10 Useful Teaching Tools to Improve Your Coding Class
At the time when technology is a great part of everybody’s lives it became only natural that teachers now also have the opportunity to integrate different tech and use it to their advantage. This article will show you our TOP 10 of the most interesting tools that teacher can use in his coding class.
The idea of the article occurred when we’ve launched the ClassRoom upgrade on CheckiO where we asked our followers for some recommendations on tools they might be using in their work. All the received emails and comments we decided to aggregate into this article. So, here goes.
Cloud9 is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) in the cloud which has a complete set of very useful features for writing software and great opportunities of collaboration for remote users in real time. So, teachers can code alongside with their students, watch how each student is figuring out a given task, point out and fix their mistakes as they occur. You don’t really have to be in the same room to do so, because not only you’re sharing a screen, you can communicate within the IDE with an integrated chat client. Here you can check out a great selection of articles and tools concerning the pair programming.
Cloud9 simply looks great, it’s usable and has a beautiful design. It also has an extensive debugging support with various forms of code analysis and inspection.
Why is it a so uniquely awesome tool? Well, for starters, you can start coding right away from anywhere you’d like on any device with already configured your personal perfect workplace. You can use any language, because Cloud9 supports a large amount of programming languages (C, C++, CSS, Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, HTML, Go etc.).
It’s also possible to easily share your work due to Cloud9 being integrated with such popular repositories as Bitbucket and GitHub.
The pricing has a special offer for teachers. A teacher has to pay $1 per month for which he gets a free public workspaces, unlimited amount of students who can join him with one private workspace for each student. And while the service can’t be used without a valid credit card, students can freely join without one.
Colaboratory released by Google and built upon the open source Jupyter project has proven to be a very helpful research tool highly used by the small groups of people who needs to work fast and closely together, which is why it’s a perfect place for teachers and their students. A teacher can not only demonstrate Python abilities but also share the results of conducted work with his class.
This tool’s features are fairly similar to those of Google Docs. But it’s strictly for Python users as it has a Python 2.7 environment (working on supporting Python 3 and R) with all of the great Python libraries. Colaboratory provides free computing power where any Python code can be easily written, edited and run without any installations right in your browser. You can also create various notebooks that can be shared, downloaded and commented upon. Also changes to each notebook could be made simultaneously by the different group members and they are all immediately visible.
If you’ve used Jupiter before, then Colaboratory is definitely worth checking out.
Slack is a chat platform for collective communications which is available in a free version and can have a great success among students. This tool connects students and their teacher with different apps and services to make collaboration as easy as possible. It consists of various workplaces, channels, search, notifications and messages, and has a lot of other features to bring everybody closer together in terms of shared information and work process management. The great thing is that you can access Slack from your phone due to this tool being available not only for the computer desktops. This way it’s unbelievably easy for a teacher to give advises to his students who are doing their homework without having to be in front of a computer.
With this tool your students will always be informed. Each of them can even search through the archive to review the public conversations between other group members. The high level of transparency and accessibility keeps everybody coordinated within the shared workplace. There is always the opportunity to add new apps, Slack has a set of plugins and up to 20 of them can be used in a free version. You can also edit documents and share them, discuss various tasks and organize all of your conversations by topics or projects.
Google Hangouts is created by Google and considered by many of their customers as a good place for communication via free video or voice calls with up to 10 contacts, and instant messages or chats between two people or a group up to 150 contacts. This is a great tool with the capabilities of Google Voice which will allow teachers to keep in touch with their students and even conduct lectures online making a webinar right in the video call. The integration with YouTube gives the opportunity to post that video after the webinar for those students who wasn’t present, so they could get familiar with it.
As a pleasant addition (mostly for students) there is a fair amount of sounds and visual effects as well as the opportunity to use various photos, videos, stickers, emojis and GIFs, available through the mobile app, Chrome extension, the Gmail and Google+ accounts.
Hangout Chat also integrated into Google Docs and Sheets which allow teachers to assign documents to his group of students and freely share information and assignments in parallel with viewing who enters those documents and works on them. This tool has an additional great search features with different filters by people, files or links left.
TeamViewer is an extremely useful tool with the remote control possibilities which teachers can apply for pair programming. Before we were talking about the web tools, but this one requires client installation.
With TeamViewer you can share screen of a computer or other device with your students by providing a relevant ID and password (an unattended access mode can also be set) and show how things should be done or let your students to complete tasks while you’re watching their every move and pitching in when it’s needed. But the free version of this tool also allows to work one-on-one, so it can be used to offer your student tech support and help him to set up the development environment. It’s as simple as that. Not only you can access your devices on the move or from anywhere, but you can hold video calls and conduct meetings when you need to deliver all of the information and discuss tasks at hand. The collaboration with this level of access is that much easier and more productive than ever before. This software package is a great tool by itself and it’s easily integrated in the educational process.
Among TeamViewer’s other features are file transfer, chat, broadcasting, desktop sharing with real-time screenshots, online meetings and presentations. By the way, it’s completely free for personal usage.
SendGrid is a trusted cloud-based communication platform with the high email delivery ratings. It is free of charge for a considerable amount of 100 emails sent each day and 40 000 emails per month which is more than enough for your class. Very often teachers have to make mailouts to students notifying them about some changes in a course or sending out some additional information concerning the lectures or given tasks, and SendGrid can absolutely help with that. Not only this is a top-quality tool that deals with a variety of email types, allows you to customize and automate the program, and ensures that your emails get where they need to, it also provides a wide range of additional features.
Now you can absolutely receive the real-time analytics with the open rate reporting and link tracking. Teachers will always know with the help of set notifications whether their students followed the sent link, opened the letter due to the email open tracker, unsubscribed or their letters went to spam. And that’s just the half of it. Everything depends on the goal you need to reach through the SendGrid’s powerful performance. Plus you can rest assure that all of your information is secure
CkeckiO ClassRoom is a great additional teaching tool where coding is intertwined with playing games. It supports Python and JavaScript programming languages and allows teachers to create their own classrooms, add students and configure a course which they consider fitted.
CheckiO contains more than 200 exciting missions and over 300 000 creative solutions to them which everyone who solved their task can easily view. The games itself doesn’t contain any studying courses that’s why CheckiO can be easily used as an extra resource for the class that already exists in real-life and needs more practice. A teacher here can oversee how his students are working on their solutions, what are their questions and comments, which tasks they solve easily and where they get stuck as well as they can create their own missions for their students and check how unique are their solutions.
GitHub has a free version which allows to store the unlimited amount of open source projects. By using it students can work on those projects alongside with their teachers or with each other, and the whole development environment there gives you the opportunity to effectively collaborate inside the platform.
In addition to being able to work on code GitHub supports other features of social networking like followers, feeds, wikis and collaboration graph, the last one being very useful if a teacher wants to see how his students work on their versions of a repository. You can also take advantage of the issue tracker, a fair amount of documentations, helpful code reviews and comments among other extra possibilities.
Tech.io is a free platform where teachers who are thinking on trying different angles of modern education can make the hands-on tutorials by creating the open source playgrounds. This learn by doing approach is a new and solid way to help make the process of learning technology much easier and much more accessible right from your browser.
Here through the collaboration and unique creative views on technology the professionals from everywhere in the world share knowledge, and a community of peers provides relevant insights and great support to everyone who wants to learn.
Tech.io is an ideal tool for teachers who will be able create playgrounds with quizzes and some coding exercises to help their students to understand and apply new concepts. As to all of the tutorials being open source and available due to the integration with Github it’s possible to edit the content and send pull requests to the authors for improvements. So, the students can also participate in a creation process pitching in their ideas. Of course, all of the contributions here are highly welcomed and desirable. With this tool spreading knowledge becomes that much easier and enjoyable.
When talking about teaching tools it’s hard not to mention Open edX which is an open source platform where at teachers’ disposal are different authoring tools and plugins for creation and course management. This way the most effective materials could be selected, organized or created and students’ learning process could be thoroughly planned and optimised which would result in the outcome being more successful and expected.
If you decided to create an online course with Open edX you can include in its content videos and text along with the variety of practice exercises, reading assignments, questions, homework and exams. The convenient design with visual cues and the simplicity of reorganisation and content publishing make the experience that much more pleasant. You can provide course discussions for different kinds of clarifications, collaborations and sharing with your students. Also you can assign students to a cohort group and create a different course content to different cohort groups. Another interesting features are the ability to deliver sets of randomized problems to your students by using randomized content blocks, create libraries, embed a Google Drive (with its docs, spreadsheets and images) or a Google calendar to highlight the important dates, line exam or a quiz. You can also configure digital certificates for the successful completion of your course which can be printed or shared.
As you can see there are a lot of opportunities with this tool. Open edX is a place where students and teachers from all over the world are involved in an evolutionary teaching and learning experience.
Conclusion
So, these were our 10 useful teaching tools that can be a great improvement to your coding class. I hope that you’ve found this information interesting and might consider turning to some of our suggestions. Please, leave your feedback, especially if you think that we’ve left out some of the tools that were helpful for you or can be integrated to improve the learning process.
