Observing a computer science 101 class

Observed on Oct 30, 2014 - a CPSC1010 class

This professor used a projector setup with her own personal laptop.
The subject language was C and a swap function with pointers was being dissected and discussed. I noted that she was using Word to review code in C.
Next lesson was a quiz review. She went over the questions and answers using the above technique.

At a particular point in the classroom she had to use the faculty computer which was a Windows machine which necessitated the use of SSH. The SSH program for Windows might be difficult to see because of the white background. Unsure if there are program options to change the text font or size.

Using a SSH shell, she demonstrated the use of command line arguments with argc and argv. She would alternate between using VI and then using the command line compiler (GCC) to compile source and observe output.

I noticed most of the students (save a few for Mac users) were using SSH/Putty to use the compiler on school computers. This would be an excellent use of an online IDE as it would make it a lot easier to students/teachers to view/edit/compile source code. Instead of using the cumbersome SSH program, class exercises could easily be done using koding or even cloud9. There was also a special needs student and I wondered how this affected the teacher's methods.

Personal Thoughts:
I have discussed using cloud-based IDEs to help demonstrate programming exercises with the professor. However, I had to be mindful because techniques cannot be easily changed overnight and many teachers have a method to how they teach (e.g. using Word to go over C code) and their personal preferences. I personally think programming code would be easier to view/learn from in terms of it being shown in an IDE environment or an application where a teacher could change the font/size. Students could vastly benefit from using cloud-based IDEs as well. For those who don't know exactly (or yet) how to use command line based editors or SSH/Putty on Windows, they could easily use koding to type out and compile example code. This eliminates the hassle of having to log on to a specific computer (which can be confusing to the first year student). This also effectively cuts the users who are signed on to school workstations thus eliminating extemporaneous workloads on said workstations that could be utilized by later year students.