This Is What Happens When Teachers Break The Rules

I work in IT support at a secondary school in the UK. Like most places, our users cannot buy and install their own software or peripherals or anything like that.

We got this ticket today from a teacher.

Ticket: “Hi. I can see that someone is remotely logged into my account. This is so strange. Please clarify what’s going on?”

That’s definitely not enough information to help out in any way, so I asked her to elaborate. She told me that someone was opening and closing folders and windows on her machine while she was trying to teach.

We do have remote desktop software on our machines, so we checked that no one in the IT department was actually on a remote session on this machine at the time. No dice.

After the lesson was over and the teacher left the classroom, I did then remote into the machine to see if I could replicate what was happening. It wasn’t happening when I had control of the machine, but as soon as I gave control back, text started being highlighted and folders opened and closed.

I made my way to the offending PC’s classroom and logged in. I couldn’t see anything that could be causing it. The desk was pretty messy, though. As soon as I got logged in, news apps, volume control, and network connections started popping up like they were being clicked on.

I had my arm leaning on a stack of booklets covered in sticky notes with paper registers strewn under them. There were also two plastic cups at the top of this nest of clutter. I moved my arm, and suddenly, the desktop was calm — no movement at all. Strange.

I started moving the cluttered paperwork and spied something black and plastic at the bottom of the pile. I was sure I knew what it was at that point, but I kept clearing to confirm my suspicions.

At the bottom of the pile was a writing/drawing tablet. I checked, and yep, it was plugged in, and the plastic cup full of pens on top of it was constantly clicking the left-click button.

We had no idea that this department even had these tablets and had never even heard of them before this.

After “fixing” the remoting to the PC issue, I went back to the office to find four tickets from this department asking how to use these tablets.

We’re going to have a lot of fun confiscating them.