You sneaky little...

Image via Tom Häkkinen
My own wireless mouse at home - of a similar type to that
used to disrupt my lesson!

Today, some student in one of my classes who was a bit too clever for his own good, plugged a wireless mouse into the back of the teacher’s computer whilst we were in the computer room. What a sneaky little …

It was some time before I eventually caught the blighter. It wasn’t that I was actually using the teacher’s computer, the problem was rather that it was linked-up to a projector and speakers. Thus giving the student a platform for all sorts of mayhem. He was too smart for his own good, in a bid to remain unnoticed, the student tried to continue doing his work whilst disrupting the lesson. My suspicions were raised when a noticed a student laboriously working on the computer with only one hand, whilst the other remained steadfastly underneath the table.

He really had me going for a while though, because my first fear was that some brainiac kid had managed to figure out the school network passwords or some other way of taking over the teacher’s computer. In the end I was surprised at how low-tech the trick actually was. The simplest ideas are always the best.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Notice how small, almost undetectable, the USB wireless
receiver for the mouse is.

So I’ve now stored that one away to remember - wireless mouses (or is it mice?). It can alongside the old swapping-computer-keyboards trick that students play on each other; as well as the swapping-names-for-the-new-teacher trick; the there’s-a-new-kid-in-the-class trick and the we-didn’t-bring-our-books-because-miss-said-we-were-going-to-watch-a-movie trick.