Plagiarism Scavenger Hunt

In this project, I built a page to lead students through a scavenger hunt on a topic related to copyright and fair use.  In the process, I explored several key areas of knowledge and skill.  First, I went in with a limited, patchwork understanding of the topic.  Before I could build a website and activity for students, I needed to understand principles of copyright and fair use.  I spent a fair amount of time reading up on these principles to be sure I understood these topics.  As a result of the deeper, more complete understanding of fair use I gained, I have been able to use images, videos, and other copyrighted material appropriately in the other projects I've completed as part of this program.  I've also gone back to revise many of the materials I use in my classroom to better conform to fair use principles.

Second, this was my first introduction to the use of an online scavenger hunt lesson.  This structure could easily be adapted to a wide variety of topics.  I currently have several lessons I use in my classroom that follow a similar structure, but rely on articles or textbooks.  These lessons could benefit from being converted into online scavenger hunts since many of my students prefer to read from a screen rather than paper and the Internet makes it simple to find resources at a wide variety of reading levels, which would make it much easier for me to differentiate and scaffold lessons for both my struggling readings and my most advanced students.

For the project, I ended up selecting the topic of plagiarism, since that is the topic I deal with the most with my students.  In particular, I have my 9th grade students complete a research project on different energy sources and many of my students copy text and images from websites without attribution or believe that by copying a paragraph, then changing one or two words, they have adequately put the text into their own words.  I hope to use the scavenger hunt with my students as part of the project to help them understand how to avoid plagiarism.

Plagiarism Scavenger Hunt