows them to install native software is fine. I recently did a small unit on binary data. It was really handy for students to install a hex editor, inspect a flat text file in binary mode and map out the ascii table for themselves. I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s possible on a Chromebook.&lt;p&gt;I also teach Web dev. We use MAMP which is cross platform. We install VSCode, interact with the FS, create a local DB, file uploads, programmatic image resizing etc. My understanding is that this is not possible without jailbreaking (is that the right term?) a Chromebook.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also opposed to any device that hides away the file system from the user. It relegates a computer to the dumb appliance category which I think is unhelpful.</text></item><item><author>dpark</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see the move to them as a positive either.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What to your mind would not be rubbish?  I&amp;#x27;m a Microsoft employee, so I have a vested interest in Windows devices being the dominant choice for schools, but I don&amp;#x27;t see anything realistic students at the high school or below level couldn&amp;#x27;t do on Chromebooks.&lt;p&gt;Also, where do you live&amp;#x2F;teach?  &amp;quot;Year 7&amp;quot; is not high school in the US.  That is distinctly junior&amp;#x2F;middle school.</text></item><item><author>ux-app</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a HS teacher. I was so happy when my school finally phased out iPads as the designated device for our year 7 students. It&amp;#x27;s such a rubbish device for content creation. The touchscreen is a POS for anything other than web browsing and casual games. Teaching coding, image manipulation, file manipulation was utterly painful or impossible.&lt;p&gt;Typing on them is beyond painful and of the hundreds of students I taught, fewer than a dozen actually bought a physical keyboard. This meant that every task took 3x longer than necessary.&lt;p&gt;On top of this they are expensive. To anyone even remotely IT savvy it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a failed experiment. Unfortunately education, like most other things follows the fashion of the time and everyone had to learn the hard way that a traditional computer is superior in every conceivable way.&lt;p&gt;Chromebooks are rubbish too, so I don&amp;#x27;t really see the move to them as a positive either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kaspiCZ</author><text>Have you considered online tools such as Cloud9, replit etc.? If so, is the problem missing features, workflow or pricing?</text></comment>