Some friends of mine were having the big problem of wanting to control their student's computers in the classroom.
The solution is free and easy and comes with Ubuntu Linux 9.10:
iTALC
iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways. It supports Linux and Windows 2000/XP (Vista support will come) and it even can be used transparently in mixed environments!
In contrast to widely used commercial equivalent software, iTALC is free! This means you do not have to pay for expensive licenses or things like that. Furthermore the source-code is freely available and you're free in changing the software to fit your needs as long as you respect the terms of iTALC's license (GPL).
Freedom in two ways!
Features
iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as
- see what's going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots
- remote-control computers to support and help other people
- show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) - the teacher's screen is shown on all student's computers in realtime
- lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher
- send text-messages to students
- powering on/off and rebooting computers per remote
- remote logon and logoff and remote execution of arbitrary commands/scripts
- home-schooling - iTALC's network-technology is not restricted to a subnet and therefore students at home can join lessons via VPN-connections just by installing iTALC client
Furthermore iTALC is optimized for usage on multi-core systems (by making heavy use of threads). No matter how many cores you have, iTALC can make use of all of them.
Download italc here.
