Forty Students, Fourteen Machines, No Internet
You teach Computer Literacy to 40 Class 9 students in a lab with 14 working desktops, 2 teacher laptops, one projector and no working printer. Power fails about twice a week for 10–20 minutes, and the internet cable has been down for three days with no repair date. The objective for this week is: 'Students will enter 10 readings into a spreadsheet, compute the mean with a formula, and draw a labelled bar chart.' Your periods are 40 minutes and the class has used a spreadsheet twice. Yesterday a student brought a USB drive labelled 'ICT practical file' from a friend outside school; plugged into machine 7 it showed a file named practical.exe and the machine slowed down. Separately, two projects submitted through the class shared folder are word-for-word identical to a website, and you discover the folder gives every student edit rights; one student's file was deleted by another.
1. Plan the 40-minute lesson so the objective is still met on 14 machines with no internet, including what you do if the power fails mid-period.
Read the worked answer
| Time | Activity | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 5 min | Whole-class demo on the projector: type 10 readings, =AVERAGE(B2:B11), insert a bar chart, add axis titles |
One demonstration replaces 14 separate explanations |
| 25 min | Pairs, two per machine, roles swap at minute 12 (driver / navigator). Three staged tasks on a wall chart: (1) enter and average, (2) chart, (3) label and save to the local folder | 14 × 2 = 28 seats, so rotate a third pair onto the teacher laptops; staging prevents a queue at one step |
| 7 min | Two pairs show their chart on the projector; the class names one improvement | Keeps the objective visible without internet |
| 3 min | Save, log off, chairs | Protects the next class's files and time |
Setup before the bell: LibreOffice Calc installed offline; a template with the 10 readings and a partly built formula on every desktop, so typing is not the bottleneck.
If power fails: do not restart the demo. Switch to the paper backup - printed data table and graph grid - and run the 'what does the formula actually do' explanation; the pairs convert their work to the spreadsheet next period. Nothing in this objective needs the internet, so the cable outage is a scheduling problem, not a curriculum problem.
2. Respond to the USB incident: immediate actions, and a policy that will survive contact with a real school lab.
Read the worked answer
- Unplug the drive, do not open practical.exe, stop using machine 7. Name the lure first: a file called 'practical file' carrying an .exe extension is a program, not a document.
- Isolate machine 7 from the local shared folder and have the ICT coordinator scan it; check the other 13 machines for the same file. Report per the school's incident policy. Do not plug the drive into another machine 'to check'.
- Teach the visible sign: turn on file-extension display and show .docx, .xlsx and .exe side by side; disable autorun on lab machines.
- A policy that actually holds: no personal drives; one labelled, scanned transfer drive kept by the teacher; submissions through the lab's local shared folder. Explain the reason, because this is the digital-citizenship lesson, not an interruption to it.
- Consequence for the student follows the school's discipline code, but the teaching aim is that all 40 students can now recognise a disguised executable.
A blanket ban with no alternative simply pushes USBs underground; the transfer-drive routine gives students a legitimate route.
3. Handle the two identical projects and the shared-folder permissions problem, including the deleted file.
Read the worked answer
Plagiarism
- Do not accuse first. Check the file's version history or local backups - a copy-and-paste often leaves a single creation event and no editing history.
- Speak to each student separately: what did you do, what did you learn, which part can you explain? Use a two-question oral defence on the formula and the chart choice. This separates 'copied but understands' from 'copied and cannot explain', which need different responses.
- Fix the task, not only the students. The task invited copying because it had one right answer. Change it to personal data ('your family's last 10 electricity readings'), a chart choice argued in two sentences, and marks for the formula bar. Copying then buys nothing.
- Apply the malpractices policy consistently and record the conversation and the evidence.
Permissions and the deleted file
- Restore from the recycle bin or version history.
- Restructure: one view-only parent folder per section, one named subfolder per student with edit rights only for that student; submissions via force-copy links or the lab's local drop folder.
- State the rule you now enforce: shared edit rights are for drafts; assessed work goes where only the teacher can edit.