ControlAula

Introduction

ControlAula is an application written to assist with the integration of the computers in a classroom and with their daily use. Its main goals are:

Providing collaborative tools to its users to make it easy to share and send information between students or between the students and their teacher.
Giving a teacher total control over every computer in the classroom, while requiring that he or she possess almost no IT knowledge.
Easy of use: with the software's interface, all its features are one mouse click away.
Easy setup, with great flexibility to make the sysadmin's life happier.
Running as either a native Qt application in KDE or as a native application in Gnome. The same executables fully integrate with both desktops.
Being able to work also on thin clients using LTSP.

The main utility of ControlAula comes from its use and experience in Extremadura classrooms. Many of its features come from the teachers' and sysadmins' feedback. ControlAula's first version was released in 2004 and was based on some bash scripts made by a teacher called Juan Sanguino.

He did some programming tasks at Calamonte Secondary school where he was teaching and called them "Gran Hermano" (Big Brother). Since then, many ideas, documentation and code have been contributed to the growing feature set of the application. The most recent version of ControlAula has been built from scratch, adding some new features and using more robust code, and it is now easier to maintain the software and accept new patches from other people.

Structure

By installing ControlAula you install these executables:

sirvecole: should run as a daemon with administration permissions on all computers.
monitor: graphical application for every student, allowing them to share information and files easily.
monitorProfe: graphical application for the teacher. It has the same features monitor has, but also has an interface to control all the computers in the classroom. It only starts on the teacher's PC and for users logged in as teachers.
controlaula: small wrapper to launch monitor or monitorProfe depending on the user system's groups and the computer he or she is using.

The user only needs to start controlaula, and depending of his privileges, he or she will see a different interface.

Application manuals

Warning:

Ease of use, setup and installation have been the primary goals when making the application. ControlAula should not be used in high-security environments. It's designed with primary and secondary schools in mind, or even home environments, but some of its features make it vulnerable to people with good programming and networking skills. You have been warned...

About ...

ControlAula has been developed by José L. Redrejo Rodríguez. In the beginning, it was written for Extremadura schools, but its popularity has spread around the world and leapt from classrooms to office environments -- and even to homes with several computers.
This application is in debt to many teachers and sysadmins for their suggestions, feedback, and help. Some of the most important contributors (who donated ideas, docs, help, and bugfixes are):

Francisco Paniagua Sánchez, Daniel Campos Fernández, Juan Sanguino, Francisco Mora Sánchez,

Antonio Ullán de Celis, Javier Majado Torre, Antonio Abasolo, Antonio Durán Terrés,
Ismael Campos Suárez, Rafael Jesús García Perdigón, Vicente Parejo Sosa, Manuel Fariñas, Juan Arance Calvo

And the translators:

French: Claude Paroz <paroz at email.ch>
Turkish: Zeki Celikbas <celikbas at itu.edu.tr >
Italian: Andrea Grandi <a.grandi at gmail.com>
Portuguesse (Brasil): Carla Betioli <leteras at gmail.com>
English: Julian Graham <joolean at gmail.com >

License

Copyright:

    Copyright (C) 2004-2008 José L. Redrejo Rodríguez <jredrejo en edu.juntaextremadura.net>

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

Last modification on 23th May, 2008.