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“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. The Timbuktu page has one education example in the midst of several corporate ones. The word education doesn’t appear on the home page at all instead you get “ eBusiness infrastructure and enhanced VPN capabilities. The nice, big colorful buttons are all corporate-speak, and Timbuktu is a little tiny text link in the lower left hand corner. You can tell who Netopia’s customer base really is by looking at their website. This document was written during the dot-com boom and holds up surprisingly well to events since then.

This phenomenon is described well on The Cluetrain Manifesto, a diatribe against corporate websites missing the target of communication with customers. Since Netopia, a network hardware company, acquired Timbuktu Pro, they haven’t adapted well to the education customer at the classroom level. However, not many classroom teachers connect “enterprise” to “big group” – to most of us it’s a really fast starship or an aircraft carrier. Could be the district ordered some sort of “Enterprise Management Package” that I saw listed on Netopia’s site.

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. You can pick all the machines in your room, choose Shut Down, and they all shut down (boom) like that. Network Assistant, on the other hand, lets you control functions like this on the entire selected set of machines. 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. 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.Īs you can see, the set of functions for Network Assistant is very similar (although it is split between two menus.) I thought you might be interested in a comparison between the two.

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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. 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. 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. These products are aimed at different kinds of markets and have different feature sets, although the core functionality is very similar.īoth 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. The two main remote control products in the market are Netopia’s Timbuktu for the Mac and Apple’s Network Assistant. You can also put Johnny’s data on the projector to show the class how it works while Johnny is working on it. 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. If you’ve never used software like this, you should check it out – it’s extremely handy and lots of fun. The obvious solution to this problem is to have remote control (and observation) software installed on my teacher computer. And, if the class is very busy – as is usually the case – I can’t observe everyone at once. However, if students are using iBooks, the screens are oriented away from me. If students are surfing when they’re supposed to be typing, I can tell by looking. I have arranged the class so that all the screens face my desk. With my desktop lab, that’s not too much of a problem. Teachers simply have to be aware of what students are doing with the machines. Our district has filtering software, but as several news reports have recently pointed out, no filtering software is perfect.

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2002 – 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.