Friday, November 8, 2019

Google Snacks Volume 6 - LanSchool Advanced

This training will cover advanced features in LanSchool (LS) including, pulling students into your class, setting web restrictions, and blanking screens.


Class lists are imported from Progressbook, so they should look similar to what you are used to. Since I am not a teacher, I used Todd for this example, thanks again Todd! Load your students into your class by choosing Class List at the top menu, then choose Load Dynamic Class List.



When you select the Dynamic Class List, you will see a window that looks like this.



Make sure you choose the option at the top called Login Name (your name will appear where Todd's is). Then you should see all of your classes listed. When you click on a class, you should also see all students listed on the right. Once you have selected your class, just click Load and the students will be pulled from the default channel to your channel, a.k.a. your class.

In order to restrict websites, click on the Limit Web option in the top row menu and select Configure Web Limiting at the bottom of the list.



This option is grayed out when you do not have students in your class/channel, but the settings can still be accessed from the Preference menu under Administer at any time.

You can setup multiple Block and Allow lists and save them for later. The Block All option can be selected without configuring anything.



Whichever list you have loaded last will be set as the default list until you change it. What that means is when you click on Allow List or Block List from the Limit Web menu (shown above), it will block or allow the last list you loaded for that option. Additionally, you should not need to use the "Restrict IP address" option at the bottom of this menu.

An example of when you might use an allow list would be if you wanted students to be able to get to specific websites for research or testing. There are several uses for a block list, one you might not have used before would be to have students do research on a topic, but restrict certain websites you know would be obvious for the answers, such as Wikipedia, to force them to dig deeper.

After configuring your Allow and Block lists, you can then implement them under the Limit Web menu. If you want to restrict web for certain students but not all of them, if you select which students you want to restrict, then choose the Limit Web option you want to apply, it will only effect the selected students.

The last thing we will cover is how to blank screens for students. Clicking on the Blank Screen button in the top menu bar will blank the students screens and display the default message, which looks like this.



You can also configure your own message by clicking on the arrow next to the Blank Screen button and choosing Configure Blank Screen Message.



The message that is set for the Blank Screen will be displayed at the top of this menu as well.

Once you click on Configure, you will have a menu that looks like this.



There are several options you can customize here, but the most important one is in the middle, where you can change the text or image when blanking screens. You can set several blank screen messages if you like, but the last one used will be the default under the Blank Screen menu, just like the Block and Allow lists.

I hope this helped you get to know the advanced features of the new LanSchool application. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

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