AASLBlog » 2006 » July

Beyond Acceptable Use: Developing and Implementing a Plagiarism Policy July 10, 2006

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , add a comment

Presented by Debbie Abilock (editor of AASL’s Knowledge Quest).
Much of the information can be found on her site at www.noodletools.com/debbie/ethical Checking in here will give you a better outline than I can give here form my notes. Beyond Acceptable Use: Ethical and Academic Use (.pdf)

Debbie focused on reasons why students plagiarize and why having an acceptable use policy is not enough. The most interesting thought, “it is not enough to “tweak the assignment”. Many of us tell teachers that they need to make the assignments more interesting or more difficult for students to copy/paste. However, if the pressure for a student to succeed academically, then even really interesting compelling projects may still be plagiarized.

Several resources mentioned during the session; film “Shattered Glass” book “Doing School” Yale University Press, author Geoffrey Nunberg “power of blog culture to credit.

Resources which help students with creating bibliographic citations and note taking were also discussed. Along this line, Noodletools will soon have a note-taking component.

Tag: NECC2006

Blogging toward Literacy; Promoting Reading and Writing in English Classes

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , 1 comment so far

Presented by Pamela Raytick and Karen Connaghan

Blogging was all over NECC this year. I saw one blog session, Blogging for Beginners being held in in a very large room with people standing just outside listening in because the room was full. Blogging was definitely a hot topic.

I wanted to get to a blog session this year, as I had listened in on David Warwick’s session last year but wanted on about how students would use blogs, and so selected this one since the focus was to be on using blogging to promote reading.

These two ladies prepared and implemented an action research project on the topic of blogs used for promoting reading and writing. In addition to covering blogging, it was a good example of an action research project. The project was begun with limited students in small group, later expanding to more students. They hoped to;

Cultivate Literacy

Focusing on more than skills
Encouraging connections
Making the READER matter

Community
Social and collaborative
Ownership
Students teach themselves (latent Curriculum)

Technology

Virtual community
Conversations with no boundaries
New Mechanism

The possibility that parents and other teachers were uncomfortable with this technology was discussed as a possibility.

In the summary, for others who might want to do a similar project, four areas were addressed; Security issues, Sanity issues (editing, time, comments, unexpected) issues of access outside of class and Time (frequency, workload etc)

Tag: NECC2006