Control your Linux Lab with iTALC
© 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.