But did you cite it????

I want to take this week's lessons and activities and bundle them up and send them to all my student's that I have ever taught. See the 3rd and 4th day of school each year, I go over the Freshman Plagiarism packet with my English 1 students. We go over all the different types of plagiarism, we go over copyright, public domain, citations, etc. I then spend half the school year working on how not to plagiarize with them. The majority of freshman tend to over quote. Realistically speaking, most students do not want to cheat and do not try to intentionally copy. I tell them though, that ignorance is not an excuse. There are plenty of references and places to seek guidance and help. We use citation tools such as databases, Noodle Tools, and other extensions to Chrome also and I have pointed them in the direction of things like Creative Commons for their projects. We also use turnitin.com and I work with them to show them how the numbers and ratios work on there to understand what they are looking at and how to fix their papers. I discuss paraphrasing versus direct quotes and bibliography versus works cited and MLA formatting versus APA. 

Still, without fail, I have students who ask "we had to cite that?". The students complain about using the databases and Noodle Tools. I try to tell them that these things are blessings and have streamlined the research process for them but they don't want to hear it. They have known nothing else. 

I could try to explain what the process was like when I was in school but they have no idea what a Dewy Decimal system is or a Card Catalog so it would be wasted breathe. 

I think next year I will try to go a different route. Maybe next year I will use music. Maybe next year we will talk about copyright and music and sampling. Maybe that will help with understanding the copyright usage rights.

This past year I used student's stats for their sports to help with quoting. That seemed to help a little. I asked some athletes how they would feel if their football stats were cited under another football player's name. They got that point. 

I'm going to have to get creative with this material. Copy/paste is all too easy now. Students think they are being sneaky but they will eventually get caught. 

.....I just had a student on the last paper we wrote copy/paste my sample paper and then use a thesaurus to change every SINGLE word except the cited material to try to make it look like his own work. It didn't pull in turnitin.com so he thought he got away with it. I don't know why he thought I wouldn't notice when I graded the paper; it was my sample paper after all......

Maybe it's that we think we can just Google what ever we need and we don't have to learn it or remember it because Google is always there. Students just Google the answer to everything instead of thinking for themselves often and even then, they don't give credit to those they got the information from- they try to pass it off as their own.