Twenty-Five Laptops and a Broken Inverter
Kofi Boateng teaches ICT at a day senior high school of 1,400 students. An NGO has donated 25 refurbished laptops, bringing the laboratory to 31 machines for classes of 55. Only one wall has six working sockets, and extension boards trip the breaker when more than four laptops charge at once. Electricity is off roughly three days a week for most of the day, and the laboratory's inverter is dead. The internet is a single 2 Mbps line shared with the admin block. Three of the nine ICT teachers have had any training in the last four years. Science-stream students mostly own smartphones; most business students do not. The head teacher has announced that from next term all lesson notes and assignments will be posted on Google Classroom, and expects Kofi to train the staff. Kofi has six periods a week with each class and a syllabus that assumes one student per computer.
1. Evaluate the head teacher's Google Classroom plan. Which assumptions does it make, and which of them hold in this school?
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The plan is a tool decision presented as a pedagogy decision. Test the assumptions.
- Assumption: students have reliable devices and data. False for most business students and unstable for many science students. Smartphone ownership is not the same as sustained, private, affordable access; a shared phone at home does not support regular submission.
- Assumption: staff can use the platform. Only three of nine teachers have recent training. A platform rollout to untrained staff produces scanned notes and unanswered threads, which parents will read as the school failing.
- Assumption: connectivity and power permit it. A 2 Mbps line shared with administration, plus outages on most of three days out of five, means synchronous use is impossible and asynchronous use is unreliable at the point of submission.
- Assumption: posting content equals integration. Under SAMR this is substitution at best - the same notes, on a screen. It changes nothing about how students learn unless tasks are redesigned: collaboration, formative feedback, student creation.
The equity failure is the decisive objection. A blanket digital requirement converts a home-resource gap into an academic penalty, which is exactly the harm the Free SHS policy exists to mitigate.
Kofi's position. He should not refuse the direction; he should reframe it. Say yes to a digital component, no to a universal requirement, and specify the conditions: printed equivalents for every task, a lab-based submission route for students without devices, and one term of staff development before any assessment depends on the platform.
What good looks like here. A plan that works on a bad day - no power, no internet - is the only plan that can be relied on in this school. Build that first, then add connectivity.
2. Design a realistic way for Kofi to teach one practical spreadsheet topic to a class of 55 under these constraints. Show the reasoning behind each choice, not just the activity.
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Design rule: the lesson must run identically whether or not there is power and internet. Start from the constraints, then choose methods.
Constraints mapped to decisions
- 31 machines for 55 students: students work in pairs with a rotating driver and recorder, and pairs are assigned rather than chosen so the confident do not monopolise the keyboard. One machine is the teacher station; one is a spare.
- Charging is the bottleneck: laptops are charged in two shifts at the six sockets under supervision, never all at once, and the trolley timetable is posted. A charging roster is a teaching resource, not an administrative chore.
- No reliable internet: install a free offline office suite and load it on every machine at the start of term, keep all files on a labelled USB drive, and store student work in named folders on the machines so nothing depends on a network.
- Outages: prepare a no-power version of the same lesson - printed data tables, a printed blank spreadsheet grid, and students plotting and computing by hand, then checking against the machine next session. The concept survives the outage.
- Time: six periods a week with 55 students means about 25 minutes of hands-on time per student pair per lesson. Choose one function to master, not five.
The lesson shape
- Five minutes: a real question with the school's own data - attendance by class, or canteen sales per day.
- Ten minutes: teacher demonstrates one formula and one chart, printed handout beside each pair as a fallback.
- Twenty-five minutes: pairs build the table and a chart; teacher circulates with a two-item checklist (correct formula reference; chart titled and labelled).
- Five minutes: two pairs show their screen; errors are discussed, not hidden.
Why this shape. It targets application, gives every student keyboard time, and produces a visible artefact. The offline discipline means the lesson is not contingent on the inverter being repaired.
3. Kofi is expected to train the staff. Propose a staff development approach and a way to tell, within one term, whether it is working.
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Do not run a one-day workshop and declare victory. Training that is not followed by supported practice in the classroom decays within weeks, and the three trained teachers are the asset to build on.
Structure
- Designate the three trained teachers as champions, each paired with two colleagues. Peer coaching beats cascade briefing because the support arrives where the problem occurs.
- Twenty-minute weekly clinics, one tool or one technique at a time - how to share a file offline, how to set a single homework on the platform, how to use a projector-free quiz. Depth over coverage.
- One rule for the term: no teacher is asked to use a tool that Kofi has not first used himself with a real class under the same power and bandwidth conditions.
- Differentiate. Science teachers with student smartphones can do more; business teachers need the offline submission route. Treating staff as one audience guarantees the weaker group disengages.
Evidence that it is working - collect three things, not impressions:
- A short TPACK-style self-audit at the start and end of term: can the teacher name one task where technology changes what students do, not just how notes are delivered?
- Lesson observation by a champion, looking for student use rather than teacher display.
- Artefacts: number of classes with offline-ready materials, and number of students who submitted something by the no-device route.
Honest success criterion. By the end of term at least half the staff should be running one recurring technology-supported activity that survives a power cut, and no student should have lost marks for lacking a device. Anything beyond that in one term is a claim, not a result.