1.) ZorinOS lite should be fine on a traditional drive, but will be slower depending on the drives performance.
2.)Clonezilla or redo backup will clone drives quickly and easily with a gui.
3.) Create a new standard user. On your install before cloning
Thanks for your help
I fell that a restricted user account is still powerful enough for students to mess up the settings with.
What I was thinking about is a guest account that reset with every reboot but had the ability to store files in the home folder.
I found a old method on Ubuntu wiki but the commands don't seem to work