In cooperation with humanities dept,Year 7′s are researching Native American Indians for their Desktop Publishing / Leaflet module. They have been allocated a famous/historical native american and were given 2 weeks to find some information from a BOOK and write it in their own words. They had to also cite the Author, title , publisher, year published. I told them about encylopedias and told them to go to the library and NOT use the internet. Internet research comes next.
Maybe I rushed the setting of the homework, Maybe I didn’t make sure that they wrote down the “In your own words” bit. But no one managed to do the home work properly.
Most just copy and pasted information from the internet. Some actually cited a book (probably because it was written on the internet page) but still copy and pasted text. The best (least Internet) was a photocopied a page of an encyclopedia with the source properly cited – and I’m sure he got help.
In fact all the adults that obviously helped the low ability kids got it wrong too. I can imagine the scene “There you go just look it up on the computer”.
I don’t know how much of a fuss to make about this. What with the native Americans, that I know nothing about, foisted on me and there being very little in the library to help, shall I just chalk it down to experience and move on?
Or should I stop everything to labour a point – just for all the kids and their teaching assistants and parents to go “Wha?”
Humanities should have some text books though. I could get the encylopedias down into my classroom. Kids have to learn how to look up things. I always have a race with yellow pages and yell.com to find a plumber and sometimes the internet guy wins even though I make them login in to the network and then the internet first.
Posted by richard 
