Educational Web Sites are not only prolific, but for many of us essential for our classrooms. Sometimes the information taken from a site is done without the thought of plagiarism. In this week's Technology Tip of the Week, we will show you a few viable sites that can be used with your students for Internet research assignments.
Tip #20: Avoiding Plagiarism - Internet Resources
Definitions: URL: Uniform Resource Locator - also known as the site address. This is the section that usually begins with the sequence: http://www, which also describes the type of protocol (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol) to be used.
Link: A connection to another site or screen within a given web site page. Links are easy to find as the mouse cursor usually changes shape from an arrow to a pointing finger.
The Problem: The World Wide Web (WWW) provides us with an enormous amount of information - unfortunately all for the taking.... Not all of that information is accurate nor is it completely useful. However, it is owned by the authors and steps to prevent plagiarism are essential.
The first site URL: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_plagiar.html comes from the Online Writing Lab of Purdue University. This site also includes a good discussion of when and how to give credit.
The second site URL: http://www.nyit.edu/0695/slessons/doc.html contains a four-week teaching unit on the process of searching the Internet for resources and citing the information properly. Although the lessons are designed for middle school students, the information in these lessons can be used for older students as well. The lesson information was written and developed by Lillian M. Ludwig and contains a feedback rubric and shows direct learning connections to the New York State Learning Standards. [Please note: the site referred to above is no longer available, but links to other relevant sites may be found at http://www.cln.org/themes/plagiarism.html.]
Our final site URL: http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm is more of a resource tool for teachers. The article offers some ideas on preventing as well as tracking plagiarism. From the snapshot below, you can see that the author also offers some web sites to assist in tracking the origin of suspicious research papers.
One final note - these sites were available at all school locations at the time of this writing. Some of the links, however may be filtered due to their connectivity to questionable sites as seen by our firewall filter.
Special Thanks American Teacher - December 2000 issue.
