pabs1983 Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 does anybody know of a free monitoring tool. At present i am using VNCThumbnails to view vnc connections, however, if a machine is restarted, you need to re-add the host, some students know this and will quite happily restart there computer to avoid been 'watched'.
tmcd35 Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 iTALC is mentioned quiet a lot in these forums. I've used it before and it's pretty good for a freebie. I believe it's VNC based so may have similar issues as VNC Thumbnail viewer. Personally I think AB-Tutor was more than worth the money we spent on it
CyberNerd Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 Free classroom monitoring tool .. a teacher. sorry. I'm in one of those moods...
tmcd35 Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 .. a teacher. He said free. As much as teachers like to complain about pay and working conditions, I'm sure most are paid more than me
Guest theeldergeek Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 does anybody know of a free monitoring tool. At present i am using VNCThumbnails to view vnc connections, however, if a machine is restarted, you need to re-add the host, some students know this and will quite happily restart there computer to avoid been 'watched'. LANview. It's no longer developed, but we have little or no problems with it.
pabs1983 Posted October 8, 2009 Author Posted October 8, 2009 I agree with the teacher comment, however, in the real world most teachers haven't got the minerals to confront pupils now a days. so instead they choose to spy and let a 'senior' member of staff deal with it... we have CrossTec over some of the school, but its paid for per department.
jsnetman Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 Free ones never quite cut the mustard for me, they have too many overheads like configuration and running problems. We decided to go with ABTutor, their licencing model is the cheapest around i.e you pay only for the tutor licence all clients are free.. We just bought 5 licences (£700) for tutors who will really use the software and installed the software onto USB memory so they can use it in any classroom.
HodgeHi Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 I like iTalc. I have just started to roll it out across our machines. I like the fact that it doesn't actually use passwords to authenticate. It works quite well as well if the machine you are using it on (teacher station) is up to the task. A naff graphics card ain't gonna cut it to be honest. I once ran it on an integrated matrox g200 something on my HP server. It didn't work too well though. I have since put it on an iMac with an Nvidia 9400 mobile chip and although the graphics card isn't still the greatest out there it does work reasonably well. I had around 40 machines on the screen at one time being monitored. It has quite a few tools in it too like most do. We had NetOp here before this and i think in comparison this is as good if not better than the version we had, v4 i think it was, although i also ran this on the HP server. The only downside to iTalc i found, unless someone can correct me and tell me how was the deployment of the client side app.
kearton Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 We used to have NetOp but had loads of problems with it (for several versions) We ditched it in favour of iTalc. (Client installed with NO fuss as an MSI)
badders Posted October 8, 2009 Posted October 8, 2009 We also used to have netop and have just moved to italc. It's easier to install than netop and it's free!
BlueDragon Posted October 9, 2009 Posted October 9, 2009 Despite some of the above comments Netop have made considerable improvements with their products in recent years and now offer a number of options to suit all levels of school requirements. Of particular interest might be Netop MyVision FREE Netop MyVision Free which would give you the functionality you are looking for in a completely free product. Hope this helps.
tmcd35 Posted October 9, 2009 Posted October 9, 2009 One problem I noticed with NetOp (may have improved in recent versions) is the students screen would flicker when you connect to their machine so they'd know you are watching.
BlueDragon Posted October 9, 2009 Posted October 9, 2009 One problem I noticed with NetOp (may have improved in recent versions) is the students screen would flicker when you connect to their machine so they'd know you are watching. Hi TMCD35 You can stop this happening if you connect in bit map mode. Go to the teacher console and: Options>supervision, then check observe in bit map mode and remote control in bitmap mode. Also in session properties in the same window make sure that your optimisation does not disable wallpaper etc in the desktop tab. This should then allow you to connect to the student machines with no flicker. The way Netop is setup by default is to minimise the use of bandwidth (especially important if you were using it over the internet for example). It uses GDI hooking to capture the screen controls and sends these. It is this that causes the flicker. By setting it up as above you are sending bitmaps and so there is no interruption to the display commands. For an average network the increase in bandwidth doing it in this way is no problem at all. Hope this helps. If you have any further questions let me know
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