© Extra Ketchup

If you are like me, an educator, then you know what I am talking about when faced with students learning computer skills in the classroom. There are times when you'd want to check if the student is actually doing the work s/he is supposed to do rather than checking out Facebook or chatting with friends. The "boss key" is easy to do since students know when you are on to them - when you approach their terminal, boss key activated and you're left with no clue as to what s/he is doing. How do you solve this?

There are commercial applications that allow you to "snoop" on your student's terminal from your computer - leaving no clue to the student when you are checking them out. Yes, VNC might be able to do this but iTALC fits it to a T.

iTALC is a free and open source tool developed for classroom management.

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

This is one tool that I will recommend to my colleagues. :) I hope that this works on my Mac.