Smart Tool for Online Classrooms

iTALC lets teachers remotely manage their students' machines, show live demos, lock workstations during a lecture and much more. Here we show you how to configure it

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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With distance education gaining ground, you need tools to ensure that information reaches out to target audience in real quick time. Plus, you need features to manage remote systems effectively. In educational institutions, it's difficult for a teacher to give demos to all students at the same time. iTALC has been designed keeping this in mind. It can be used to deliver lessons to all students in real time. The software can also be used as a software KVM switch to monitor and control all computers. It can be used on Windows as well as Linux based systems.

Installation
The software has two components-master and client. You can install the master on any machine running Windows. This will become a central monitoring computer that can be used by the teacher to monitor and control the computers on the network. While installing iTALC on the master computer select both the master and client applications options for installation. During installation, you would be asked to give the location of the folder for generating public and private keys. The public key generated while installation must be kept handy, as that is needed while client installation is done. Do remember to enable Remote Desktop functionality on the master computer.

Install the client component on the client machines. Here, give the pubic key generated by master installation. You can copy the public key from the master computer on a USB drive or you can directly share the key on the network. After installation, you will be asked to restart the client machine to activate the installation settings.

Configuration
After the master and client installations have been done, the master computer can add all the network computers where the client iTALC setup had been installed through the Client-Manager option.

The teacher can monitor all computers on the network through the OverView Mode option. He can view each user's desktop and monitor their activities. This allows the teacher to keep an eye on the users and their daily activities. With the Demo option facility the teacher's desktop screen is shown on students' computers in real time. This way the teacher can give a live demo to all students. He can even select any particular student for showing the demo. The teacher can use either a full-screen or a window demo. In full-screen demo the input ports of a student are disabled, so he can just view the demo shown by teacher, while in Windows demo along with viewing the demo, a student can do other work as well.

In the Client Manager console, you can add the students' desktop that you want to monitor. Click on a desktop on the left to see what it's running

Remote Access
The teacher can provide support or help to any student from his computer using the Remote Control feature. This allows the teacher to have full control of the student's desktop and thus help him out of any problem. The functionality also comes in handy for network managers who can troubleshoot any client machine on the network. Having a Remote Control feature will give the network manager to troubleshoot or install software upgrades to any network computer from the ease of his desk. Similarly, this can also be used by corporate trainers.

Demos can be shown to students by clicking on Demo in the toolbar or by right-clicking on any user's desktop and selecting Demo option

The teacher has also been provided with features like 'Lock Desktop' to lock the students' desktops while giving a lecture so that students pay undivided attention to the teacher. The teacher can also switch on/off the power of any remote system and reboot it. There is another interesting feature called Snapshot, which can be used by the teacher to capture an image of a user's desktop as a record for any problem faced by that user or to keep a record of any restricted activity done. These images can later be viewed and managed through Snapshots menu option. With the facility to post message to the client through 'Send Text Message,' the teacher can communicate with users on the network. He can post a message to a single user at a time but there isn't the option to broadcast messages.

You can take a snapshot of a client desktop at any point. For this, right click on the desktop and in the pop-up menu select 'Make a snapshot'

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. This is particularly useful for distance education.

Check for status of iTALC Client under Windows Services and see if it's running or not. If not, start the service manually