SKYPE

[Face-Man]

My boss wants to get his class using Skype and I'm a bit nervous about letting year 10 lose with it. Has anybody used it in their organisations and are there any things I should be aware of....

[webman]

Whole class using skype = lot of bandwidth. Also they are able to talk to others on their own contact lists (outside of the school).

[russdev]

look at http://www.skype.com/business/ as this might be of some help

also look at http://www.gizmoproject.com/ as might be bale to hack the client so that can limit what students have access to etc

russ

[StewartKnight]

kids + skype = disaster
(imho)

[CyberNerd]

Could run an internal telephone exchange using asterisk:
http://www.asterisk.org/about

It can use SIP so will intergrate better with business VoIP than skype does, also you can set it up so its internal only.

bit more work than deploying skype, though

[plexer]

I think what you need to find out is what he wants to acheive and where this fits in with the curriculum so that you could offer some alternatives to acheive the result as I see this combination being a disaster.

If he just wants to do it because it's nice and shiny then you need to persuade him that it's not a good idea and to have some responses to throw at him.

Ben

[ZeroHour]

Faceman your boss is a n00b Computing Teacher aint he
I would stay away from skype unless you can disable alot of it. Secure file transfers mean kids can send anything out through a secure tunnel. You cant disable it either as thats how the Voip data is transfered