I spent a WEEK out of my computational basics curriculum teaching middle school students just about paths. Just about FILES and paths. Did this with a VPS and chromebooks SSHd in. Also, later, Raspberry Pi units.
They simply don't understand computers when they walk in my classroom door. They understand mobile app user interfaces.
Readers of this thread may be interested in lower cost options. I built a middle school robotics curriculum around Dexter GoPiGo robots: https://www.dexterindustries.com/gopigo3/
While you can do visual/block based coding on these, it also has built in Python support and the whole curriculum I ran was Python based.
My criteria for selection of this platform included:
- support for Grove sensors
- flexibility in machining own parts if desired
- Python support
- rPi based
(no affiliation with this company, just a positive real world end-user/educator experience)
This past year I taught Python to 7th and 8th graders.
But to 6th graders I taught CLI basics and Inform7 (all on the command line).
It was one of the most successful "programming and computer basics" courses I've ever run. A fair amount of custom tooling to make it run smoothly, but a shared VPS for the students and some deploy scripts made it possible to not only make individual games but also collaborate on a larger scale game written collaboratively (each user writing their own set of rooms which was compiled automatically into a full game).
I used to pay for GSuite and still found my content being mined. With all due respect to Google, I find it hard to believe that they're as consistent as they believe with filtering paid vs free accounts across the service.
I could be, and am open to being, wrong, though. I'm not Google. Just found myself with substantially less targeted advertising once I left.
And actually that's slightly interesting - how does one determine a bug re: being the recipient of targeted ads when you shouldn't be? Probably wording it wrong without coffee in me, but I hadn't thought of it like that.
turc1656 (other direct reply to you) noted what I was getting at, but to expand on it...
I'm pretty careful about what I share with various services. Facebook (Instagram, etc) are all silo'd off to separate access points, phone is devoid of any of them, you get the gist. The only thing I didn't mind was Google, since I was paying for it, and it's easy to think that paying for it means it'll work how you expect it to and your privacy is intact.
Thus I'd keep Google apps signed in to the account, and I'd keep a tab open with Gmail all day, so short of incognito tabs, I was almost always signed into it.
Your _email_ isn't scanned, but Google doesn't even do that for free email accounts since..., what, 2014? Most people who decry the whole Gmail reading emails angle don't seem to understand this. They still track you as you move around for advertising purposes, though, and that was enough to make me just not want a Google account.
Siloing social media probably reduced my targeted advertising by 20%, and the absolute biggest reduction I found in my life was by getting rid of Google. It's honestly jaw dropping how much tailored content you get shoved at you that "waking up" from it can blow your mind (read: less depression, fomo, and so on, which more people seem to be catching on to).
YMMV though. I don't hate advertising and think it certainly has a place in society, and some people find it useful/fine/acceptable. Just noting my experiences.
> They still track you as you move around for advertising purposes, though, and that was enough to make me just not want a Google account.
Firefox containers solved[1] this for me. They are probably the biggest privacy boost I've felt for a decade. I've got three separate Google containers (private Google account and general Google properties like youtube, and two separate Gsuite accounts), individual Facebook, Reddit and HN containers, a separate containers for various banks I interact with, another separate for online purchases (plus goodreads, because I don't want Amazon to leak), and an individual Pandora one (because why not?).
1: Well, "solved" in that it's harder for them. They can still track me, but at least now they get conflicting cookies from different types of sites but the same IP which might confuse their metrics some. I'm aware I'm probably just making it harder to state anything about me with too much confidence at most.
Yes, but Firefox on Mac is honestly nowhere near the level of polish that other browsers are, so I only use it for social media. My default browser is Safari, which never sees a Google signin anymore. shrug
Besides what the parent already mentioned, I was also a paying GSuite user for some years (when it was still called Google Apps for Applications/Business). And I had e-mail contacts (Google Mail is covered by GApps) appear as suggested profiles, etc. in Google+ (then not covered by GApps).
Even if there is no malice, it seems that they are not enforcing strict boundaries between their products.
> And I had e-mail contacts (Google Mail is covered by GApps) appear as suggested profiles, etc. in Google+ (then not covered by GApps).
It's still a Google service tied to your account, gsuite or not. It doesn't surprise me one bit that there's still a bit of integration there. They already have your email and the emails of others in your address book that you willingly gave them. It's not like they're mining you to steal those and give you creepy suggestions.
> G Suite customers own their data, not Google. The data that G Suite organizations and users put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements nor sell it to third parties. We offer our customers a detailed data processing amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days. Finally, we provide tools that make it easy for customer administrators to take their data with them if they choose to stop using our services, without penalty or additional cost imposed by Google
>No advertising in G Suite
There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or
use data in G Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the
ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
The specificity of "for advertising purposes" leaves wide open the likelihood that it is scanned for "their own purposes", per the question that was asked.
Or for the purposes of, “spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files…”, which seems reasonable and fair.
In my (non-expert) opinion, one of the most important parts of the linked DPA is where Google claims that they are a Processor and not a Controller under GDPR.
A Controller has discretion of what processing takes place and how it is used. A Controller also has greater responsibilities under GDPR to both the data subject and to the authorities. If Google wants to limit their exposure to GDPR (and I see every indication that this is their current strategy), then they need to make sure they only carry out the processing activities outlined in the DPA.
This sounds impressive. I too would be interested in seeing the teaching materials you are using for your curriculum. As a father of two girls, aged two and five, I enjoy reading about girls getting exposed early to programming. I plan to start introducing my oldest soon once she progresses her reading skills more.
If you'd be willing to publish it, the study guide/course outline/lesson plans for this would be really interesting -- especially as its getting results.
in so far as ssh is just one of dozens of commands that the girls learn on the command line, it's perhaps not.
in so far as it makes them realize that computers are discrete entities that are networked and that this is what the internet actually IS... it's priceless.
The first time we connected to a remote machine in a different state it BLEW THEIR MINDS. One of them asked if it was EVEN LEGAL :)
It's a single command, yes, but it's also the pivot point for a whole unit on remote access, networking, IP addresses, etc.
I think if ssh is really just "time with a command line" then it's a super valuable exercise. You can remember none of it and still go away with the lesson that the CSI looking thing really ain't that complicated.
I've done something similar, but with the boys in my kids' circle, who have all grown up with playstray-tions and whatnot, only we are using retro computers that don't have internet or amazing games or heavy tooling, but rather just Amstrad or Commodore or Spectrum or Oric Basic, a bit of modern disk tech (48k RAM with 8Gigabytes of storage) and some happy game-playing, or so, before getting stuck into what programming is, how different computers work in different ways to accomplish similar things, and so on.
I had the identical experience when they first launched and started heavily promoting their fiber to the home in seattle a year or two back. Same terrible v6 site performance, same oversubscription issues, and same "we never received the modem" claim. This claim didn't show up till about 2 months after I sent it in, by which time I no longer had my UPS tracking number. Seems like a real pattern with them and felt scammy even then.
FWIW you can still work with Drive like this, though it's somewhat hidden functionality. "Shift+Z" after selecting an item will bring up the otherwise hidden "Add to" dialogue, allowing you to add an object to multiple parent folders/tags.
Google had a chance to be the open standards communications platform. Just as Gmail succeeds in the world of federated email, Google was poised to do the same with standards based chat, RSS, etc.
Vic Gundotra, with apparently passive approval from above, killed all that and Google lost its only real differentiator in this competition: not being the centralized bad guys.
I think that's a bit unfair as Google tried to federate social networking many times but failed (ActivityStreams is one that comes to mind but there were several others).
The big change, imo, came when Larry Page returned as CEO. He shifted the company's strategy away from "technology" and towards "products". In same cases this was a major success, it's when Android started to actually improve its UX, but it also meant no longer focusing on things like standards as much.
Same. Linux on a P50 with 64GB ECC ram, Xeon. Battery life isn't hot, but I'll suffer this compromise for the power and flexibility it gives otherwise.
They simply don't understand computers when they walk in my classroom door. They understand mobile app user interfaces.