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Offline Hedy

Rico Hermans edited this page Feb 17, 2024 · 1 revision

You can download a copy of Hedy to run on your own computer, and have your students connect to your computer directly. This can be a good way to use Hedy if you have poor Internet connectivity in your classroom, or if you or your school has privacy concerns around having students use online tools.

Offline Hedy is currently available for Windows. Let us know if you would like to see other platforms.

How to install

To download Offline Hedy, visit the Releases page, click on the latest release, and scroll to the bottom to find a file named offlinehedy-24.x.y.zip. The release number is named after the day this version was deployed to the official website.

Extract the zip file and start the server by running the start-hedy-server.exe file.

Windows may give you the following warnings:

  • Suspicious software: Windows may tell you that it doesn't recognize this program. Click More info and then Run anyway.
  • Windows Firewall: Windows will warn you that this server is trying to listen on a network port, and ask you whether to allow or deny that. Click Allow.

How to connect

After the server has started, it will print one or more HTTP addresses with numbers in them. They will look like this:

http://192.168.13.181/

To connect, you and the students type that into the address bar of the browser. The address may be different every time you restart your computer.

Make sure you don't start with a space: most browsers will then turn your input into a Google Search instead of trying to connect to the server!

Setting up a teacher account

You can create a teacher account for yourself by visiting the following link and then clicking "Create Account".

http://localhost/invite/newteacher

You can also use one of the built-in accounts, which is named "teacher1" with password "123456".

Upgrading to a newer version

All your data and your student's data is stored in the file database.json that you will see in the program's directory. When you download a newer version of Offline Hedy it will come with its own empty database. To keep all programs around, you can copy over the database.json file from the old version to the new version of Hedy.

To keep it simple, you can also start fresh and use the newer version only for a different class or different year.