10 Terms of Use for Plagiarism Detection

Today at a meeting of department heads, we were asked to consider spending a few thousand dollars to gain access to the most popular plagiarism detection database: Turnitin.

In leveraging tools to teach learners about academic integrity, here are my recommended Terms of Use for Plagiarism Detection:

1] Staff members will commit to teaching lessons on academic integrity. (via @ransomtech)

2] Teachers will overtly model academic integrity by attributing their sources for lessons, assignments, and coursework. (Where do your ideas, text, graphics come from?)

3] Conscientious attempts will be made by teachers to design authentic writing tasks that are resistant to copying. (via @sadone)

4] Students will be provided with opportunities to present their ideas in alternative ways including the use of emerging media tools.

5] It will be the norm for written assessments to be completed in the presence of the teacher.

6] Comprehensive training in the roll-out of digital detection software, will welcome the participation of interested students. (via @rivenhomewood)

7] Plagiarism detection will be used primarily by students as a way to gauge the integrity of their writing before submitting final drafts. (via @GDhuyvetter)

8] It will be the norm for students to use modern writing tools that track the 'history' of a document's development. (E.g., Google Documents)

9] Educators will learn (and teach students) how to use quoted text in a 'Google Search' as a way to validate suspicious strings of text.

10] Users will become familiar with the terms of the service agreement and will carefully consider the ethical consequences of submitting content to an online plagiarism service.


Photo Credit: churl

Stuck on Photos

I've been looking for a reason to share some ideas about the use of online photos in the classroom and although there are indeed educators making use of photography in their classrooms, few of them leverage the best of the free image resources of the day.

Why not help those creative writers by providing inspirational 'characters' to write about? Consider projecting some of these amazing 365 Portraits for starters.

Invite participation to categorize, sort and add meaning to once forgotten images in the Library of Congress Pilot Project.

Why not create a library of welcoming 'school/community guidebook' photos for families new to the community. Students can add explanatory audio notes via VoiceThread. Maybe you can even put those cell-phone cameras to use?

Highlight the power of photos when combined with words and music... easily worth more than 1000 Words.

How about teaching students to take advantage of terrific free public photos rather than ignoring fair use by grabbing the work of others that just happens to reside on the web. Free Digital Photos or BigFoto.com or FreeFoto.com are good starting points, but there are many others.

Consider teaching students that they can actually license their photos (and other creative works) for various uses vie Creative Commons licensing? For a generous example, some put their photos into the public domain a la Robert Scoble

Don't we owe it to students to point out how their world will be very different from ours? Showcase Photosynth in the video below, and ask students to contemplate the consequences: Are students being prepared for this future... for the jobs in such a world... for the yet-unwritten rules of the coming decades? Is it exciting, scary or both?



Review the dilemmas posed by those who 'sanitize' or 'satanize' with photo editing... Consider photo-ethics by consider sharing any of a number of Photo-Ethics resources.

Teach about Photo-editing via site resources like Luxa or teach the use of an online editor like Splashup. No doubt you'll want to share the often linked Dove commercial to expose some advertising secrets:



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