Journal Post 5

Focus Question: How can teachers respond to problems with plagiarism when 
students use online sources?


Plagiarism is the direct copying and misrepresenting of someone else’s work. The 
internet is perhaps the biggest source of information available to students; and
 most students chose online sources when it comes to writing a paper or doing any
 other school assignments. Turnitin.com and ithenticate.com are two of the
 websites that aid teachers in detecting plagiarism in a students work. The work 
is electronically scanned to identity is the text is directly copied from other 
sources. In turnitin.com alone there are about 40,000 papers turned in a day, 
 and 30% have material that is identified as plagiarism or less original. Rather 
than waiting to find plagiarism in a students work, it may be a good idea to
 warn students and teach the ways to avoid plagiarism. James McKenzie identified 
seven ways teachers can fight against plagiarism. These include, distinguishing 
levels or types of research, discourage “trivial pursuits”, emphasize essential
 questions, require and enable students to construct answers, focus information
 storage systems, stress citation ethics, and assess progress throughout the
 entire research process. All of these ideas are great; however we all know that 
even if we teach students how to avoid plagiarism, there are still student’s that
 will take the easy way out. In my opinion it is a great idea to guide them, and
 warn them about plagiarism, but still use sites such as turnitin.com, to make
 sure that the work is truly authentic. It’s also important to let the students
 know that you plan on turning this paper into such a site, and explaining the
 site. This will hopefully motivate students to do their own work, and as an
 outcome actually learn something from the assignment. 

                                                            Photo credit to Andrew Wong

 

Tech Tool: 
Librivox – http://librivox.org


Librivox is a website that offers free audio recordings of published books and
 other materials. These materials are read aloud into digital audio files by
 volunteers. You can do a search by author, title, reader, and language or
 subject/genre. Many books are available by chapters. This makes it very useful 
for teachers and students who don’t need to listen to the whole book, but only a
 certain chapter, poem, etc. This website is wonderful for people who have
 impaired vision. At the same time is helpful for people who are on the go, as 
you can download these files into itunes, and then into your phone, or ipod. 
 There is a wide variety of books and other materials on this site, it is great
 that so many people have volunteered their time to create all of this things
 accessible in an audio version. 


                                                Photo Credit to Kara Shallenberg

Summary: Chapter 5

            Chapter five discuses how teachers and students can both use the Internet correctly to assist them in their plans and learning. The chapter begins by introducing different search engines and giving examples of how teachers can teach student to use them correctly, and identify things such as weather there are bias and have useful information. The chapter also includes a chart listing specialized resources for teachers. Other than addressing how to properly use the web as a search engine, and how to teach students how to this as well, the chapter also goes over plagiarism. Plagiarism is a big issue since the Internet has become such an available source for students to research in. Students can find actual papers and turn them in a their own work. There are of course other ways students plagiarize such as not sourcing their sites, or taking big chunks of information from a site and using it as their own. At the end of the chapter there is a Technology Transformation Lesson Plan.