Education as a tool to prevent internet plagiarism.

The last decade has been of evolution. Each day the society is improving thanks to technological advances, but do those advances work for learning? Everyday technology makes life easier. Nowadays there is an invention for almost all people’s needs and professors cannot avoid the opportunity of using the new technological advances on their classes. On the Internet, for example, there are many utilities that can make the learning process funnier and more entertaining. Also, there it can be found a great variety of information which students can use for their researches. But what happens when students use this information improperly? A very important issue is that high school students can take advantage of internet to avoid their assignments by plagiarizing the information that they find on the internet, which restricts their learning process and will probably affect their professional ethics. So professors need to educate their students about plagiarism and ways to write a proper work.
What does plagiarism mean? This word refers to “the presentation or submission of the work of another, without citation or credits, as your own work” (University of Northern British Columbia, 1997). Plagiarism in high school can bring negative consequences. Student can fail the subject, but the moral consequences are even harder. Those students who plagiarize, can be rejected by their own classmates or colleagues since they might be afraid of being accused of plagiarism too. If there are negative consequences, why do students plagiarize? Many researches have been done about this question, one was made by Joan Gajadhard in 2005 with a population of 25000 students from 29 high schools around the United States. The results were that 70 percent of the students gave the answer “laziness or avoiding work”, 20 percent answered “the desire for a higher mark or quality of work” and 10 percent answered “I am not aware of the consequences of plagiarism” But, do students know that copying and paste from the internet is plagiarism? According to Wood (2004), students do not consider cut and paste from the Internet as a kind of plagiarism. Certainly, this is a big problem for professors, if their students are not producing their own works they will not learn anything. So what can they do? Educate them.
As it was said by Wood (2004), students do not think than copying a paper from the internet is plagiarism, so the first thing that high school professors must do, in order to avoid plagiarism, is educate their students about that topic. The professor must give them a speech or can look for a specialist in plagiarism that can explain to the students what that word mean, the consequences of plagiarism, when a student is plagiarizing and everything related to the topic. About this issue Harris (2004) says that students must be clear in the fact that “When you use someone else's words, you must put quotation marks around them and give the writer or speaker credit by revealing the source in a citation. Even if you revise or paraphrase the words of someone else or just use their ideas, you still must give the author credit in a note”. It is very important for professors to be aware of the proper use of citations and explain to the students how they can use internet sources.
As soon as the students know the meaning of plagiarism, the professor can work on the classroom with the group. Now the professor has the responsibility of giving to the students, handouts, guidelines and any useful material about writing in an appropriate way. Nobody was born with all the knowledge and people learn when they have the necessary information, so the professor must provide all the material that he can and teach the students how they can take advantage of that information. In that way, the students will be able to understand how to write having as a base their own ideas and internet sources as a support to those ideas.
Finally, the productive work comes. Now that students are able to understand any theoretical topic about plagiarism they can start writing. And, what better place to start than the classroom? It is a good idea if students start writing at the classroom, where they have the professor to help them and to clear any doubt about proper use of internet sources. Also, it is a way for the professor to be sure than that work was written by that student and it is not a plagiarized work. Furthermore, writing at the classroom can be a way to motivate students to produce a paper by themselves, no matter it is not perfect; it was made with the effort of that student which can be increase the appreciation for writing in a proper way.
As has been said, plagiarism is a big problem for today’s teachers but there are ways to prevent and eliminate it. It is in the hands of the professors to apply the strategies against plagiarism at the classroom If they do, students will try to learn, the proud feeling of writing something by themselves will be their stimulus.