K12LTSP: Using VNC/Pushing to Teach! Works Great! and TeacherTool!
Robert Melton (maillist@metacosm.dhs.org)
Wed, 12 Dec 2001 03:43:29 -0500
(This is my second posting to the list, because the other posting
came from my "non-list" email address, so it is might or might not
pop up via the administrators. Sorry about that.)
You can use VNC to "show" your students howto do
stuff. The reason I am posting this is because of a
comment from the citrix vs. terminal server thread.
========= The Comment ===================
> .... (An interesting side note: there exists the
> possibility to "share" the connection which might be useful in a
> sort of shared whiteboard configuration. I haven't played with this,
> so I might be mistaken.)
=================================================
[ Remote Shared Whiteboard ]
======================
I have successfully setup a teaching configuration at
YorkTown highschool. Here is what you do. Setup
VNC normally on the LTSP server. Then get VNC
Reflector. VNC Reflector is a VNC proxy with two
password, one for "control" and one for "viewing", it
is important to have this seperation, because if you don't
some student will take control of your desktop and make
you look silly. You run VNC, and the VNC reflector has the
real password to the VNC server, then you run VNC reflector,
and have the teacher connect as control, and all the students
connect as viewers. It works great, teacher can walk them
thru stuff! In our enviroment we setup a VNC server on the
teachers machine that runs the same desktop enviroment the
students are used to, so he can actually show them EXACTLY
what todo.
Everyone connects to VNC reflector in this setup, students with
the student password, teacher with the "control" password, and
no one can connect to the primary VNC server because it is setup
to only accept a single connection and VNC reflector takes up
that one :).
[ Running applications on students desktops ]
=================================
Another thing I have done at YorkTown to make teaching
better is write a little program to help "push" applications
onto students desktops. (ie: run an app, on a students
machine, AS that student). Now doing this is childishly
easy once you have the correct information. The information
you need is.
Is the student logged in?
What machine is the student on?
once you have this info, you simply do
"export $DISPLAY=students_machine:0.0; su student_name -c what_to_run"
[ Good general purpose teaching tool for LTSP ]
==================================
I am currently taking this two little things we have setup, and
building them into one GUI application called TeacherTool. This
tool does other stuff useful to teachers as well.
This tools allows you to do a few cool things so far, but is being
grown todo more and more very rapidly. A quick feature list are
-- It dynmaically finds all the students who are logged in and what
workstations they are on.
-- It allows you to select one or multiple students and run commands
on them. (this is great for running like "netscape
www.webpagewearetalkingabout.com" for every student in class)
-- It allows you to completely log a student out.
(skill -9 -User student_name) After they are logged out they just
are back at a login prompt (great after kids leave to log out people
who forgot to)
-- It allows you to view and kill individual student processes
-- It allows you to to run VNC on students desktop (have the viewing the
teachers "teaching desktop"). This is just a command, but I created
a button for it because it is heavily used.
-- You can have multiple "Run" windows open, with multiple groups of
students, so you kids could be divided into groups and you could
run VNC viewer for all of group1, while point everyone in group2 to
a webpage... etc.
Check out these screenshots to see what it actually looks like:
Main window: http://metacosm.dhs.org/tt/teachertool.png
Run window: http://metacosm.dhs.org/tt/run.png
Process window: http://metacosm.dhs.org/tt/processlist.png
Now, there is more to this setup than I have quickly explained here, but
I can go into greater detail for those interested and I am working on
documents now to help explain howto do this in detail. (It is _not_ hard,
I might be able to create a generalized RPM in the near future todo most
of it, except for a few passwords for VNC)
I wrote this in a hurry, please excuse spelling and sanity mistakes :)
--
Robert Melton (MetaCosm)
==================================================
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