For teachers

Every PC ready for your lesson.

Every student PC starts clean at every boot, with the same desktop and applications on every seat. From your desk you can see the screens, pause Internet access and switch the room on and off.

Teacher’s desk · try the controls

Twelve student PCs at work. Internet on.

An illustration of the room, not the real interface. In a lab these actions come from the classroom view on the controller.
From your desk

Your controls during the lesson.

Sign in to the controller with your teacher account and click the Nixorium icon in the dock. The classroom view opens with every student screen. It comes set up with every PC in the room: nothing to install or pair, and no administrator access needed.

The classroom view on the controller: a grid of twelve student PCs. Ten show their screens, including VS Code, a terminal, a browser and the desktop; pc05 and pc12 are switched off. pc02, pc03 and pc06 are selected, and the toolbar offers Show my screen, Lock, Unlock, Block Internet, Allow Internet, Send desktop and Power. Current versions add Message to the toolbar, replace Send desktop with Share files (Send a folder…, Send a file… and Collect from students' desktops), and add Switch on and Schedule to Power.
The classroom view in a test lab: ten PCs on, two switched off, three selected.View full size 

  • Watch the room

    See every student screen at a glance. Click one to open it in its own window, large or full screen.

  • Help one student

    In that window, take control of the PC with your own mouse and keyboard, then hand it back. “Save screenshot” keeps a picture of that student’s screen in the Nixorium folder of your home.

  • Get attention

    Lock the selected screens with “Eyes on the teacher”: keyboard and mouse stop until you unlock them.

  • Send a message

    “Message” shows a text over the selected screens, even above a locked one; it stays until the students close it, for a time you choose, or until you unlock.

  • Show your screen

    Show your whole screen, one window or a browser tab on the selected PCs while you explain.

  • Hand out files

    Choose a file or a folder and send it: a copy lands on the desktop of each selected student.

  • Collect work

    “Share files → Collect from students' desktops” copies the files on the selected students’ desktops into the Nixorium folder of your home, with a folder for each PC.

  • Pause Internet

    Block Internet on some PCs or the whole room for a test, then allow it again. Each screen shows its PC’s real Internet state.

  • Switch on, off or restart

    “Switch on” starts the selected PCs that are off; you can also restart them or shut the room down at the end of the day. Nixorium warns before interrupting a PC in use. “Schedule” switches the room on and off by itself at the times you set and never shuts down a PC in use.

  • Students know

    While you watch, each student PC shows GNOME’s screen-sharing notice, which students cannot hide. Screens never leave the school network. If a student stops the monitoring, the card shows “Monitoring stopped on this PC” and the PC starts it again by itself within seconds.

Clean at every start

What happens when a student PC starts.

This is why the room looks the same at the first lesson of every day, whatever happened the day before.

  1. 01

    It starts from its own disk

    No network boot and no controller involved: the PC is an ordinary computer.

  2. 02

    The last session is set aside

    The previous session is kept on that PC as a snapshot, so recent work can still be recovered.

  3. 03

    A clean desktop takes its place

    The lab’s template becomes the student home: the same applications and settings on every seat.

  4. 04

    The student is signed in

    The student account opens on its own, without administrator rights. The PC is ready for the lesson.

A student left a mess

Restart the PC

The student account returns to the clean template. Nothing a student changed survives the restart.

A file has gone missing

Recover it yourself

Sign in to that PC with your teacher account and open Snapshots in the Files sidebar: the last five sessions are there. Snapshots are not backups.

Work that must last

Save it elsewhere

The reset clears the student home. Git, a school drive or Google Drive work well for this; Nixorium does not set them up.

Software

The applications for your subject.

The technician chooses software profiles for the lab. These are the applications they bring; anything else in the NixOS package collection can be added for every PC, a group, or a single seat.

01

General education

LibreOffice, VLC, English and Italian spelling tools
02

Programming

VS Code, C/C++, Java 21, Python, PHP with Apache, MySQL and MySQL Workbench
03

Graphics and illustration

GIMP, Inkscape and Krita
04

Audio and video

Audacity, OBS Studio and Kdenlive
05

CAD and 3D modelling

FreeCAD and Blender
06

STEM and scientific computing

R, Octave, Maxima and Gnuplot

With the Programming profile each PC also has its own web server with PHP and a MySQL database for exercises, emptied at every boot.

What students find

The same familiar desktop at every seat.

Applications run on the PC itself, so the lesson does not depend on the network. Whatever seat a student takes, the dock, the browser and the tools for the lesson are in the same place.

Student GNOME session with VS Code editing and running a Java project beside Chromium showing a school website.
A student session with VS Code and Chromium.View full size 
Not part of a lesson

Everything else is for the technician.

Adding software, changing the student desktop, reinstalling a PC, backups and updates are occasional tasks for the administrator account.

For administrators →Send this page to your technician →For school leaders →