Some services, like Netflix and Hulu Plus, may also require additional subscription fees to actually stream content. Several broadcast and cable channels also have their own apps for streaming video content as well. Well, guess what? Add another item to the pile of things that people said would “never” be possible in computing.We agree-lots of users like watching video on an iPad when watching the 55-inch flatscreen in the living room isn't convenient. In 2010, computer programming was one of the cardinal subjects that iPad sceptics insisted it would “never” be possible to teach using an iPad. On a wider note, I think this milestone is emblematic of the increasing maturity of iOS.
Given the success of this project, it’s almost inconceivable that we could justify provisioning a whole computer lab for just one subject.
This document was then emailed to me as a PDF where I could mark it digitally using PDF Expert on my iPad and return it to the students via email and archive my copy. The only downside to this workflow is that you lose the syntax colouring from Textastic.
We went through a few iterations of the exact workflow for this but, in the end, we settled on copying and pasting the code from Textastic and the testing runs from Prompt into Pages and presenting them in a monospaced font along with the rest of the report.
Once students complete an assignment, they have to turn in a report with some text, their source code and evidence of systematic testing of their code. They’re not quite as delightful to type on as an Apple Bluetooth keyboard but they do the job just fine and none of them broke. They cost £9.16 on Amazon and they held up perfectly well for the year. The downside to this is that you lose even more screen space for seeing your code.įor these classes, I bought a number of these Bluetooth keyboards. Textastic does a good job of trying to help you by creating a row of five-way buttons across the top of the standard keyboard that allow quick access to a large number of symbols. When you’re programming, you’re always reaching for those weird symbols in the second and third keyboards on the iPad. This class was the first time we had deployed Bluetooth keyboards for use with the iPad. It wasn’t a frequent enough occurrence to warrant a lot of debugging. I haven’t yet figured out if that’s just a bug or if there’s some server-side timeout happening. Occasionally, Prompt wouldn’t maintain the connection to the server while the pupils were editing code in Textastic. This problem will go away after our refresh. The biggest complaint was that, on our iPad 1s, resuming the switched-to app was slower than we would have liked. With the multitasking gestures in use, the switch was easy enough. The idea of switching between two apps to edit and run code didn’t seem to have much impact on pupils. Textastic has a really nice feature whereby, if a file was initially downloaded from a remote server, Textastic can send the file back where it came from with one tap. In the end, we settled on using Prompt for our SSH client and Textastic to edit the code.
In my last piece, I was debating the exact combination of software to use. If I had automated shutting it down at, say, 10pm and relaunching it at 9am, I could have cut the cost to about £35 for the year but it’s almost not worth my time to bother. I didn’t do anything to limit the time the server ran - it was on 24x7 for the whole year. All-in, it cost me £65 to run this server for the past academic year. I set it up, it ran for over 5,000 hours of operation without a hitch and I turned it off today. We ran into no problems with with the EC2 server at all. I’m not sure it would have been ideal to actually edit code in, but it was perfectly fine for running programs. We used the EU West (Ireland) region for our Amazon EC2 instance so it wasn’t far away from us and the interactive response was just fine. Responsiveness of the remote server wasn’t an issue at all.
Our iOS SSH client, Prompt, supports using SSH keypairs for authentication but distributing the private keys is a little fiddly so I reconfigured SSH on the server to allow password authentication. I did this manually because I could, but it’s easily automatable if you needed to. The next step was to set up user accounts for each pupil. For neatness, I allocated an Elastic IP Address to the instance and created a sensible DNS name for it. I used the standard Amazon Linux AMI, and launched it in a Micro instance. The Server Sideīack in August, I set up an Amazon EC2 instance. Last August, I wrote about my new approach to teaching Ruby programming on our iPads. I just shut down the Amazon EC2 instance we’ve been using all school year, so I thought it was worth reflecting on.