Using Technology to Prevent Plagiarism: Skilling the Students

Helping students to engage in sessions focussing on plagiarism and therefore learn about the concept can be challenging. The advent of new technologies used in educational contexts may help in facilitating such engagement. This study details a small project which sought to use three technologies in an attempt to help students learn about plagiarism and to gain insights into student understandings of plagiarism. The technologies used were a student response system, a social network and online quizzes delivered via a virtual learning environment. The project outcomes suggest that students arrive at university with a variety of understandings of plagiarism and that the success of the technologies used in plagiarism education largely depends on how the activities are integrated in the curriculum.