Three Things Teachers Need to Spot—and Stop—Plagiarism
SPONSORED CONTENTFROM PLAGIARISMCHECK
my note: I firmly disagree with the corporate push to mechanize plagiarism. Plagiarism is about teaching both faculty and students, and this industry, under the same cover is trying to make a profit by mechanizing, not teaching about plagiarism.
Plagiarism-detection software can address the most pressing needs of classroom educators faced with assessing students’ written work. Here’s how:
1. Teachers Need More Time
The Challenge: The larger the class is, and the more students that are in it, the longer it takes to review each written assignment—checking grammar, style, originality of ideas, etc. This is especially important when screening for plagiarism.
My note: this is NOT true. If the teacher is still lingering in the old habits of lecturing, this could be true. However, when a teacher gets into the habit of reviewing papers, s/he can detect as soon as in the first several paragraphs the discrepancies due to copy and paste of other work versus the student’s work.
In addition, if the teacher applies group work in her/his class, s/he can organize students to proofread each other’s work, thus teaching them actively about plagiarism, punctuation etc.
2. Evidence Must Be Reliable
The Challenge: When identifying plagiarism, teachers need to be confident in their assessment. Accusing students of academic dishonesty is a weighty claim; it can lead to their suspension or even expulsion from school.
My note: another myth perpetuated by industry searching for profit. Instead of looking at the process of plagiarism as punitive action, an educator will look at it as education and prevention. Prevention of plagiarism will never be successful, if the focus as in this article is on “suspension,” “expulsion,” etc. The goal of the teacher is NOT to catch the student, but to work with the student and understand the complexity of plagiarism.
3. Tools Must Be Easy to Use
My note: right, the goal is to make the teacher think as less as possible.
My note: PlagiarismCheck is the same as TurnitIn and all other tools, which seek profit, not education. Considering that plagiarism is a moving target (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/01/10/plagiarism-or-collaboration/) and it is a concept first and secondly an action, the attempt to extract profits from the mechanization of this process is no less corrupt then the attempt to focus on profit (of education) rather then on education (itself)
While it may take time to do this reflection, it can have many important benefits: 1) research shows that reflecting on experiences creates an environment in which insights and creativity can flourish; 2) taking a moment to consider the positive experiences (and to learn from the challenging ones) generates positive emotions which can benefit everyone during highly stressful moments in the semester; and 3) your experiences in narrative form provide insights to the committee beyond what is possible through surveys. This helps us to tailor the program in the future.
Here are a few questions/topics you should consider in your reflection:
How well is the program working for you so far?
I was not able to collaborate last year, but this year it has been perfect match with my ID2ID buddy Aura Lippincott. It is just marvelous to work with same-minded and driven person
What have you accomplished so far?
We are well underway with one of our two projects – the VRrelax one the project each of us is teaming up with faculty and staff from our universities. We plan to roll out the test at the end of this month (October), do the research in November and compare notes and results in December. The project aims to establish if VR delivered by Oculus Go may have positive impact on stress reduction for students.
Our second project, the Open Learning one is also gathering speed; we intend to have a research topic determined by the end of the month, while we are gathering resources at the time being.
What else do you need to do? Describe the progress you have made toward meeting your program goals.
What obstacles have you faced that you did not anticipate?
I have difficulty to pinpoint obstacles, because with a determined ID2ID partner and team members, all obstacles start to seem minuscules. We had discussions about the video content of the VR session, or the frequency of the testing and some of these issues is impossible to reconcile for two teams on different campuses, but again, they do not seem crucial when the team is driven by conviction to finish the research
What are your plans for working through them? What are your plans for the rest of the program? Many of you may have chosen to focus on one or more of the ELI Key Issues. If so, briefly summarize and reflect upon your discussions of these key issues.
I see our work falling neatly under: digital and information literacy. The work through ID2ID seems as a intake of fresh air, since digital and information literacy is not considered in the stagnant 90-ish interpretation, as myopically imposed in the library where i work. Our project aims to assert digital literacy as understood by Educause.
To some degree, our work also falls under the ELI issue of “learning space design.” While we advocate for virtual learning spaces, as well as under the ELI issue “academic transformation and faculty development.” Both XR and open learning are ambitious trends, which inadvertently can meet resistance with their novelty and lack of track in former traditional methods of teaching and learning.
Blind Protocol, an alternate reality game created by two high school English teachers to help students understand online privacy and data security. This form of gaming blends fact and fiction to immerse players in an interactive world that responds to their decisions and actions. In a recent article on KQED, Paul Darvasi and John Fallon described how they chose the gaming format to help their students gain a deeper look at how vulnerable their personal data is.
Roughly half of American school children have experienced at least some form of trauma — from neglect, to abuse, to violence. In response, educators often find themselves having to take on the role of counselors, supporting the emotional healing of their students, not just their academic growth.
The condition has numerous names: secondary traumatic stress (STS), vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue.
The symptoms are similar in some ways to post-traumatic stress disorder: withdrawing from friends and family; feeling unexplainably irritable or angry or numb; inability to focus; blaming others; feeling hopeless or isolated or guilty about not doing enough; struggling to concentrate; being unable to sleep; overeating or not eating enough; and continually and persistently worrying about students, when they’re at home and even in their sleep.
One of the handful of studies of STS in schools found that more than 200 staff surveyed from across six schools reported very high levels of STS.
STS can affect teachers’ happiness, health and professional practice. But Betsy McAlister Groves, a clinical social worker and former faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that she has often been surprised by the number of teachers, school counselors and administrators who recognized the cumulative stressors that they faced in their schools but did not realize that their symptoms were a common reaction to working with traumatized children — and that these symptoms had a name.
How Schools Can Acknowledge Secondary Trauma:
Building a Culture of Awareness
Create Peer Groups Trauma-Informed Schools: School leaders should take a school-wide approach. There is a growing movement around creating trauma-informed schools— schools that recognize and are prepared to support community members affected by trauma and traumatic stress. Such schools deeply integrate social-emotional learninginto their teaching, culture and approach, understanding that the holistic health and wellbeing of their charges is essential for achieving academic success.
Resource for teachers and schools
Assess how your work as an educator might be affecting you (both positively and negatively) by using the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) self-assessment tool and exploring the toolkit created by Teaching Tolerance to learn self-care strategies.
Learn how, as an educator, you can begin to identify secondary traumatic stress and learn strategies for self care through the tip sheet created by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
How strong are your school’s trauma-responsive programs and policies? Take the 20-minute evidence-informed Trauma Responsive Schools Implementation Assessment to find out — and learn ways to grow your school’s work.
Learn about additional individual and organization strategies for addressing secondary traumatic stress, compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Stay tuned for a new online curriculum for preK–12 teachers, named STAT (Support for Teachers Affected by Trauma), being created by experts in the fields of secondary traumatic stress, education, and technology. The curriculum, due for a 2019 launch, will feature five modules on risk factors, the impact of STS, and self-assessment, among related topics.
Teaching news literacy is more necessary and challenging than ever in a world where news is delivered at a constant pace from a broad range of sources. Since social media and filter bubbles can make it challenging to access unbiased, factual information, we must equip students to be critical as they access news sources for a variety of purposes. This live, interactive edWebinar will give an overview of the phenomenon of fake news going viral and tools educators can use to help students develop news literacy skills.
Tiffany Whitehead, School Librarian at Episcopal School of Baton Rouge in Louisiana, will share:
A strategy to develop fun, original lessons about media literacy
Fresh approaches that move students towards better news smarts
Three CCSS-aligned sample lesson plans for middle and high school classrooms
Teacher and librarian collaboration opportunities that support powerful student outcomes
Elementary through higher education level teachers, librarians, and school and district leaders will benefit from attending this session. There will be time to get your questions answered after Tiffany’s presentation.
About the Presenter
Tiffany Whitehead, aka the Mighty Little Librarian, is an obsessive reader, social media user, and technology geek. She is the director of library at Episcopal School of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Tiffany earned her undergraduate degree in elementary education and School Library Certification from Southeastern Louisiana University, and her graduate degree in educational technology leadership from Northwestern State University. She has served as the president for ISTE’s Librarians Network and was recognized as one of ISTE’s 2014 Emerging Leaders. Tiffany is National Board Certified in Library Media and was named one of the 2014 Library Journal Movers & Shakers. She was the 2016 recipient of the Louisiana Library Media Specialist Award. She frequently speaks at local, state, and national conferences, sharing her passion for libraries and educational technology.
Around the turn of the millennium, American society realized a looming crisis: the lack of female representation in STEM fields. But today we are witnessing a crisis of male leadership in a variety of workplaces. From the president to CEOs of major companies to actors and power players in Hollywood, the past several months have exposed the toxic work environments they preside over or worsen in scandal after scandal. Though different in nature, this crisis is of equal importance as the STEM shortage. Yet, to date, no prominent solutions or interventions have been seriously proposed. In contrast, a quick Google search brings up dozens of programs for girls in STEM, but not one national program appears for boys in the arts and humanities.
latest indicators of the demographics and earnings of public school humanities teachers — most of whom are women and many of whom aren’t paid well — underscore that we need more men in the arts and humanities.
The Humanities Indicators report that, “As of 2015, women earned 61 percent of all master’s and professional-practice degrees in the humanities and 54 percent of the doctoral degrees in the field.” And the latest report on public school teachers found that “76 percent of humanities teachers were women, the largest share among subject specialists.” When male K-12 role models barely exist in these disciplines, what message does that send to our young boys and men?
But our society suffers when boys and men are actively discouraged from pursuing their interests in the arts and humanities. The cycle of toxic masculinity starts early. Boys are often told not to cry or show emotion. They are socially trained to repress it, and they take pride in this false resilience.
the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In an annual event called “Cops and Docs,” accomplished medical professionals and highly trained police officers take a group trip to the museum. Over the course of the evening, mixed groups of cops and docs look at paintings, sculptures and other works of art, and they then share their answers to a pretty basic question: What do you see?
Another program, “The Art of Perception,” takes police detectives, FBI agents and high-ranking Secret Service and CIA executives to well-known museums and galleries like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection to observe works by Picasso, Caravaggio, Edward Hopper and other masters. Program creator Amy E. Herman says the exercise is “not about looking at art. It’s about talking about what you see.”
College students’ perceptions of pleasure in learning – Designing gameful gamification in education
investigate behavioral and psychological metrics that could affect learner perceptions of technology
today’s learners spend extensive time and effort posting and commenting in social media and playing video games
Creating pleasurable learning experiences for learners can improve learner engagement.
uses game-design elements in non-gaming environments with the purpose of motivating users to behave in a certain direction (Deterding et al., 2011)
How can we facilitate the gamefulness of gamification?
Most gamified activities include three basic parts: “goal-focused activity, reward mechanisms, and progress tracking” (Glover, 2013, p. 2000).
gamification works similarly to the instructional methods in education – clear learning and teaching objectives, meaningful learning activities, and assessment methods that are aligned with the objectives
the design of seven game elements:
Storytelling: It provides the rules of the gamified activities. A good gamified activity should have a clear and simple storyboard to direct learners to achieve the goals. This game-design element works like the guidelines and directions of an instructional activity in class.
Levels: A gamified activity usually consists of different levels for learners to advance through. At each level, learners will face different challenges. These levels and challenges can be viewed as the specific learning objectives/competencies for learners to accomplish.
Points: Points pertain to the progress-tracking element because learners can gain points when they complete the quests.
Leaderboard: This element provides a reward mechanism that shows which learners are leading in the gamified activities. This element is very controversial when gamification is used in educational contexts because some empirical evidence shows that a leaderboard is effective only for users who are aggressive and hardcore players (Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014).
Badges: These serve as milestones to resemble the rewards that learners have achieved when they complete certain quests. This element works as the extrinsic motivation for learners (Kapp, 2012).
Feedback: A well-designed gamification interface should provide learners with timely feedback in order to help them to stay on the right track.
Progress: A progress-tracking bar should appear in the learner profile to remind learners of how many quests remain and how many quests they have completed.
Dominguez et al. (2013) suggested that gamification fosters high-order thinking, such as problem-solving skills, rather than factual knowledge. Critical thinking, which is commonly assessed in social science majors, is also a form of higher-order thinking.
Davis (1989) developed technology acceptance model (TAM) to help people understand how users perceive technologies. Pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) emotional-state model that developed by Mehrabian (1995) is one of the fundamental design frameworks for scale development in understanding user perceptions of user-system interactions.
Van der Heijdedn (2004) asserted that pleasurable experiences encouraged users to use the system for a longer period of time Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) has been integrated into the design of gamification and addressed the balance between learners’ extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Ryan and Deci (2000) concluded that extrinsic rewards might suppress learners’ intrinsic motivation. Exploiting the playfulness and gamefulness in gamification, therefore, becomes extremely important, as it would employ the most effective approaches to engage learners.
Sweetser and Wyeth (2005) developed GameFlow as an evaluation model to measure player enjoyment in games
Fu, Su, and Yu (2009) adapted this scale to EGameFlow in order to measure college students’ enjoyment of e-learning games. EGameFlow is a multidimensional scale that consists of self-evaluated emotions.
Eppmann, Bekk, and Klein (2018) developed gameful experience scale (GAMEX) to measure gameful experiences for gamification contexts. one of the limitations of GAMEX to be used in education is that its effects on learning outcome has not been studied
the Big Five Model, which has been proposed as trait theory by McCrae & Costa (1989) and is widely accepted in the field, to measure the linkages between the game mechanics in gamification and the influences of different personality traits.
Storytelling in the subscale of Preferences for Instruction emphasizes the rules of the gamified learning environments, such as the syllabus of the course, the rubrics for the assignments, and the directions for tasks. Storytelling in the subscale of Preferences for Instructors’ Teaching Style focuses on the ways in which instructors present the content. For example, instructors could use multimedia resources to present their instructional materials. Storytelling in the subscale of Preferences for Learning Effectiveness emphasizes scaffolding materials for the learners, such as providing background information for newly introduced topics.
The effective use of badges would include three main elements: signifier, completion logic, and rewards (Hamari & Eranti, 2011). A useful badge needs clear goal-setting and prompt feedback. Therefore, badges correlate closely with the design of storytelling (rules) and feedback, which are the key game design elements in the subscale of Preferences for Instruction.
Students can use Google to search on their laptops or tablets in class when instructors introduce new concepts. By reading the reviews and viewing the numbers of “thumbs-up” (agreements by other users), students are able to select the best answers. Today’s learners also “tweet” on social media to share educational videos and news with their classmates and instructors. Well-designed gamified learning environments could increase pleasure in learning by allowing students to use familiar computing experiences in learning environments.
Looking for a beginner’s crash course in game making software and process? Games can be an excellent teaching resource, and game development is easier than ever. Whether you’re looking to develop your own teaching resources or run a game-making program for users, this course will give you the information you need to choose the most appropriate software development tool, structure your project, and accomplish your goals. Plain language, appropriate for absolute beginners, and practical illustrative examples will be used. Participants will receive practical basic exercises they can complete in open source software, as well as guides to advanced educational resources and available tutorials.
This is a blended format web course:
The course will be delivered as 4 separate live webinar lectures, one per week on Wednesday November 21 and then repeating Wednesdays, November 28, December 5 and December 12 at Noon Central time. You do not have to attend the live lectures in order to participate. The webinars will be recorded and distributed through the web course platform for asynchronous participation. The web course space will also contain the exercises and discussions for the course.
Learning Outcomes
Participants will be able to name five different software tools available to assist them or their users in creating games and interactive web content, as well as identify the required knowledge and skills to effectively use each program.
Participants will be able to effectively structure the development process of a game from brainstorming to launch.
Participants will be able to identify and articulate areas in which games can increase educational effectiveness and provide practical, desirable skills.
Who Should Attend
Library staff looking to develop educational games or run game making programs for users (including tween or teen users).
Instructors
Ruby Warren
Ruby Warren believes in the power of play, and that learning is a lot more effective when it’s interactive. She is the User Experience Librarian at the University of Manitoba Libraries, where she recently completed a research leave focused on educational game prototype development, and has been playing games from around the time she developed object permanence.
<Cost
LITA Member: $135
ALA Member: $195
Non-member: $260
Moodle and Webinar login info will be sent to registrants the week prior to the start date.
Book Creator LucidPress and Book Creator supports uploading many kinds of media and then adding that media to the pages of an ebook. This can be a great way to have students build digital portfolios of their best work.
About the Presenter