BlueDragon

This is correct, the new Netop Vision Pro caters for class-wide remote login from the teachers console.

Take a look at PaperCut or Software Shelf's Print Manager Plus (Academic Edition), both very good. Note some print management solutions are rebadged OEM of PaperCut. You cant go far wrong with PaperCut, very robust and good value.

When it comes to picking classroom management products it can sometimes be difficult to see how the products differ, but there are some specific areas to consider. Most classroom management tools will cover the basics and offer something in the way of teacher control and student restriction. However, the better products out there put the teacher’s needs front and center. Meaning once it is rolled out into your classrooms teachers will find it quick to adopt and easy to use. Usability and willingness to adopt ensure that the return on investment in teaching and learning results is quickly achieved. What is more, for the IT Administrator a robust and reliable product coupled with great technical support and the certainty of happy teachers will set various products apart from each other. If you consider the industry leading products, leading technologies, development history, global coverage, R&D/technical teams then you begin to understand the value of what you are buying is not just 'can you lock a pupils machine' but what is the technology and infrastructure behind the solution to ensure its develoment and future proofing. Equally what is the capex what is the opex etc many solutions appear cheap but what are you getting, what support do you get, what development/upgrades, do you have to pay for them or are they included, is the solution cheap to buy but expensive to maintain year on year? Lots of things factor into choosing the right solution....its not just a feature based contest.

Try IMSafer - its a free solution for parents in its basic format. For more info go to bbesafe Protect children from cyber bullying internet grooming and other online dangers Hope it helps.

For those of you who may be interested you can look to monitor student activity via email or any other messaging content (MSN, Facebook etc) through a product called NetModerator (see Crisp® SchoolSafe? - Home). In a nutshell it looks at the content of the message for inappropriate behaviours such as cyberbullying, grooming, profanity, self harm, drugs, race hate etc and prioritises this for a moderator so they can simply log in and see who are the biggest offenders or those students at most risk. It also looks at short and long term relationship behaviours so it can pick up on a short bullying conversation as well as pick up on the subtle approaches of a groomer over a longer period of time. For schools who are looking to open up the communication options within their network it may be of interest.

I second this....They are a very good company with a very good product and we have always found them a pleasure to work with.

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

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.

Take a look at Crisp® SchoolSafe? - Home and go to the 'Safe at Home' section. Crisp are the global experts for online child protection and they are offering their home use version of the product Free.

You can also have Netop MyVision for FREE Netop MyVision Free

Crisp® - NetModerator? School Edition

Thanks David Thats helpful and something we had thought might be useful. We work with an advisor to schools in the county who delivers talks to parents and pupils and have media that we have created for them thats been well received.

Sorry I am vague. I had a friendly wrap on the knuckles a few months back about overstepping the boundaries of this site so want to stay well within the rules. I also think in my vague approach I have sent people off in the wrong direction. The incentives are not in association with buying a product, that would be bribery and a big no no! In a nutshell we want to start promoting FREE online child protection tools to parents and the obvious way to reach a wide parental audience is via the schools. If some schools wanted to make their parents aware of the tools then we where thinking of a way of thanking the schools for their participation in such a way that is did not break any rules or sensibilities.

We have been exploring an idea along with of our suppliers to see if some sort of reward scheme for schools would be a viable idea. Its difficult to explain without mentioning names & products which will upset the moderators as it could be seen as product promotion but something along the lines of a reward, voucher, discount, redeem code etc for some collaborative work with schools on online child protection issues.

Out of interest... What are peoples thoughts on incentive programmes for schools? Specifically ICT departments. Do they work or are they a waste of time? For those where schemes have worked what have been the incentives offered?

Netop may do most of what you are looking for.

Reading in TES today they mention the forced closures of some schools due to swine flu. To add to this it suggests the government has been in talks with broadcasters about screening educational programmes whist the schools are shut. What are peoples thoughts on this? I have two staff members off sick at the moment with swine flu and just see this as something thats unavoidable.

IMO this is a difficult one to answer as each product fits a specific need. It’s a bit like saying which is the best, a bike, a car, a bus or a plane....they all carry people but in very different ways for different reasons. The question really is what do you want from the product and then identify which products then fit that requirement. From the responses so far there's a lot of love for ABTutor and it obviously works well for some schools, however that may not be the case for every school as some may be looking for a more feature rich product. Having worked with hundreds of schools on this topic our first conversation is all about what the school wants, why they want it, who will be using it and the features required. From here you can then fit the right product round the school. My advice would be to think about your specific requirements and then identify the products to evaluate once you are clear on what it is your looking for. Products in this category range from free software through to the high end solutions that can cost many thousands depending on exactly what you need.

Hi Tom, thank you for letting me know, just repaired the link.

I have to agree, I like the rabbit but it is a bit odd.... in a sort of cute way!

If it helps have a look at bbesafe - IMSafer - Protect children on the internet as we have put together lots of free resources and free tools to help parents keep their children safe online at home.

Try getting the parents to install IMSAFER (its free) and will help the parents identify any messaging that they need to know about. It will also identify the handles used by the aggressor so if they are doing this from a number of sources such as Facebook, messenger etc it will identify each account they send a message from. If they go to bbesafe - IMSafer - Protect children on the internet they can get hold of the product plus other good advice.

Hi John, PMP do have a renewal cost to their solution (they would go out of business if they didnt) but it should not be that expensive? From our experience we have found them to be rather good.

If you are looking for very well regarded and affordable backup/recovery solutions you may want to give StorageCraft a look. Data backup software, online server backup, disaster recovery software, drive image backup, bare metal restore solutions by StorageCraft

Depending on exactly what you are looking for from the solution you may want to look at NetModerator School Edition. Principally it looks to protect and moderate for bullying, sexual bullying, grooming, profanity, harrassment and other inappropriate conversations throughout the school network and will identify traffic from email, webmail, instant messenger, chat rooms, social networking sites, forums etc The benefit is that it requires no hardware or installation/configuration other than simply rolling out an agent on each machine and is licensed on a subscription basis which keeps your costs relatively low and managable. The false positive rates are very low as it does not rely on keywords or blocking techniques and uses over 200 factors to analyse the communication in context. By assessing and ranking risk, the system prioritizes alerts making it easy to manage and quickly identify top offenders or pupils at most risk.