Smart Tool for Online Classrooms

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