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On the Problems with Laptops in School?
resistor2004 asks: "My school has recently implemented a program of issuing laptops to all students from 7th grade through highschool seniors, and providing a massive 802.11b network across the campus. As you can imagine, it's a serious nightmare for the IT department. Apart from the usual run of broken laptops we have had a major problem with students usign email during class. Is there any effective way to allow the teacher to monitor the student's activity from his/her own laptop? Some of our teachers have come up with creative methods like installing mirrors in the back of the classroom so that they can see the students' screens, but a method that could be performed on the laptop would be even better." Might VNC be a potential solution to this problem. I would think that with a few creative scripts, and a working VNC client, a teacher can pop up a window to see what students are doing on their school-provided computers. Can you think of other ways teachers may be able to monitor students laptop use in-class to insure that they are at least not horsing around when they should be learning?
VNC is a good one, as mentioned, but it's not exactly an automated solution. Since these are school-provided computers, you could also have a client/service/component/whaddeva on the machine that, when prodded remotely, enumerates the running processes/windows and matches them against a list of what's being looked for (eg, email, webbrowsing, solitaire, etc.) and returns any offenders.
Of course, anything that's done this way can be gotten around with enough time and effort (a reformat is simple, but the lack of the client/service/component/whaddeva would be suspicious), but that's the risk you take when you give laptops to people who might use 'em.
Server-centric, but why not block access to the e-mail server for the student accounts during class hours?
I'm sure you could knock together a script that reads the timetable and determines where each student is meant to be.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
It seems to me, in a classroom, the last thing these kids need is another distraction. Yeah, technology is great and all, but come on. With the direction that the educational system in the US has been going, it seems like having kids staring at the blackboard is a better method. If you need a laptop for school, limit it to being used in study hall and interactive classes.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
What's wrong with the non-technical solution (mirrors)? It doesn't have that "21st century appeal" but is there really anything wrong with it? Your IT department is already burdened with the chore of keeping all of this new crap working, so if teachers can solve this problem with mirrors, I say let them.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I assume for ease of use for the common student, that these machines are running an M$ OS...easy solution, in that case. Microsoft SMS Server. It has a software inventory, and metering component, which can be setup to tell machines what they are and are not allowed to run. Simplely set that up tell the Machines they are not allowed to run various Email clients, such as outlook.exe ect...if the students try to get around it by renaming that will not work either because the system looks at internal names, not physical names. You could also use windows policy files to accomplish the same effect.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Not to belittle your problem, but you have the resources to issue laptops to all students 7-12 and a 802.11 network and you're complaining about it? Either you have a very small school, or a huge budget. I'd have given my right arm for something like this when I was in junior high!
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Apple has a system called "Apple Network Administrators Toolkit". Amongst other things, it lets you remote control a Mac just like VNC. If you are the teacher you could have the admin tool on your computer and monitor up to nine (I think) screens as minitures on your own screen. It is up to the admin to decide wether those being monitored will see a pair of eyeballs in the menubar when they're being monitored.
Very typical for Apple, it is extremely difficult to find any information on their website. The closest is probably http://www.apple.com/networking/ana
Last I checked the client came free with every copy of Mac OS and the serverpart was included in AppleShare IP.
Can't remember what it was called, but a local junior college used a classroom management package for its Novell network. It actually served a much broader purpose than just monitoring. It allowed the teacher to take control of the mouse, or the entire desktop, or to share a specific window with the student. As a result the teacher could help students anywhere in the classroom without leaving their own desk.
My school has recently implemented a program of issuing pencils and paper to all students from 7th grade through high school seniors. As you can imagine, it's a serious nightmare. Apart from the usual run of broken pencils, we have a major problem with students writing notes to each other during class. Is there any effective way to allow the teacher to monitor what students are writing from his/her desk at the front of the class? Some of our teachers have come up with creative solutions like hanging video cameras above each student's desk, but a method which could be performed on the paper itself would be even better.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Why go through all this just to stop kids from fooling around in class? If they are not going to pay attention in class then it is their loss. I not saying that no measures whatsoever should be taken in classrooms to make students pay attention, but there is a limit to it. If it was technologically possible would you really want to prevent students' _minds_ from wandering? I should hope not. I definately think high school students are capable of deciding if they want to pay attention or not, and just locking computers is not going to change their decisions. You might have a valid request for the 7th/8th grade students, but I still think most of them are old enough too.
VncMonitor John Wilson writes:
VncMonitor is intended for those people who need to monitor several remote systems. A single window is used to present all the displays. The tab or backtab key allows the user to switch between systems. The return key causes the currently viewed system display to be transferred to its own window and the user can interact with the system using the mouse and keyboard. Closing the new window returns the monitored system display back to the initial window.
The configuration of VncMonitor is controlled by a file which contains all the information about what systems are to be monitored.
A version can be downloaded from:
VncMonitor
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
"Put the laptop under your chair during class, or take an F."
.).
A laptop is a tool (and a toy). It is a tool that has NOTHING to do with learning from someone who is standing in front of you.
The only possible use would be taking notes. Is it condusive to a lecture to have 20-30 students all typing at the same time? Is there anything more than a marginal benefit over the students using a paper notebook?
I think you have made yourself a problem, and that the best solution is to STOP making that problem for yourself (doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this . .
-Peter
Disable access to the campus wide email server and proxy to accounts in the group 'Student' during class time. Each classroom, building or department could have a local proxy that allows students in a given class access to certain URLs on the internet, added in by the teacher, automatically purged after they expire or by you. School schedules are mind-numbingly regular, and variations from the norm (half-days) can be handled by a script to set the stop/start times for periods. When period starts, turn unregulated access off. Period ends, access resumes. You can do the same things for lunch, as long as you have valid data which students are scheduled for which lunch. This also prevents most problems with browsing inappropriate pages during class, unless one of your teachers has a porn archive that can be found on the WLAN.
... what did you expect they would do with them. Doodle? Write embarrassing poems? Reverse engineer the entire MacOS with MacsBug? Turn off access using an automated system and you won't have to police so much. Not to mention your server load will drop, letting you go a few more years between server upgrades.
Other than that, your school has given the students laptops
The problem with VNC is that you'd have to lock down the local security settings of the laptops to prevent the students from disabling it. It also wouldn't take long before one of them learns how to setup rfbproxy to send a prerecorded VNC sequence to clients, like an idle desktop with a hot key to pause/resume the fake sequence.
If your laptops run MacOS prior to X or Windows that is non-NT, then good luck securing them. The products vendors sell to secure these like Foolproof and Fortress do everthing they promise, but at the hands of a determined kid with nothing better to do but crack it, their "security" is a joke. Think "scriptkiddy".
Best of luck.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
Why is outside internet access necessary during class hours in the first place? Give each classroom a fixed IP address gateway (10.A.B.1), and allow students access to that gateway to route to the internet as required for a particular class at a particular time. Sure, adjacent classrooms might get that access, if they happen to know the right IP address, but you could even have a quick little one-time password you give the class at the beginning of the period, if you want to add one more layer of "security".
I'm sure it wouldn't be very hard to write a few scripts to automate the whole process. How hard depends on the OS, of course.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?