Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as the intentional or unintentional usage of someone's words or ideas without recognition.  Some examples of plagiarism given on the Purdue website were "buying, stealing, or borrowing someone else's paper, hiring someone else to write a paper, copying large amounts of text without using quotation marks".  Plagiarism is so much easier when using the internet as a resource.  All a person has to do is copy and paste.  A safe way to avoid plagiarism is to give credit where credit is due.  A person can do this buy taking accurate notes from sources by placing quotes with copied text, paraphrase statements and always give credit somewhere in the paragraph, or use direct quotes from a source.   

When I taught in Birmingham I was the victim of plagiarism.  I had created and posted a webquest on my school's website for my 7th grade science students to complete.  I had a teacher from Mobile county e-mail me and ask if she could use my webquest in her science class.  Of course, I was flattered and gave her permission to use it.  Months later I was talking with a friend of mine the Mobile school system and she was bragging on a certain teachers presentation of a webquest that she had "created"at a system wide meeting.  My friend began to describe the webquest and it sounded very familiar.  I asked her for the address and she gave it to me.  I looked up the webquest and it was mine.  She had changed a few things, but some things were copied and pasted and others were linked straight to my webquest.  The teacher had taken my "made from scratch" webquest, changed a few things about it, and called it her own.  She recieved many rewards (LCD projector, new laptop, etc) for her classroom because she had done such a wonderful job.  I went to my administrator and reported it, but nothing was done.  I wasn't sure at the time how copyright works and if a web based creation would be covered by the law, but after looking at the copyright website I now understand that any work is automatically secure under the copyright law.  Registration is not required.  After my hard work (it took me 3, 8hour days at a workshop to complete the webquest) was stolen and passed off as someone else I began to deny teacher's from other systems to use any of my web based project.  There is no way of monitoring what those teachers chose to do, but I did keep documentation of those contacts.  It is because of dishonesty that good people suffer.  Plagiarism is stealing and is wrong.  Student's should not be the only one's held accountable for what they write.  Teacher's should be held to highest standard when it comes to their work, especially if they claim it is an original work.