iTALC: how to use free software in your school classroom

iTALC (Intelligent Teaching and Learning with Computers) is a tool to use in a school, relating the activity of students and teachers from their computers. Chelo, our friend and follower, wrote this article recounting his experience with iTALC at Escuela Normal 8 in Buenos Aires.

The possible uses are varied. For example, the teacher can show what he does from his machine to everyone else in real time. You can also access the computer of a student who requests help. Another interesting use is to enable a student's terminal to show others what they have done or are doing. Of course, there is also the control function to monitor, send alert messages and in case it is necessary to block a computer.

In our case, here we start from assessing this program from an implementation experience in a tertiary level course, so repressive tools were not necessary, although if they have to work with a horde of adolescents, a soft like the iTalc can help, especially if we don't want to go to the hard level.

The implementation was made in a room that had 14 HP computers with a Sempron processor and 512 MB of RAM, machines that the Ministry of Education of the Nation (Argentina) bought more than 6 years ago. They had a dual start of W $ and Mandriva. The Mandriva was pristine and unused at the time of testing, but it was already a very old version and to update ourselves we opted for Edubuntu. An Edubuntu 10.04 installation was performed on one of the machines and an image was made with Clonezilla. The recovery of the image from a pendrive was very fast (Ghost trembles). The room is networked through a wifi router in dhcp.

The advantage of having Edubuntu installed is that we have the iTalc student packages (client part) already installed and running without doing anything. Therefore the next step will be to install the packages corresponding to the teacher (master interface) on the main computer of the network. In Edubuntu if we go to the software center we simply look for it and install it.

Once installed comes a fundamental part: the creation of the keys. In order to interconnect the computers, iTalc generates public and private keys using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system. The logic is that the iTalc client is not going to hand over control of the computer where it runs to anyone who connects on its local network (this is important, all on the same local network). It is given to whoever has the corresponding keys.

To generate the keys, you must execute from a terminal on the master computer:

sudo mkdir -p / etc / italc / keys / public / teacher sudo mkdir -p / etc / italc / keys / private / teacher sudo ica -role teacher -createkeypair

The installation will have created the iTalc group. You have to add your teacher user to that group, from gnome or from terminal:

sudo adduser professor italc

In our case it was necessary to restart for iTalc to take the keys and the teacher module to work well.

Once we have created the keys, we must take our public key, that is, the key file, to all the machines to which we want to connect and have control. We find the file in this path:

/ etc / italc / keys / public / teacher / key

We can do this manually (copy it to a pendrive and take it) or by network if they already have it configured. In the teacher directory you have to replace the existing file with the one we have. If it is empty we place our file and that's it.

For better use of the iTalc it is convenient to have the network well configured. In our case, as all Edubuntu are cloned, we must give them the corresponding name to each PC. For that we have to manually edit the / etc / hosts and / etc / hostname files. Replace localhost with the corresponding number or hostname, for example pc1, pc2, etc.

sudo gedit / etc / hosts

In this way, when executing iTalc in teacher mode, we will see on the monitoring screen the small images of each student in real time with their corresponding machine names.

The performance of iTalc with the hardware used was low but was still correct. I think both the poor quality router and the old hardware contributed to slow performance. In any case, we were able to use it on several occasions without inconvenience, especially in the Open Office classes that generated so much resistance in some students of the teaching staff who only want to see the W of the company that I do not want to name.

We hope with this tutorial to encourage the use of iTalc in school computer rooms and to continue promoting the use of free software.

References:

• To carry out this installation we use the help of this tutorial: http://recursostic.educacion.es/observatorio/web/es/equipamiento-tecnologico/aulas-digitales/938-monografico-herramientas-de-control-del-aula?start=2
  and from the iTalc wiki (which is down at the moment). (http://italc.sf.net/wiki).

Greetings:

• The work was carried out at Normal 8 in Buenos Aires. We greet our friend Redubicua from here for his positive encouragement during that time of work.