IMing Questions to the Instructor in the College Classroom

[doesper]

I work at a university and am responsible for setting up "smart" classrooms. I work with instructors to help them integrate technology into their courses in a way that hopefully will increase both student engagement and achievement. After "spinning my wheels" on the internet for several hours and trying out a few freeware programs, I have not been able to find any software that meets our needs. Is there any IM software out there that will meet the following specifications?

* In a classroom where each student has a desktop computer, they need to be able to anonymously IM questions to the instructor's computer at any time during class.

* The instructor is the ONLY person they will be able to IM from their computers using this application.

* The IM software must operate locally in the classroom without needing to access the internet once the software has been downloaded and installed.

* The IM software settings can only be changed by a local administrator on their computers and not from the student guest accounts they will be using.

* The instructor will be able to save into a text file all the student messages received during the class.

Is there anything that does this?

Thanks much,

Dave

[David]

Those are some interesting requirements. I don't think you're going to find anything off-the-shelf that does all of that.

Jabber or even Office Communicator will satisfy some of the requirements, but things like saving all the messages to a text file... that isn't a standard feature, one would have to save each conversation manually.

I think what you are looking for is an app that would run on the instructors computer, and students would connect to using a web browser. Anonymity isn't usually a standard feature, but each computer could be configured to use a generic account (Computer1, Computer2, etc)

[doesper]

Thanks, Dave. I did add a local user login that is the same for all computers in the classroom, so that is a help towards giving anonymity. I had a breakthrough earlier this week when I found out that Faronics Insight software allows students to message the teacher. I've downloaded a trial copy and am evaluating it now. Definitely worth a look.

Thanks again for responding.

Best Regards,

Dave