Project 3

Part 1 : The problem I have chosen is that of plagiarism. I have experienced this as a student, and know how discouraging it is to work hard on something and then get a worse grade than someone you know cheated. However this problem not only hurts the honest students who are discouraged. Plagiarism is harmful to those who get in the habit of "taking the easy way out." Here are just a few scary statistics:

"A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.

According to a survey by the Psychological Record 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material.

A poll conducted by US News and World Reports found that 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined.

The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996) states that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989." (from http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_facts.html)

Part 2 – There are new methods, however, of limiting plagiarism through fascinating technological devices which attempt to detect cheaters. The most prominent of these are online plagiarism detection devices such as turnitin.com

The goal of such sites is to make sure that papers are not recycled from one university to another, from one class to another, from one student to another.

For this project I went to the turnitin.com site and read articles about how it works, as well as watched the tutorial video. Then I called my sister who is signed up with turnitin and got her password information so that I could log in and see what it is like to navigate the site. Through this I found turn it in to be extremely useful. There were ways to grade the papers digitally (thus saving paper), and allowing teachers to type their feedback (which saves them time). Teachers could use it to have their students peer review each others work, thus encouraging positive types of collaboration without eating up class time. There was also a place the students could go to see their grades and find out how they were doing in the class, and there was a way to send messages between classmates/teachers. This researched showed me that not only does turnitin help plagiarism (by comparing papers in a huge database) but it can also be used for so much more. Turnitin, however, does do an excellent job attacking plagiarism. When the papers are submitted by the students, they are compared to millions of articles and papers across the globe, through originality check. If matches are found, the teacher is informed and they can act accordingly with that particular student. I was extremely impressed with turnitin.com and would be very tempted to use it for my students. This new technology saves time, money, paper, and drastically limits plagiarism.

This year

• How have you used technology to increase your knowledge in your content area?

I have found it very helpful for projects like the movie, and website projects for me to search the web to see what it out there. I was really impressed by what a plethora of material is available to those who will look for it. Therefore, if you know where to look there are lots of great websites where those teachers with more experience have explained how they use technology/cool assignments they have given.

• How have you used technology to collaborate with classmates?

We used the blog method for a while, and google reader (which was pretty cool), but I think that is something that I personally did not do too much. I feel like collaboration will be even more vital when I am actually in a working environment.

• How might you use technology in your classroom?

I would use technology to increase communication between students, parents, and me (the teacher). I would use it to help students get excited about the material we are covering. I would use it to give students assignments online (through a website/blog/movie project). Most importantly I would use technology to help link the information that I need to teach them with those things which are familiar and "cool" to them (technology).

• What did you learn in this class?

I learned that there is a lot more to being a teacher than just knowing about your subject. Presenting that knowledge to your students is a huge part of teaching. Therefore knowing about the technology out there to help you increase your options of presentation is quite vital.

• What will you use that you have learned in this class?

I think the thing that was most helpful to me was learning how to create a website. That is a tool which is essential for a teaching to know how to do. I also liked the fact that the way we did it was really trial and error. It taught me that even without a technology class to help me step by step, I can figure things out through trying it out. Simply learning that was extremely helpful.