Be respectful
Today's learning environments offer many ways to access information, create content, work collaboratively, and consume knowledge. Interacting with resources in ways that are both ethical and legal is an essential element of being a good digital citizen. Educators must teach learners the basics of copyright and fair use of online content, including ways to avoid plagiarism and respect ownership of digital content.
An International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) article from February 2020 states that “in classrooms where digital citizenship is taught effectively, teachers have two things in common: They model ethical technology use for their students on a daily basis, and they naturally incorporate conversations about it whenever technology is part of their lesson plan.”
Citation and attribution are two important concepts learners must understand to become good digital citizens. Citations give credit to the authors of restricted or copyrighted sources. Attributions are used when sources aren't restricted.
Educators use the American Psychological Association’s APA style guide to help define the roles both concepts play in helping learners increase credibility during the creation process. Educators use Excel to list sample statements of both citations and attributions and ask learners to categorize by dragging cells to appropriately titled columns that define each concept, or use Whiteboard to brainstorm examples of when to use citations versus attributions.
Using citations and attributions helps avoid plagiarism and copyright violations and gives credit to the creators who did the work. Researcher in Word is a great tool for researching topics, finding reliable sources, and using citations appropriately.
Tools to help learners cite and attribute
- Bing Visual Search is a resource to search the web using an image instead of text. Visual search uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to discover information about an image, including links to where that image can be found online to ensure proper citation and attribution. Educators and learners use Bing Visual Search when text searching doesn't provide desired results.
- Bing, Microsoft's web search engine, includes a filter tool that allows users to filter image searches for license restrictions. This filter is based on the Creative Commons licensing system and helps users find images to use, share, or modify.
- Microsoft Teams, a collaborative platform for educational use, now integrates with TurnItIn, a product designed to flag plagiarized documents and check for similar language in assignments. This integration helps streamline the grading process for educators, while encouraging learners to do and value original work.
- Microsoft OneNote is the perfect tool to use to capture and organize resources and information from the web into a digital notebook. The OneNote app provides autocitations, complete with direct links to the websites. Learners copy and paste resources from multiple websites directly into the OneNote app without fear of losing the source of the information.
- The Editor feature inside Microsoft Word allows for suggested edits and revisions to documents and also includes a Similarity Checker that shows how much content in a document is original. It makes inserting citations easier when necessary.