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Reply With Quotekath (11th February 2009)
We are due to run a trial of Impero. Has anyone got more recent comments than I can find on the site (which seem mostly very positive)? We are an upper school - I wondered if it was aimed more at younger students.
All input would be greatly appreciated.
Having used it (as a teacher) at my previous school, I can genuinely say it is the best thing since sliced bread, it has so many intuitive and useful features which are great in the classroom. The ability to filter the net according to individuals, groups or room policies is great, the kids never found a way around the screen blocking and the file deployment and capture was superb. Overall I would definitely recommend this product - it is worth every penny.
kath (11th February 2009)
We have been using Impero for a while now, and have recently renewed our maintenance contract for another 12 months. We are a secondary school with approx 900 students.
Teaching staff like it as it gives them greater control over their classroom environment, not only in preventing students straying off-task but also assisting them in getting started more quickly by being able to send them documents, URLs etc which open up on the client PCs automatically.
I would say from a technical support perspective Impero is in an almost continual state of development, which means that it has had its fair share of bugs. In fairness though, the development team are very approachable, very responsive and receptive to ideas when it comes to product enhancements. V3 is due in a few months time.....
We find it is very useful being able to log on to a whole classroom of PCs and send commands to them, particularly if you want/need to install programs 'locally'. This is especially useful when you get a teacher brandishing a CDROM they have just bought and ask 'can this be put on the network for next lesson please.....'
On balance, I would recommend it too, I think we would struggle now without it.
kath (11th February 2009)
We are using Impero and are very pleased with it.
Support is also excellent: We were having some issues with it monitoring websites on our vista clients (we were aware that vista support was not guaranteed at the time) and in order to track down the issues we had an Impero developer visit our site twice.
Matt
kath (11th February 2009)
Hi Kath
If your going to trial it you'll soon find out how good it is, We have it on all PC's in school and love it.
If you'd like a short guide (written by one of our ICT Teachers) drop me a PM
Steve
garethedmondson (25th March 2009), kath (12th February 2009), linkazoid (12th February 2009), lionsl2005 (27th April 2010)
Have a look at AB Tutor as well Kath. It seems to do all what Imperio does at about 1/3 of the price. Rolling it out here now and seems very good.
Jazzman (11th February 2009), kath (12th February 2009), lionsl2005 (28th April 2010)
Let us know how ABTutor works out for you - I would be very interested!
So far extremely well. We will have it rolled out to all Curriculum Machines by the end of the week, and slowly doing staff laptops and PC's as and when we can.Originally Posted by Jazzman
I gave a short demo of it to the ICT Departmenal contacts last night (Basically the person in each deprartment who is in charge of their ICT delivery). All where very impressed. The main parts being the usual way of locking all the PC's down with a screen on asking for teachers attention, showing a demo of whats on the teachers screen to the rest of the class and turning off the internet.
Two other great parts on it was that in 'detailed view' you can see the name of each PC in a list, and next to it an icon of the software that is running on that PC at the time like Word / Explorer etc. If it seems that they are hiding games in Explorer under the Word window you can hover your mouse over the Explorer Icon and it tells you what webpage they are on. Just right click and close and it's gone.
The second part was the quick poll system. You bang out a few questions of multiple choice or single answer and send them to all the students in your class instantly. They then respond and you get the results instantly on your screen. Perhaps something that can be used at the end of the lesson to make sure they have learnt some of the information you have taught them.
On the NM / Technician side of thing you can also view the entire school at the same time. So, if a teacher has a class on his/her AB Tutor Control screen you can still see and interact if needed at the same time. My HelpDesk server is running this at the moment and I can see all the PC's that are set up and switched on.
The installation of the client on the teachers laptops and PC's also enables us to remote into them and fix a percentage of the errors there and then instead of running half way across the school for something easy.
All the Tutor control PC's can be setup for the rooms the teachers are in. This allows the teacher to select only the room they are teaching in and not to see all the other PC's on the network.
Cost get cheaper the more AB Control license your buy. Clients are free and unlimited. The school purchases 10 licenses at £125 each, but the more you get the cheaper it gets. We might need one or two more to cover a couple of the teachers (SMT) who want to monitor the VI Form room etc, but the pricing stays in the 10+ bracket and does not start again as a single license purchase. So I will be paying £125 per license for each one now.
I think that covers what I've found out so far, any more questions then please shout.
Jazzman (12th February 2009)
Oh, I did miss out one more item. I've posted a request for a bad word list on another thread in this topic area.
You can also set a policy inside AB Tutor to monitor key presses and words. If a word on your list is spotted it will take a screen shot, time, date and PC and flag up a warning for you as well. All the evidence you need to stamp on the little darlings when needed.
This will help on the cyber bullying and other rubbish that goes on in the background that no one ever seems to see.
Ditto on Impero, sounds like a different licencing model though?
Yeah, we saw the Impero Demo and both products look similar. I just thought that AB Control was better value for the school.
If you look at the Impero forum though, there's a lot of new features being added in the new version 3 which is due out shortly, which makes it far more appealing than ABTutor.
Used ABTutor myself - very feature packed and works like a dream. Would be interested to see a feature comparison list with Impero - I can't see Impero beating ABTutor for features and ease of use, our teachers love it. ABTutor is also under constant development and they're very approachable too.
Bad vibes from Impero staff trying to force their way onto the edugeek wiki here in the past left a bad taste too.
I agree with your comments about the similarity. We trialled both products & I let the staff(teachers) who use the product decide. We had a budget that allowed us to licence either product, they chose Impero, saying it was more 'teacher-friendly' .... whatever that means
In a similar way Impero is constantly under development also, if you check the forums you'll notice new revisions every few weeks, and server updates etc. The development team on this are also directly approachable via email or phone.
There is a free download of Impero located somewhere on their website, might be worth just giving it a try?
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