J'Nette
"There are alot of programs available for teachers to help detect students that find these easy ways to cheat hardwork.
I liked the idea of having broader questioned assignments. Rather than marking a bubble sheet they could explain the knowledge they have learned. They have a chance to defend their reasoning and it gives the teacher a better perspective of where they could improve on their teaching."
Bonnie
"It really hit me after the various lessons on ethics how important information is in our society today. there are so many devices and technologies made specifically to find, transmit and store information. It is the whole basis of our society. So it makes sense that there are so many different laws protecting information. I'm sure none of us ever consider going into a store and taking something without buying it, but many of us don't even bat an eye at stealing information, ideas, music, software, etc. It is so easy to get sometimes that it doesn't seem like stealing at all. Many of these types of things are a lot more valuable than things one might steal from a store."I agree! Ideas may be the most valuable thing someone owns! We shouldn't break copyright just because we're worried about getting sued (who cares about that?), we should be ethical just because it's right.
Matt talks about a way to prevent cheating -- use creative and nontraditional forms of assessment!
"Another thing that can be done is to get rid of traditional tests and replace them with some other type of evaluation. group or individual projects can easily be made to show learning of a unit's concepts.for example, instead of taking a test on cells- what is mitochondria for? and what does the nucleus do?- a project could be to compare a cell and something familiar to the student (idea from marta adair). the student compares the cell and its contents to the postal service: the post office is the nucleus because it takes in all the new information (out-going letters) and processes what has to be done to get them to their correct destinations. the mitochondria is represented by money. in order for the cell (postal service) to work, it needs a sorce of energy (money). this allows the students to be creative and work together in generating concrete anchors to abstract concepts. this will help them remember what exactly the nucleus does instead of remembering that the answer was"
Interesting post from Jonathan about how much we should be involved in protecting students. There's a real ethical dilemma for you! How do we balance professionalism with our moral responsibility to help students become decent people? A quote from Jonathan:
"In my classes, this semester, I have been told that I should not try to play a role in my future students' personal lives and that I am not there to be a friend. I respect such opinions of my professors and naiive student teachers. Well, I don't see how one can't be a friend and a confidant to the students. They spnd most of their adolescence in classrooms with teachers. Whether people like it or not, teachers often have greater influences on kids than parents and are the people who they spend most of their time with until they graduate."
Here's a great question from Jared - I encourage you to go to his blog and discuss it!
"There is a film that really has facilitated some of my thinking. The movie is The Emporer's Club. In the film, Kevin Klein is a teacher at a private school. He finds out that his student that he liked a lot was cheating in an academic competition. For various reasons, he lets the cheating pass. Then, many years later, he comes to discover that this former student, now an important figure in society, still resorts to cheating for personal gain. How responsible was Kevin Klein's character? How responsible are we, as teachers, for the honesty of our students? Let me know what you think."
