Taste of Tech

I was talking with our high school media specialist this morning about anti-plagiarism tools. We’ve been subscribing to Turnitin.Com for the last few years, but we really haven’t used it enough to justify the expense. Based on last year’s use statistics, it looks like we paid about $7.50 per paper to have it checked for plagiarism.

I remembered an EdTechWeekly episode from last winter where Dave introduced a service called Plagium. Basically, you paste text into the box, and it checks the text against information available on the web. If there’s a match, it gives you the link.

Sure. You can do that with Google. But they don’t tag everything, and they can only find exact hits. Consider this. I searched for:

She’s generally pretty easy-going, and it took a little while to figure out what she was talking about. It turns out there’s a web site with a video that she wanted to show on the first day of school.

It quickly identified my blog post from last week where I used those two sentences. So far, so good. Then, I tried this paraphrased text:

She’s pretty easy-going. It took some time to figure out what she was talking about. There’s a web site with a video that she wanted to show on the first day of school.

It found this one, too. I’ll admit that the changes are very minor, and it wouldn’t be hard to change it enough to keep it from being found, but the point is that it doesn’t have to be an exact match.

ArticleChecker does the same thing. It seems to be a little less sophisticated, just using the Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. This tool also found both of the items quoted above.

Copyscape also does a similar thing, but it just looks for copies of text from a web page on other web pages. It wouldn’t be a good tool to check student essays, but it will let you know if someone is stealing your web site or blog content.

All of these tools are free. I think we’re going to suggest them to our teaching staff this year, and then re-evaluate whether we really need something like Turnitin.

Megan was looking for a new book to read. “Do you want a book that’s true or one that’s make-believe?”

“Make-believe.”

“Do you want a book where the characters are kids, real animals, or imaginary creatures?”

“Imaginary creatures like fairies and unicorns?” I nodded. She nodded.

“I’m assuming you want a picture book instead of a chapter book.” She’s going in to first grade, and sometimes doesn’t have the longest attention span in the world. I also selected “Short Book” without asking.

“What language do you want?” She was confused at first. “Look, they have books in English, Spanish, Vietnamese…”

“Dad. I only know English!” We selected English and had 19 books to chose from. She selected one about a star that wanted to be a wishing star. The pages were displayed on the screen, and we read the book together.

The International Children’s Digital Library works to inspire the world’s children to become members of the global community. They promote the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas by making the best in children’s literature available online.

Megan just likes reading books for free on the computer.

We have a hearing-impaired sixth grader coming to our middle school next fall. One of the many challenges this student faces is the inability to use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate with other students and with adults. While he certainly knows ASL, his teachers and fellow students don’t. So it’s difficult for him to work on those skills at school.

His parents suggested that the school investigate the acquisition of a Sorenson Videophone. This device is a video conferencing appliance. It has a built-in camera, connects to a TV and to an ethernet network, and is about as easy to use as TiVo. The idea is that the student can use this videophone to communicate with other deaf students in other schools. They can use sign language to carry on the conversations, and all of the students will benefit from the experience.

Sorenson provides video relay services. Essentially, a deaf person can use a videophone to connect to an interpreter. The interpreter makes a regular voice call to a hearing individual, and acts as a translator between the two parties. They charge for this service, and make enough money to give away the videophones for free. There is no charge for calls between videophones. So this isn’t going to cost the school any money.

I went to the web site and filled out the application form. The whole process took about five minutes. It was clear from the lack of red tape in the application form that this isn’t a government-funded project. I was expecting that I wouldn’t hear back from them, and I’d have to follow-up, make my case for this student, and try to convince them that this is a worthwhile application for their product. After all, it’s unlikely that this particular device will be used with the relay service, so they’re not likely to make any money on it. It’s understandable that they would want to drag their feet, or deny the request altogether. This is one of those things that can take months to get done. To my surprise, I received an email a few days later. “Can we install it next week?”

“Sure. Next week is great.”

“Do you already have a TV to connect this device to?”

“I didn’t realize we needed one. I’ll see if the school has one they can spare.” I was hoping we could use a computer monitor. We seem to have lots of those.

“That’s all right. I’ll just bring one when I come.”

So the installer came out, set up the videophone, and provided a TV. He configured the device, made several test calls, and ensured everything was working properly. The whole experience took less than an hour. The device is ready for the student, and this is possibly the best experience I’ve ever had with an assistive technology device.

I can’t help but draw parallels between this installation and the upgrade of our distance learning equipment. We’re replacing our outdated, proprietary, analog distance learning system with a new Polycom unit that provides IP-based video conferencing. We’re more than a year into the process, and getting answers to even the most basic questions (what makes the Polycom monitor so much better than the LG one that it’s worth an extra $3,800?) is nearly impossible. With a little luck and about $30,000, we’ll get this project done this summer, too. But somehow I doubt the whole process will take an hour.

We received a request to unblock a web site yesterday. The justification went something like this:

I received an email message containing some inappropriate content. The message said that I had signed up to receive this content, but this must be a mistake. I tried to unsubscribe, but when I clicked the link, the site was blocked. Please unblock the site so I can unsubscribe and stop receiving this inappropriate content in my inbox.

Thankfully, our filter review team denied the request. As soon as you click on the unsubscribe link in a spam message, the sender of the spam knows the following things:

• Your email address is valid.
• The spam message got through any spam filters in place and was delivered to you.
• You opened the message.
• You read the message. At least, you read the part about unsubscribing.
• You took action based on the content of the message by clicking a link.

These facts make you a much more attractive target for spammers. You just got a big gold star next your name on their list. The liklihood that your email address is going to find its way onto other lists is very high.

But that’s not the worst that could happen. According to the iDeceive blog and OnGuard Online, many of the “unsubscribe” links also try to exploit vulnerabilities on your computer, installing spyware, trojans, or other malware.

Keep your operating systems’s security patches up to date. Make sure you have anti-virus software installed and that it gets updates frequently. Use a firewall to protect your computer from the Internet. And don’t click on links in email.

Last week on the Ohio Tech Coordinators’ listserv, tech guy John Case tore the lid off the web filtering debate. He pointed out these facts:

• Most schools block social networking sites, because objectionable content can easily be posted by visitors to these sites.
• Most schools have filtering systems that can be circumvented by knowledgeable and/or ambitious students.
• Many technology in education luminaries (including Alan November and Will Richardson) think social networking sites have a place in education.

John floated the idea of building an internal system which would allow students to participate in an online social environment within the school. This would take the “walled garden” approach of only allowing students within the school to read and add content. This is something we’ve tried on a very limited scale, and it has worked. The students can participate in an online community. They learn how to be responsible members of that community by not posting inappropriate content and not sharing personal information. Because they’re using their network accounts, all of their activity is identifyable, so they’re responsible for their actions. It has worked fairly well.

The problem is that it doesn’t truly give them the perspective that a global community might bring. I know that I have blog readers thoughout the US and in Canada, Australia, and Germany. While I don’t often get comments from these people, they read the pages or subscribe to the feeds and contribute when they’re moved to do so. In a closed system, we only have the people in the school who can contribute.

From the school’s perspective, if we block social networking sites, we can pretend to protect our students from accessing inappropriate content. But without a clear definiition of what a social networking site is, we end up blocking anything where users can contribute content. Increasingly, that’s a lot of stuff.

Consider this: Alexa attempts to rank the most popular sites on the web by tracking use of their toolbar. It’s not the most scientifically accurate way of measuring web use, but it does produce fairly believeable results. Of the top 20 sites listed, ten are blocked by our web filter. If we block every site that allows comments, or lets you share files, or uses email tools, we’re left with the static web of the 90’s, where all we can do is use it as a giant digital library.

Even beyond the social networking issue, there’s lots of material online that could be considered inappropriate. Last summer, as I was redesigning our schools’ portal pages (which are the default home pages on our browsers), I considered incorporating news feeds from various sources. After a couple days, I ended up burying the news feeds on a subpage rather than keeping them out front, because they almost always contain violence or sex. You can check for yourself on the news page from our high school portal. Odds are, there will be a link to some news items that we probably don’t want all of our students reading about.

At some point, we have to start teaching our students to be responsible Internet users. Most people don’t have filtered Internet access at home. Our schools are supposed to provide adult supervision in all areas where students are using the Internet. It may be time to stop relying on the technology to protect them.

I’m not saying that we’re going to turn off the Internet filter. The federal government has made sure that’s not going to happen. But maybe it’s time to stop worrying so much about what someone might post online, and start teaching our students how to behave responsibly — as both information creators and information consumers — in this environment.