The New Plagiarism

While there were several items of interest in the article The New Plagiarism, two of them were relevant to me. First of all, the quote from The New York Times that "cheating is on the rise" is a very valid statement. A friend of mine is a high school science teacher. She was appalled to find that her students were texting the answers to tests to each other. To combat that, she does two things. First, students are not allowed to leave the classroom during a test. This ensures that they aren't texting answers to fellow classmates. Second, she has resorted to making multiple versions of her tests in the hopes of combating this new form of cheating. Sadly, this puts more work on her.

Technology certainly has many uses in the classroom, unfortunately students have learned ways to abuse it. In both the Tera Nova and SBA tests, we have to ask students to relinquish all of their "technology" so that the tests are not invalidated. When I ask students to place these items in my testing tub for the duration of the test, the quality of their appliances amazes me!

Next, as a language arts teacher I use Step Up to Writing. The use of assigning colors for the various parts of a paragraph is very powerful. I love seeing the "light bulbs" go off as understanding dawns on students and they begin to incorporate it into their writing. Antidote 6-Stress "green ink" and citation ethics really caught my attention. I like the idea of having students change colors as they take notes, with black showing the ideas of others and green indicating fresh thinking. The idea of having "found ideas" and "fresh ideas" appeals to me. The author indicated that while the colors helped students keep their ideas separate, it also helped the teacher see how things were going in their research as they looked over their shoulders. Novel idea!

While the use of music has been shown to help students retain their knowledge, I also believe that there is value in the use of colors...unless a student is colorblind? Hmmm!