GitHub classroom is awesome and although it's been around for a while it has seen a lot of love recently, especially adding browser IDE integration and autograding.
We at Repl.it worked closely with them to make it really easy for students to start coding in seconds instead of hours. Announcement and HN discussion:
Thank you for the massive leaps you’re making with repl.it. It’s game changing how low the friction is.
How do I quickly convince my safeguarding team of the safety of repl.it and github integration?
We’re obviously concerned about pupils having contact with strangers. A much more common problem in schools is bullying. It’s also important to not allow yet another channel for harassment. Anything where pupils can privately message each other is usually quite difficult to endorse.
Thanks for the kind words. I don't think repl.it provides anymore social features than say GitHub does. How do you currently handle those concerns with regards to social coding on GitHub?
I have yet to deploy either in the classroom and haven’t really looked into where to begin. My hope is that when I start researching this I will encounter a “lock down social features to prevent bullying” checkbox, hah!
Today’s repl.it based lesson went amazingly well, yet again!
We have an upcoming teams feature that allows you to have almost a complete instance of repl.it for you, and we'll have special pricing for education, and maybe as part of it we'll add the checkbox. Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to email me amjad@repl.it with anymore feedback.
Isn't more important and effective to shut down harassers than give the harassers free roam but try to lock down the whole world to prevent harassment?
In real life, yes. With children, no. It’s harder and you really have to go out of your way to make it safe from day zero.
Much as I would love to have them run into problems which I could turn into “and the real treasure we found was the friends we made along the way” teachable moments for them, they generate far too much strife for each other without already.
Any additional tools to facilitate the social chaos of teenage life would be surplus to requirements.
We're excited about it. Cloud/browser coding being normalized is great for us.
I don't think what we're building is a direct competitor to IDEs -- you'll always need a repl in the same way you'll have a TV but still go to the movies, or you'll have a tablet but still have a desktop etc.
How do I quickly convince my safeguarding team of the safety of repl.it and github integration?
We’re obviously concerned about pupils having contact with strangers. A much more common problem in schools is bullying. It’s also important to not allow yet another channel for harassment. Anything where pupils can privately message each other is usually quite difficult to endorse.