Vision is touted by GenevaLogic as a classroom management suite, allowing teachers to supervise, demonstrate on and remote control student computers, among other things. Needless to say, teachers would love to have it in their classrooms with computers. I have been working on getting some form of Vision working on our computers since I started at CHS. It has not been a fun ride.
Vision 6 was supposed to change all that. It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to solve a lot of the problems that plagued its predecessors, such as broadcast storms, static port assignment and lack of support for multiple master stations per client. It seems to be doing an OK job at solving most of these problems. I can almost get it deployed without a problem using the MSI installer, we can now manage client machines from multiple master machines, and I have found less problems with network utilization while running Vision 6.
I’m still working on the minor problems that I am having deploying Vision to mixed computer areas and to computers that have problems after Vision is installed. I’ll post some things later, because I think it will help to actually have documentation that can be found via the major search engines. I was not so lucky these past couple of weeks.
Hello,
I am the Director of Technical Service for GenevaLogic. Most of the issues that you have raised have been addressed in Vison 6 version 6.1. Please contact me if you have any questions regarding this new release.
Thanks,
Rick Phipps
@ Rick Phipps: Actually, my school district recently decided to go forth with using Vision 6 as our classroom management suite. A graphics problem was addressed by the mirror driver patch. I haven’t had a chance to post of the success we have had with Vision since March. Once I get a chance to get some free time, I will post about it.
Can you share some of the issues you have had and the resolutions? I am running version 6.1 and sometimes my teachers can use Vision and other times it doesn’t even load. We’ve had more problems that when we were running version 5.01. Thanks.
@ Neil: I am now working in a different building in our school district, so I am not exposed to Vision as much as when I was in a school. One of the things my counterparts in the schools have reported has been the disappearance of workstations from a Vision classroom. The only solution they have been able to find was to re-create or re-import the Vision classroom to restore the missing computers. I hope that helps.
Hi am an IT Technician at a school problems i have had with vision 6.1 is after having created a classroom and connected to it. Everything is fine then when i disconnect from the classroom i cannot connect again to the classroom. Anybody experience this?
I have been having trouble with Vision 6. When I try to do a demo it generally works but when I try to stop the demo it freezes on the work station and the user has to power off to get control back. It’s intermittent and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, other times it happens on 22 of the 31 machines. They are all Dell, Pentium III machines with 256 MB of RAM and 930 MHz processors. Anyone have any solutions for this one?
Unfortunately, I can’t be of much help with Vision, since I no longer use it because of a job change. I will say that after having investigated other products like NetOp, Vision appeared to be a better product for what my school district was looking for. In particular, in Vision 6 we liked the fact that multiple computers could be setup as masters for a single client workstation. This allowed us to setup a computer lab with not only the teacher’s station as a master, but also have a tech staff’s computer setup as a master, as well. Unfortunately, we had some issues with this feature, and I am not sure if we got it to work completely. I have heard reports that broadcast storms were still occurring when using the demo features of Vision. This brought a wireless network to its knees in one school every day that a teacher used the demo feature. The issue was resolved by putting the access points into a different VLAN than the computer lab that used the demo features.
Vision was a disaster at our school and we have a good network and fairly advanced tech program. We had problems right out of the box in multiple areas of the school. We had it installed in 5 wired labs and 8 wireless areas and I was impressed by the fact that it never worked anywhere. If a teacher locked student computers in order to do a demo more times than not the student’s computer would hang after it was released. Teachers constantly had issues with computers from other rooms connecting to their room, or many of the computers in their room connecting to other rooms. Calls to genevalogic tech support sometimes got a response within several days, but often seemed to be totally ignored. The remote feature wasn’t even worth trying most days. In my 15 years of tech support this is the first time I’ve ever written a program this expensive off as a loss.
I am irritated with GenevaLogic. We have Vision 6 and of course, the assure me every time I have a problem that if I upgrade I can fix it (that’s nice… sell me something buggy and make me pay to upgrade to fix your bugs!). Mine worked okay this year, but recently has been buggy again (classes disappearing, slow to respond, not entire classroom computers showing, etc.). The customer service has been less than stellar.
Just wanted to add my .02 cents. I am a tech in a school district with about 800 machines. We installed Vision last year in a few labs. We had connectivity issues on our laptops as well as issues with DVD playback once it was installed. Their tech support was unable to resolve our issues. Since it worked fairly well on our desktops, and since the newer version was “supposed to correct” the issues, the district purchased a site license. We ended up having the same issues with the new, “improved” version. DVD playback was completely hosed, and the only way to get the program to run on a laptop was to disable the wireless NIC. Tech support could not resolve the issues (big surprise!), and we tried to get a credit, the president of the company sent an e-mail stating that the problem was not with the software but with the quality of our technicians. We finally ended up getting a partial credit. Now, 2 months after we went with a competing program, we are still having issues with their software. Even though uninstalled it from our machines, a piece of the Surf-lock program remained. That piece was enough to cause problems with one of our internal school Web Pages. In the past two months, I’ve had several other techs I know ask me if I was familar with Geneva Logic & Vision. I gave them a big “thumbs down.”
I’ve been using iTALC, a free and open-source alternative to these programs. I currently have it in one lab, and it’s changed my life as a teacher. No problems with installation, network utilization, or anything like what’s been mentioned here. For the low price of free, you might want to check it out:
http://italc.sourceforge.net/
We had Vision on several computers in the school. The Surf-lock program caused the text in internet links, the title bars, and Microsoft word not to show up, as well as causing the icons on the desktop and start menu to dissapear randomly. These problems continue, although Vision has been uninstalled. I am mainly wondering if anybody knows how to fix this.
Anyone know how to get past Vision 6?
Im at school and would like if whenever i was on the internet my teacher didnt interupt me.