Unit 8 for teachers

Teacher PowerPoint

A 28-slide delivery deck with full speaker notes. Each lesson slide follows the department routine (starter, aim, teach, practical, task, check, flipped homework) with questioning, stretch and support ideas, and the matching workbook section, practical and quiz.

Download the teacher deck (.pptx, 1.9 MB)

Contents: unit overview · assessment · the course site · using the AI tutor · delivery plan · 15 lesson slides across 8.1–8.4 · practicals and ethics · exam technique. Diagrams are the same originals used on the Learn page.

How the course maps to the scheme of work

Week (2025–26 plan)	Topic	Learn lesson	Practical	Quiz
11	Confidential information; why keep it confidential; impact	S1	–	1
12–13	Technical threats: malware, botnets, DoS, hacking, social engineering, network attacks	T1–T4	1, 2	2
14	Technical vulnerabilities	V1	–	3
15	Human threats	V2	–	3
16–17	Physical vulnerabilities; impact of threats	V3	8	3
18–19	Threat mitigation techniques	M1–M4	3, 4, 6	4
20–21	Internet security: firewalls, segregation, monitoring	M5	7	4
22–23	CIA triad	C1	9	5
24–26	IAAA model	C2	5	5
27–29	Revision and exam	all	–	Exam practice 1, 2

Your PowerPoints, the 8.1 eLearning module, the perimeter security worksheet and solution, the Diffie-Hellman spreadsheet, Nmap and Linux practicals, student presentations (John the Ripper) and the Cisco Cybersecurity Essentials files stay on Teams. Cisco activity files and Pearson worksheets are not published on this public site.

Assessment

Content area 8 is part of the T Level core and is assessed in the written core examination (Paper 2 in the 2025–26 plan). Questions range from short recall to extended, level-marked responses on a scenario.
The Course guide gives a red/amber/green checklist of every specification point (8.1.1–8.4.2), saved on the student’s device.
Exam practice uses original scenarios with level descriptors and self-marking checklists. Pair it with official sample assessment materials for timed mocks.

Ethics and safety

Every page with scanning or attack content carries a legal and ethical warning. Nmap, password cracking and penetration testing are taught for defence and only on the isolated lab network.
Consider a signed acceptable-use agreement for the lab before the Nmap and Kali practicals.

AI study tutor

Workbook tutor (page 3): explains, diagnoses, hints and sets new practice questions for each of the 15 lessons. It will not simply give the answer to the lesson’s own activity, and it is told not to give step-by-step instructions for attacking real systems.
Because this unit is exam-assessed, there is no assignment coach.
Privacy: no student accounts, no names collected, and no conversation stored on the server.

Status: the AI service needs the college Azure subscription to be active. When it is re-enabled, the Unit 8 tutor is deployed and switched on by the course administrator.

Maintaining the course

All Unit 8 pages are generated from tools/unit8/ (python3 tools/build_unit8.py). Quiz and exam questions are in docs/unit8/quiz-data.js and docs/unit8/exam-data.js. The teacher deck is generated by tools/unit8/teacher_deck.js.