Module 4: writing responsibly

Bridging digital divides

Preface:

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Poof Papers

—  The anxiety of influence

October 2009, Harper's Magazine

We spent the last two weeks talking about the overwhelming importance of test taking in elementary grades.  It should stand to reason that early on in a child's development, the necessity to cheat on exams is commuted to acceptable behavior. Our youth learn from us how important "the high stakes exam" is, not to them, but to us teachers, so that we can keep our jobs and keep our administrators off our backs.  And as our children grow older, cheating cultures become more ingrained, so much so that copying someone else's work is even considered cheating anymore.  Many colleges are developing plagiarism programs, action plans, and many higher education conferences are devoted to the issue. There are even scholarly journals dedicated to the subject.

Online dissertation writing services abound. Or you can simply download a term paper , or spend $20/page for a custom paper from the Internet. Some Internet essay providers even use the word, "cheat" in their business name. Even sneak peaks at the GMAT and the SAT are for sale. There are lists of cheating techniques out there! It should come as no surprise that YouTube has videos showing students how to cheat with a Coke bottle. Or that cell phones with cameras can be used to cheat on an exam.

It shouldn't be surprising that cheating is on the increase in schools, as well as the Internet sites that provide plagiarism services. Students aren't the only problem, sometimes faculty members fail to monitor academic dishonesty.

Dr. Howard Gardner, better known for his "multiple intelligences" theory, is now focusing on the deleterious effects of not doing good work in our jobs. In conversations he had with people working in various fields, he found that everyone

... knows the difference between what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.

The results of these conversations have been compiled into a "Good Work" project. More reactionary responses to rampant plagiarism include a plethora of software teachers can use to find key phrases in a student's research paper that are linked to known plagiarized material. The most popular software are listed below.

• Copyfind
• Turnitin
• copycatch

Even more disturbing is the more and more common belief that cut and pasting off the Internet satisfies "research" today. You can't even get a cup of coffee in Brooklyn while reading the NYT Op Ed page anymore without running into someone glomming off the 'Net.  Even our Vice President has been busted on the charge.

So at least think about what you can do in the classroom to keep plagiarism at a minimum.

Lesson Plan Templates

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Avoiding the rush to insanity

All that being said, there are times where you as a teachers are going to copy things over and over again.  These empty forms are called "templates," and are used in many ways in the classroom.  Consider the following scenario:

It’s Monday morning. All of the school work you promised yourself last Friday afternoon you would accomplish over the weekend didn’t get done. You let two overstuffed subway trains go by before you could cram yourself into the third one, so you’re already a little late getting to school. After clocking in, you trudge to your mailbox, and find a slip of paper from your AP stating that the Region will be in tomorrow, observing classes, so make sure you have an appropriate, student-centered lesson ready, with a lesson plan similar to the one discussed at the last PD meeting.

We already know how to grab some helpful educational research off the Internet when designing a lesson plan. But our problem isn’t completely solved yet – we have less than twenty four hours to get that information into an acceptable lesson plan format that the AP recommended at the last PD meeting. How can I quickly “cut and paste” the information, making minimal revisions? In this lesson, we will look at how we can use Microsoft Word to create a document that can be used to quickly create a new lesson plan. You have seen how to get information off the Internet, now let’s look at how to process that information so that it can be easily used in the classroom

When we’re under the gun to make a lesson plan, many teachers (myself included) have been known to simply write one out using pencil and paper. This is a completely acceptable solution to the problem. But let me offer a few insights on why you should try to develop a routine where you use a computer to type in your lesson plans. First, once you get into the swing of it, there isn’t much difference in the time spent writing the lesson up, especially if you have a working template like the one we will develop in this lesson. Second, if your AP sees you typed up your lesson, you’re not likely to get much grief about it.

But here’s the most important reason. You’re likely to conclude that because you’re slapping this lesson together in less than an hour, it’s not your best piece of work, and you’ll likely throw it away after the term is over. Imagine yourself two years down the road, reading some of your “best work” during your first year teaching. Do you think you will be completely satisfied using your first year lesson plans in your third year of teaching? The odds are you will at least want to revise them, making them better, based on your additional years of teaching experience. But if you wrote them down, pencil on paper, you will either scratch out the bad parts or, more likely, have to completely recreate the lesson.

And that’s the bottom line. When you type a lesson plan into a computer, you are completely free to revise, cut and paste, do whatever you want with it when you revisit the topic next year. Lesson plan writing should primarily be an editing function, not a writing function, you want to minimize the time spent doing these things, remember? After three or four revisions, you will likely have a lesson you love. But if you have to rewrite the same lesson three or four times, pencil on paper, you’re not likely to have much love for it, in fact, you’ll likely experience feelings like the ones you described at the beginning of the “Getting Started” problem. We want to avoid those feelings, and using technology is one way we can minimize them.

There are wikis , online generators, Excel spreadsheets, and webpage lists on lesson plan templates. I have a simple Lesson Plan Template to help build your lesson plans. The following list offers even more resources.  All you need to do is type or copy/paste your information into the template, and save it. That's it!

• Teacher Planet
• Internet4classrooms
• Janet Benincosa's 21st Century Tools
• teachnology
• lessonplans4teachers
• educationworld
• microsoft

Evaluation

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Homework #4

Deliverable #1: Each person Twitter a response to this question: how can a teacher minimize plagiarism in their classroom? 

Deliverable #2: Each group will find a lesson plan template off the Internet that they are comfortable using to create their lesson plan.

Deliverable #3: Each group will use the template and fill in their lesson plan.