kids needing full access for IT lessons

[e_g_r]

Our IT teacher says that as part of the course the kids need access to things such as the desktop, recycle bins, right click and many other features that we turn off. Apparently they have to use these and produce evidence of use for their course.

 

Have any of you come accross this and how did you facilitate it?

 

Suppose i'll end up having to create an OU in AD with weaker policies as well as a new workstation profile.

[powdarrmonkey]

It's the first I've heard. Anyway, I've just completed deploying a VirtualPC image with a single user that has full functionality, but uses SteadyState to reset it each boot. We're using it for ECDL tests, but you could do the same thing.

[teejay]

Our IT teacher says that as part of the course the kids need access to things such as the desktop, recycle bins, right click and many other features that we turn off. Apparently they have to use these and produce evidence of use for their course.

 

Have any of you come across this and how did you facilitate it?

 

Suppose i'll end up having to create an OU in AD with weaker policies as well as a new workstation profile.

 

Nope, what course are they doing? I would contact the examinations board for the course and get them to clarify requirements to you.

[maniac]

Our IT teacher says that as part of the course the kids need access to things such as the desktop, recycle bins, right click and many other features that we turn off. Apparently they have to use these and produce evidence of use for their course.

 

Have any of you come accross this and how did you facilitate it?

 

Suppose i'll end up having to create an OU in AD with weaker policies as well as a new workstation profile.

 

Actually we had this last year for part of a course, although don't ask me which one it was.

 

We created one special username which all the kids used that had a specially written group policy that allowed them to do what they needed. This was setup to only log on in one specific room, and enabled only at the time they needed it. One of us also supervised the lesson when they did these activities and watched for kids doing things that wern't on the course.

 

It worked ok, apart from us having to re-adjust screen resolutions back to what they used to be, as part of the course was changing the screen settings.

 

Mike.

[CyberNerd]

I was certainly under the impression that QCA approved courses are not allowed to be technology (vendor) specific. what course is this? It must be an industry qualification

[jcollings]

We get this request for adult ed courses. To get round it we created a virtual PC image that was basically unlocked and let them use that.

[maniac]

I was certainly under the impression that QCA approved courses are not allowed to be technology (vendor) specific. what course is this? It must be an industry qualification

 

I have no idea what the course was, I wasn't directly involved myself in that particular 'project' and I've since left that school, so I can't really find out now. It could well have been an industry qualification of some sort.

 

Mike.

[Sylv3r]

Sounds like something an exam board would come up with but have no idea how feasible it is to do in a school environment.

 

We had something similar a couple of years back and we provided laptops to students so they could do the edit desktop, run search, change resolution type questions.

[amcevoy]

I would certainly ask to see the curriculum. The teacher may have some misconceptions about how the course is supposed to go. But I would use VirtualBox machines and accounts with mandatory profiles. Surely you allow your teachers to right click etc so I would house the account in that OU.

[CyberNerd]

Sounds like something an exam board would come up with but have no idea how feasible it is to do in a school environment.

I doubt if they'd get something like this through QCA approval though, needing right-click, desktops could exclude entire technologies. what if the school had a suite full of mac's for example or had invested in hundreds of eeepc's that have no desktops!.

IMO no GCSE/Alevel course should focus on any manufacturers system.

[ChrisC]

we had a handful of old machines that were built standalone to allow kids to do this sort of stuff, they just had usb sticks to get the screens off....low tech compared to the virtualpc solution, but works.

 

Chris

[bossman]

@ChrisC: we have done exactly the same thing, standalone in every ICTsuite to allow the students to fulfil the exam board criteria.

[Friez]

I would create a virtual machine for all of this and deploy the image / VM software around.

[ajbritton]

Could maybe use SteadyState....

[TechMonkey]

Having a nightmare with this at the moment as I can't get VMWare to package easily. I don't think it is as specific as right click and that we have been asked for things like changing the resolution, setting up a network card etc nothing hardware locked in.

 

Is VPC easy to package up?

[BaccyNet]

Strangly enough I've just come accross this with an OCR course we are running this year. There seems to be a whole load of stuff the kids need to do for evidence but we have disabled it (and have done for years now)

 

One member of staff has decided to be creative with it to help us out (i.e. so we dont have to change any policies) but this seems to be becoming a growing issue.

 

Unfortunatly with my current happiness with this school, I'd rather give everyone admin access just to stop the constant whinging:( (and no, we are not overally strict with our policies)

[Wheelgunr]

Here at my college, I created a specific user keyed to a specific lab and it's computers. When I get a call from Adult Ed or DGCE about night classes or non-credit classes, I activate the account in AD, and give it a specific login time and expiration time, as well as an end date for when the account "expires". I don't worry about machine settings because 1) That's Help Desk's arena, and 2) We use Deep Freeze to reset everything on reboot.

[EduTech]

Our Director of ICT asked for this the other day just the right click that we normally block them from doing. we have allowed them to do it in the end..

 

James.

 

Edit: ours is the OCR course also

[ChrisN-0123]

Our IT teacher says that as part of the course the kids need access to things such as the desktop, recycle bins, right click and many other features that we turn off. Apparently they have to use these and produce evidence of use for their course.

 

Have any of you come accross this and how did you facilitate it?

 

Suppose i'll end up having to create an OU in AD with weaker policies as well as a new workstation profile.

 

I setup a couple of stand alones! They then use a memory stick top copy screen shots off etc.

 

Has worked fine for the last 8 years of me being there. If you're worried they will install crap on it, then put something like Deepfreeze on it to make the hdd read-only.

[googlemad]

The problem with Virtual PC is no USB support (Or certainly none the last time I checked). Which means buying VMWare.

 

Standalone machine probably the best idea, set it up and get a ghost image.

 

We had the exact same request last year but the classroom in question now uses Deep Freeze so no problems there.

[mullet_man]

We have a couple of old laptops setup for this situation, they are standalone.

[Ric_]

The problem with Virtual PC is no USB support (Or certainly none the last time I checked). Which means buying VMWare.

 

VirtualBox (or Sun xVM VirtualBox as it's now known) and the free VMWare Player both have USB support.

[DG01]

Have had requests for search to be enabled and basic windows functions but never recycle bins or right clicks etc

[john]

I think its an OCR Nationals thingy I believe, never come across it with AQA or EdExcel before, but I haven't read the latest incarnation of the silibus recenty

[srochford]

Wow!

 

I'm amazed at the negativity I'm reading here. It seems as if Edugeek is now solely used by people who see their jobs as making it difficult for anyone to use ICT in school.

 

How on earth can you expect teachers to be able to use the systems if you don't allow them to make basic changes to the OS? How can it be difficult to allow users to reset the screen resolution - just reset it at logon or reboot. How difficult to allow users to changes icons on the desktop (or whatever you call the "home" screen)? - just reset them at logoff/on.

 

The same goes for almost all changes that a user might make - this is nothing to do with being OS specfic. If you use Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix to do your job then you're going to want to make changes to the settings and schools ought to be showing their students how to do this and coping with the fact that they do.

 

As (fortunately!) several people have said you can do almost all of this with VMs and just a few bits need physical machines. You either do that with a sacrificial standalone or with machines where you make sure that things are reset when the user rebooots.

 

I always thought that the "edu" bit of Edugeek's name was there because this site is supposed to be something to do with education. I'd guess I was wrong and I'm rather sad to find that.