Essay Cheat

Peter Luscombe's classroom is a dying breed: a technology-free zone. No iPods, no cell phones, no Internet -- just a bunch of students, a teacher and books. "I tell them they can use the book, their brain, and nothing else," Luscombe, an English teacher of 22 years, says in the teacher's lounge at Lucas secondary school in London, Ont.. Not so in Joy Hunter's classroom, where Grade 12 English students are sitting in a computer lab, looking for videos online to go with a novel they're reading. Hunter, in her third year as an English teacher at Medway high school in Arva, near London, incorporates the Internet into teaching when she can. It's not always easy. "We've had to alter assignments. So before, students were doing plot summaries or character summaries," Hunter says of a teacher's life before the Web put such information at students' fingertips. "Now, I get them to do group study projects, to write personal responses -- stuff they can't find on the Internet." It's difficult, both teachers say, to make sure students don't cheat. Plagiarism is easier than ever with 'copy' and 'paste' computer functions. Google 'The Contender' and 'book', the book Hunter's class is reading, and the first thing that comes up is a site that offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentary, character analysis of each major player in the book, and several essays about themes and symbolism in the novel. "It's so easy to get a short, satisfactory answer to what you're looking for," Hunter says about the Internet. "We focus on giving contexts and on the process. We have to see all (the students') drafts for an essay, for example." Luscombe tells his students only to read what he's asked them to--not to look at other sources--on assignments. But that's tough to police. "(The Internet) has definitely changed things. It's temptation, and it's almost impossible to ignore," he says. Students arrive in high school knowing a lot about the world -- they're bombarded with information all the time online --but don't always know what to do with it. "They've got access to more information, but not the time or skill or direction to figure out what it is and how to judge its validity. They tend to equate knowledge with understanding." Both Hunter and Luscombe encourage group work. They ask students to think things through, develop their ideas, and mind-map their progress. "With more technology, it's probably more efficient to use the Internet than to use the card catalogue," Luscombe admits. But, he asks his students, "'Do you know how to access not just information, but good information?'" Medway's English department has started using turnitin.com,a popular website at universities, which allows teachers to scan student essays to make sure chunks haven't been lifted from the Internet. But is there a financial cost to the Net? Has what was supposed to be the great equalizer in education -- giving access to information to millions that didn't have it before -- become the great divider? Slotta says no. "Long ago, the less advantages schools had smaller, less resourced libraries," he says. "Now, everyone has the same Internet. It might be slower or you'll have less computers, but it's the same Internet." The much bigger issue, he says, is money schools and school boards need for technical support. "A lot of schools have great access (to the Net), but they don't have the support. Teachers need to feel backed up." Still, Luscombe, the English teacher at Lucas, says he tries to teach students their brains are their best resource --not just any took that they can find online. "The Internet doesn't have all the answers, and the answers it does have can be misguided," he says. LOAD-DATE: October 23, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper