Infrastructure as a Service as a teaching tool

On upcoming blog posts I will be documenting (technically and figuratively) several website that can be used in Computer Science classes. These websites have been chosen for their ability to emulate a Unix environment (primarily for python scripting use) and the ability to share and collaborate the code with instructors and other students.

The following websites:
www.koding.com
brython.info
Cloud9
IDEone
Python Anywhere

Of these three websites, I will document and assess their ability for use for beginning software developer students.

The criteria for assessing these abilities:

• Ease of use in usage.
• Ease of use in installing (brython).
• The capabilities of each website in terms of development environments.
• Reliability of each website.
• The ability to collaborate and/or evaluate source code.
• The aesthetic design of each website.
• The overall usability for each website.

The websites will then be compared with their strengths and weaknesses and it will ultimately be up to the reader to decide which platform best fits their needs in a classroom.