On the positive side, I also install a bunch of free software utilities on them (and, hey, each year more teachers are using #freesoftware for their classes, and so, they ask for it instead of the privative ones), and I use Clonezilla to create/deploy the images.
Could be worse, but I'm counting the days until holidays!
libre, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.
Andi: they need not to spend too much time teaching the tool itself (in our case it's agronomics school) so if it's easily installable in windows and it is a graphical tool, better than one that needs the command line or scripts.
This is the case of R, for example: they ask for “R + RCommander”.
They try to find something with no cost and the tool that they like or choose it's free software, but they didn't know it. This is the case of Raswin for example for visualizing proteins.
Other times they ask for a tool not having its licenses, or being it nonfreesoftware, or they want to do something and they don't know which program to use. In those cases I provide a list of alternatives, being all of them free software, and try to be helpful. If they want privative stuff they have to search and test by themselves or ask another person. No help there, sorry.