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One of the difficulties of working in a lab full of Macs is that students sometimes wander off and do things they're not supposed to do. Our district has filtering software, but as several news reports have recently pointed out, no filtering software is perfect. Teachers simply have to be aware of what students are doing with the machines.
With my desktop lab, that's not too much of a problem. I have arranged the class so that all the screens face my desk. If students are surfing when they're supposed to be typing, I can tell by looking. However, if students are using iBooks, the screens are oriented away from me. And, if the class is very busy - as is usually the case - I can't observe everyone at once.
The obvious solution to this problem is to have remote control (and observation) software installed on my teacher computer. If you've never used software like this, you should check it out - it's extremely handy and lots of fun. When I ask someone to stop checking email on Yahoo, it really brings home the point that what you do on the Internet can be observed by others. You can also put Johnny's data on the projector to show the class how it works while Johnny is working on it.
The two main remote control products in the market are Netopia's Timbuktu for the Mac and Apple's Network Assistant. These products are aimed at different kinds of markets and have different feature sets, although the core functionality is very similar.
Both products allow you to remotely observe a user's screen, remotely control the screen by using your mouse for their mouse, your keyboard for their keyboard, and so on. Both products allow you to chat with the remote user in a specialized chat window and do such things as restart or shut down workstations. Both products allow remote control over TCP/IP and AppleTalk, and as you might expect the TCP/IP connections tend to be a little snappier in use, while the AppleTalk connections are easier to set up.
I am in the fortunate position of having both of the major remote-control software packages for the Mac installed on a classroom set of Macs at the same time. I thought you might be interested in a comparison between the two.
The selection of functions shown in the menu below comes from Timbuktu Pro version 5.2.3, for which our district has a site license.
As you can see the set of functions for Network Assistant is very similar (although it is split between two menus.)
There are many functions in Network Assistant, such as "Schedule Start Up, which can only be done in Timbuktu Pro by individually connecting to every machine and doing it as if you were sitting there. Network Assistant, on the other hand, lets you control functions like this on the entire selected set of machines. You can pick all the machines in your room, choose "Shut Down," and they all shut down (boom) like that.
If Timbuktu Pro has such a group control function, it's not included in the core package to which we have access in our classrooms. Could be the district ordered some sort of "Enterprise Management Package" that I saw listed on Netopia's site. However, not many classroom teachers connect "enterprise" to "big group" - to most of us it's a really fast starship or an aircraft carrier.
Since Netopia, a network hardware company, acquired Timbuktu Pro, they haven't adapted well to the education customer at the classroom level. This phenomenon is described well on The Cluetrain Manifesto, a diatribe against corporate Web sites missing the target of communication with customers. This document was written during the dot-com boom and holds up surprisingly well to events since then. You can tell who Netopia's customer base really is by looking at their Web site. The nice, big colorful buttons are all corporate-speak, and Timbuktu is a little tiny text link in the lower left hand corner. The word "education" doesn't appear on the home page at all; instead you get " eBusiness infrastructure" and "enhanced VPN capabilities." The Timbuktu page has one education example in the midst of several corporate ones. "Our education customers are very important to us," I'm sure they'd say, in the same tone as, "Our copier service contract is very important to us." At least Farallon, when they owned Timbuktu, seemed passionate about the Mac - and education as a side-effect. Maybe corporate-speak is what you have to do to get those big contracts; could be one of the things keeping the Mac hemmed in, maybe. This deserves more consideration, but not right now.... |
Given such advantages, why would anyone want to use Timbuktu? There are reasons, some of them very good reasons. Timbuktu's advantages over Network Assistant include the following:
There are lots of other differences between the software products, such as the buttons you can see in the picture above that allow you to control exactly how Timbuktu scrolls around the screen or the ability that Network Assistant has to broadcast a popup message dialog box to all users simultaneously ("Time to save your work and log out"). The gist of the differences, however, is simple.
Network Assistant is for realtime group management of mixed networks including non-G3 machines. It's less expensive - but only available to schools and government agencies as a stand alone product.
Timbuktu Pro is more suited to corporate networks (because of availability) and individual users connecting to (or within) the home. It also has a somewhat slicker interface for the remote screen (never thought I'd say some other product has a slicker interface than an Apple product).
The weird thing is, neither company seems all that anxious to sell the product to individual users or small networks such as classroom-sized LANs. That's too bad; with home networks all the rage, I can see how a user trapped downstairs by having to keep watch over the little ones would really like to have access over the network to the computer upstairs.
Jeff Adkins is a science teacher who isn't afraid to state his preferences in computing platforms. In his classroom he has everything from a beige All-in-One to a a G4 XServe, and they all work together nicely. He calls himself the "poster child for technology integration" in the classroom. He was the 2006 Outstanding Educator of the Year for the California Computer Using Educators (CUE) organization. He also maintains a site for astronomy teachers at www.AstronomyTeacher.com.
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