Digital Plagiarism

I believe that as technology becomes more prevalent more students will get caught plagiarizing.  I believe that many students don’t know the proper way to cite where they got the information from, or don’t know that they should be referencing other peoples work within their own.  One of the students on my caseload was just caught plagiarizing in his English class.  He claimed that he was unaware that he had to cite where he got his work from, and was very upset that he was going to receive a zero on his assignment because of this.  While reading Digital Citizenship in Schools, I came across a guided lesson about digital plagiarism (rights and responsibilities).  The objective of the lesson is to make students more aware of the issues related to misrepresenting other peoples’ materials as their own (plagiarism). I believe it is the responsibility of both teachers and parents to communicate this message to their students.  Students are constantly turning to technology- and are surfing the web, in many English and History classes students are asked to research a topic and write a paper on it.  Without giving students the skills on how to properly cite/reference their work, plagiarism is going to become a large problem.  This lesson teaches students how to properly cite their work using examples from the classroom work. A good example would be having students write a whole class research paper together- taking the time to explain what plagiarism is along with the correct ways to cite -MLA and APA format, in text citations, reference page- providing students with the correct resources is essential- students can use APA/MLA citation machine online to double check that they are citing their references properly.  This also directly connects to the common core strand RL1 grade 10- “Students will cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. I believe that this lesson would allow students to collaborate about the topic they are researching, and would provide them with the proper resources/information on plagiarism and how to properly cite/reference their work. I plan to share this lesson with the English department as many teachers are currently reading novels and would be able to have students properly cite quotes from the text.