[Yr7-10it] network management

[victor rajewski]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:24 PM, David Doolan
<doolan.david.j at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
>  I am looking for something like NetSupport to allow teachers to have control
>  of computers within the classroom.  What we hope this software will do is as
>  follows:
>  Allow students to have greater access to the Internet.

NSS has two modes of restricting net access - blacklists and
whitelists. You can save and activate different lists depending on the
class (though I think it's one list at a time). I'm not certain what
you mean by 'greater access' - are you going to enable everything on
the proxy and let teachers block sites lesson by lesson?

>  Restrict students from playing MP3.

Easy - you can whitelist or blacklist applications just like websites.
Though snipping their earphones might be more fun :) But unless you
are using a whitelist (eg only allow students to run Word, IE & Excel)
they'll eventually get around this by bringing their own media player
apps in. The process of creating the whitelists and blacklists for
applications can be slightly annoying, but usually you make a few of
these for each class once, and don't have to do it again.

>  I suppose in a nutshell, we are finding that students like using computers
>  for entertainment, and there is an increasing amount of frustration from
>  teachers within the classroom dealing with the distractions that are
>  available through the computers.

It helps, but is no silver bullet. Kids have a tendency to get quite
defensive when you take away some/all of their control. This can lead
to other behaviour problems.

It also makes it easy to view all student's screens from one spot. I
can do this in our IT lab, but tend not to as I can see them from most
places anyway, but can be useful.

>  Another question that you might be able to answer Victor, is what the
>  technical support is like? Is it worth paying the extra per machine.  Or do
>  you think that we could get away with it ourselves.

I haven't had any need for tech support. I thought it was pretty easy
to set up, but I'm a bit of a geek :)

vik