It would be a huge help in promoting Python's use in education if we could make use of such a potentially fine module as the turtle module, but I'm finding it very difficult to write curriculum materials that use it since students don't have control over the turtle's screen in any easy to use way.

I understand the advantage of using something that is included in the default install, but I found using the included turtle module to be unsatisfactory. For me, one of the biggest problems was the whole multiple windows thing. It's not too bad on linux where you can set up focus follow mouse and no raise on click, but explaining that to someone else and expecting them to set it up is not reasonable. Anyhow, that's why I started Pynguin: http://pynguin.googlecode.com/ With this, I find it extremely easy to get the students started with writing their own code. Getting back to the turtle module; I did look at extending the turtle module when I started pynguin. It explicitly says in the module that it is designed for extending with another toolkit, but it also imports Tk at the top level. I think what I am going to do is implement a subclass of Pynguin that implements all of the Turtle methods and then make turtle-compatibility a configuration option. One user sent me a py2exe'd version of Pynguin, so getting it running on windows should not be too difficult. I was not comfortable posting the exe, though, since I have no way of knowing what is in it.