Journal Post #5: Chapter 5: Teaching Information Literacy and Digital Citizenship

Focus Question: How should teachers respond to problems of plagiarism when students use online sources?

Things have not changed much in the area of cheating and plagiarism since before computers.  There are students who just refuse to actually do the work involved in turning in a truly authentic paper and actually being proud of the work they did and the grade they receive.  At the start of the new computer age, James McKenzie saw this as being a problem and developed seven ways to help stop it:
1.  Distinguish levels or types of research (this helps to make sure they have to site from more than one type of outlet, like one on-line, one periodical, etc.)

2.  Discourage Trivial Pursuits

3.  Emphasis essential questions

4.   Require and enable students to construct answers

5.  Focus on information storage systems

6.  Stress citation ethics

7.  Assess students progress throughout the entire research process

I believe that the two most important ones from above are to teach students what plagiarism and cheat are and showing them examples of just what counts, and to follow the work from the beginning.  One of my old teachers required a few rough drafts just for the sole purpose of making sure we were not plagiarising.  Following their work and making sure they understand what constitutes as cheating and plagiarism will help students learn to do their own work, think critically for themselves and to research and cite properly.

Tech Tool 5.1

These day there are websites for everything and pictures and audio are one of the easiest things to find.  Tech Tool 5.1 gives three more examples, Flickr, LibriVox and Creative Commons.  I have heard of and viewed Flickr before but had not thought of using it as an educational tool, but it makes sense.  Students love to look at pictures and it helps them relate visually to what topic they are discussing.  LibriVox was pretty awesome as well, to be able to listen to books and poems (such as poems by Robert Frost) would be very beneficial to me as I plan to teach middle school English. 

Summary & Connection

Chapter 5 in our book discusses the Internet and how easy it is to obtain a plethora of information and how easy it is to use it incorrectly and/or cheat.  It is even more important today with students finding information online so quickly, to teach them how to use it, how to look for correct material and how to look at it objectively to see how it can be used.  Teachers have to know themselves and then teach their students what cheating actually is and how to avoid it and come up with assignments that make it hard for them to cheat AND make them think more in depth on the subject matter.

I had a friend in my first semester of college right out of high school who thought she could use her OWN paper from the prior year to turn in as new in her first college English class.  I tried to tell her and told her to look it up because I was sure you couldn't do that, but she blew it off.  Little did she know, the prior teacher had uploaded it onto a service for plagiarism and she was caught.  She was expelled from school.  She did not understand that she could not use her own old paper for a new class.  She did not know this because she was never taught.  If we start out teaching our students what it is & give examples before starting research projects, then they have no excuse in our class. 

 

Resources:

Textbook - Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Jones, Leslie. (1934 - 1956 (approximate).  Robert Frost [Photograph]. Retrieved from Web.

Waltercroft1, “Funny Classic informative Plagiarism video". June 2010. Retrieved from Web.