Add as a preferred source on Google


GitHub Simplifies Grading Process with New Classroom Assistant

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 10/08/18

GitHub Simplifies Grading Process with New Classroom Assistant

Classroom has made it easy for teachers to set up courses in GitHub, the open-source service that allows developers to share and collaborate on code. So far, according to the organization, some 3 million assignments or "repositories" have been submitted to the platform. Now, GitHub has released Classroom Assistant, a tool intended to help streamline the grading process for teachers using Classroom. The utility allows instructors to download all of their students' GitHub-hosted work, saving them the time it would take to clone each repository manually. The program works on Windows, macOS and Linux, as does the entire education platform.

As with Classroom itself, the new function lets students submit links to their assignment repository to the school's learning management system. Teachers can give feedback through comments in GitHub while still keeping grades in the LMS.

According to Stephen Cerruti, a computer science learning facilitator at San Diego charter e3 Civic High School, "This system organizes the resources required to teach coding in a way that significantly simplifies the task of assigning and collecting work from students."

The news came just days after GitHub released a new version of its Student Developer Pack. The pack includes developer tools that are free for academic work. For example, the pack previously offered Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, and Travis CI, among others. Now it also includes four new offerings:

  • Algolia's application programming interfaces helps students add search functionality to their projects;
  • Heroku is a cloud platform for placing apps online;
  • JetBrains has contributed integrated development environments for Java, Ruby, Python and several other programming languages; and
  • GitKraken added Glo Boards, its issue and task tracker, to help students stay on top of school work.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Schoolchildren Work on Personal Computers

    Code.org Reinvents Hour of Code as Hour of AI

    Education nonprofit Code.org has partnered with CSforALL to launch the Hour of AI, a global initiative providing learning activities for AI education.

  • students raising their hands and participating in a classroom discussion

    Report Explores Link Between Student Engagement and Learning

    Over 90% of teachers, principals, and superintendents agree that student engagement is a critical metric for understanding overall achievement, according to a new survey report from Discovery Education.

  • magnifying glass highlighting a human profile silhouette, set over a collage of framed icons including landscapes, charts, and education symbols

    New AI Detector Identifies AI-Generated Multimedia Content

    Amazon Web Services and DeepBrain AI have launched AI Detector, an enterprise-grade solution designed to identify and manage AI-generated content across multiple media types. The collaboration targets organizations in government, finance, media, law, and education sectors that need to validate content authenticity at scale.

  • tutor and student working together at a laptop

    You've Paid for Tutoring. Here's How to Make Sure It Works.

    As districts and states nationwide invest in tutoring, it remains one of the best tools in our educational toolkit, yielding positive impacts on student learning at scale. But to maximize return on investment, both financially and academically, we must focus on improving implementation.