Blank Student Screens from teacher's desktop

[Geoff]

ABTutor here.

[richard.thomas]

At the secondary school we use Vision 6 (I've been having issues with the latest version though) and in the primarys I use iTalc.

I think that out of all of the ones I've seen iTalc is best suited for teachers to use. It has a nice clean interface and doesn't give the teachers more power than I'd like them to have. If they added a feature which allows the 'master' to block a user's internet it'd be a perfect piece of software and I'd happily ditch vision for iTalc.

[zag]

I use italc, which does much the same as ranger remote control, but is free open source software, and works for and with other platforms as well as windows. It isn't the resource hog that ranger was (until we ditched it).

 

It does rely on properly set up DNS (whether in AD, or seperate). We had a lot of stale records as for some reason, when a machine changed IP, it often didn't remove the dynamic dns record it had before. I make sure the MS DNS scavanges regularly for old data.

 

Unlike Ranger remote control rather than just the machine name, italc also pulls the username down and displays that alongside (unless they updated ranger since).

 

http://italc.sourceforge.net

 

Teachers get access to the current ICT suite, and I get to remotely dial in to any machine in the school (it is great for simple maintenance).

 

I've tried italc and miserably failed. It seems to have problems with its security keys it generates and registry entries when you try to uninstall it. Always says it cant verify the key for some reason.

 

Also had a nightmare getting it to work on a 2nd teacher console.

 

Also had 100% cpu managing 30 computers at once.

 

And it cant even add machines by name, needs the IP address which is dynamic and changes sometimes resulting in a loss of connection.

 

Not very good software imo, but I hope it improves because the interface and features are great.

Edited February 27, 2008 by zag