Journal Entry 5: Researching and Evaluating Internet Information

How can students respond to problems of plagiarism when students use online sources?

As a student myself I would say that the best way to deal with this is to sight your sources, most students at the 3^rd grade level will not know what this means and it will have to be explained to them in a way that they will understand. Students need to know the proper ways of collecting information and giving the proper the credits to whomever it may belong to. Plagiarism is one of the biggest problems teachers may have when it comes to students writing essay, doing projects etc. But the question is how do we as teachers control it. In my history class two years ago, the professor gave us all of the students in class the options of using different school based search engines to help us with our essays. Now before we started searching our papers we had to look up our topic find at least eight different resources and type them up in APA format and hand it in if at least five of the eight were not approved then we had to find the ones that we were missing. As this point passed we had to write the essay and within the essay we had to use foot notes for all of the cites that were citing, that way we would not be accused of plagiarism. Teaching a student not to plagiarize is really hard to do from my perspective because some may think they are sneaky and think they will not be caught. In a lot of ways I think that showing students within every project how to use citations and put quotes around sentences that they did not write is one of the ways to go, I do still think this is a very difficult topic. 

Tech tool

For my tech tool I chose LibriVox the reason I chose this tool was because I found interesting how you can go on this website and read books or listen to them, they have been pre-recorded for others by volunteers. This website also made me think of the discussion that we did based on deficiencies and I thought that this would be a great tool to use in a classroom for students who can’t use their hands and or bodies they can listen as they follow along online.

Summary:

This chapter is about teaching students and helping teachers understand how to better search the internet in a safer way where students do not have to put themselves at risk with false information. It is easy to get trapped into a website that may seem safe, but teaching the students how to better surf the internet will be better for them in the future. It also teaches the teachers how there are certain steps they have to take before they themselves could be propper educators of the internet in a classroom.