Fair+Use+Resources

As an online educator, I am fully committed to the education of my students in all aspects of 21st century learning. This includes specific lessons that are targeted to the understanding of what constitutes legal and ethical use of technology.

My students are required to take a class in Educational Technology and Online Learning each year. This class is designed to teach online educational skills throughout the year. The first unit is “Internet Safety” and covers topics such as cyber bullying, malicious emails, spamming, safeguarding personal information and more. We also cover how to correctly use information found on the Internet to answer questions and take tests.

Since our students work at home, we take every precaution that we can to teach them the correct way to use and synthesize information to answers our test questions and for writing papers. We specifically tell them what will happen if we find they are plagiarizing material or having someone else complete their online work. We have had several conference this year already with parents of our fourth and fifth grade students who have "cut and pasted" material from the internet. We remind them of the consequences of these actions which include a zero for the assignment and continued punishment if the behavior continues.

As I mentioned earlier, the students take the Educational Technology class every single year, and the material becomes increasingly more relevant as the students progress in grade levels. For example, they are taught basic summarizing skills in lower elementary, while as they enter upper levels of elementary and middle school we begin to concentrate on citing and appropriate ways to use quotations they might find in their research papers.

In addition, I do several lessons with my students to model best practices in online education. I warn them that not only can I use turnitin.com I also cut and paste passages in “Google” to look for copied material. We practice taking passages from our textbooks and answering questions appropriately. I feel this type of modeling is an invaluable way to show them specifically what to do and what not to do.

Our students also must read an sign an __Honor Code__ pledging, among other things, that they will never "submit any work of a kind that is not my own or never plagiarize work." We discuss each and every part of the Honor Code as a class and discuss what each aspect means.

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