Assistant teacher course/Software/Application monitoring

Monitoring applet
Monitoring applets allow assistant teachers and teachers to get an overview of the work of the pupils without interfering too much or unnecessarily. A standard for applets can allow pupils to work with different types of applications without causing the assistant teachers to lose track of their groups. The recommended standard size for a monitoring applet is 500 * 150 pixels, which allows to put 2 * 4 applets on an OLPC screen (1200 x 900) and retain some space for general information. For future compatibility applets should allow sizing and scale their graphics appropriately. Applets should also implement a compact view with 500 * 20 pixels, which allows to put up to 2 * 40 applets on a single screen. The compact view would allow a teacher to monitor all pupil applications in a class (even a much too large class) and to expand only selected applets to have a closer look.


 * Applets should allow several teachers to monitor the same application (on the same pupil laptop); a teacher might want to collect the same information gathered by assistant teachers.
 * Applets of the same type can internally make use of a single protocol handler instance, so that all network connections are maintained by a single class. This can also allow to gather information for common diagrams with data about all pupils in a group conveniently (e.g. scores).
 * Different types of applets can use a common protocol layer to allow subscriptions to common information sources in the monitored applications. A common demand could for instance be to transmit the current score in relation to the possible score, the number of the current exercise and a list of the exercises that have been solved (No more: "Hands up, who has finished exercise 12.f?"). In contrast a non-linear learning environment might offer different types of statistics about the use of features of the learning environment.