kids needing full access for IT lessons

[ajs]

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

 

I've setup specific GPOs to allow our OCR students access to things like right click. Whether or not the course requires it, I don't know, but the SOW that the teachers have designed around the course have it.

 

Part of the BTEC ICT course that we ran for the last 2 years has needed access to the desktop, search, recycle bin etc.

[farmerste]

these are not free, but pretty good

 

cleanslate software

 

deep freeze software

 

and a reborn card for hardware, you can give them any permissions you like then over the machine, and all will be undone at next reboot

 

hope it helps:)

[farmerste]

 

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.

 

 

in my view teachers 'use' computers the same way they 'use' the toilet, and they then leave it for someone to clean up the mess. I would love to be able to totally trash a system, and then have it quickly recovered to a 'new' state by someone .

 

ah wait thats me........ errr i think ??

[penfold]

@srochford: Not all restrictions are put in place by the techs in the schools. Some of them come from the teachers who ask for restrictions to be put in place because they dont like the pupils fiddling with things when they should be working.

 

In my last place, I had almost got a complaint from the IT teacher as 1 pupil had changed her backdrop. Although it was reset when they logged out, it was still requested that a total lockdown was in place.

[Trapper]

We're looking at a couple of virtual PCs for this job.

 

@Ric - VirtualBox, I was racking my brains all Friday after trying to remember what that was called!

 

There are two things it needs to do: 1) Reset back to base settings after each use, and 2) Access USB.

 

VMware Player will access the USB ports, but doesn't support the snapshots.

Virtual PC 2004 has snapshots, but no USB support.

 

I asked around for a couple of quotes for VMware Workstation, and almost choked on my tea! It's great software, but too expensive.

 

I'll give VirtualBox a try tonight and see if that can do what we need.

[Alis_Klar]

Hi,

 

Any update on whether Sun VirtualBox Supports USB AND Snapshots? Also glad to hear it's open source!!

[Sirbendy]

What about the USB capable player bit, combined with steadystate? Both free, both useable.

[Theblacksheep]

Hi,

 

Any update on whether Sun VirtualBox Supports USB AND Snapshots? Also glad to hear it's open source!!

 

Yes, although it doesnt handle coping of VMs as well as VMware, it takes some fiddling to change the disk UUID.

 

 

We've been messing with virtualbox for a kiosk VMplayer that gets autobooted into fullscreen mode with no (well, secret) escape.

[Sirbendy]

Yes, although it doesnt handle coping of VMs as well as VMware, it takes some fiddling to change the disk UUID.

 

 

We've been messing with virtualbox for a kiosk VMplayer that gets autobooted into fullscreen mode with no (well, secret) escape.

 

There's a provision for that on the commandline...damned if I can recall what though..Vboxcopy or Vboxclone, or similar. All my home machinery is Vboxed..

[tonyd]

I'm sure VMware Server ticks all the boxes:

It's free




It supports USB

It supports snapshots